Dr Robin Marsh (1952)

Robin Marsh MA, MB BChir, MRCGP, DRCOG (1933-2024)

Dr Robin Marsh was born in Welbeck Street, London, at a private hospital to Dr Frank and Margery Marsh on 13 December 1933. He died on 18 December 2024 aged 91 of urosepsis and frailty of old age. 

Marsh spent his early childhood in Persia, now Iran, where his father was Director of Pathology for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later British Petroleum. While there, according to family lore, his father saved the Shah of Persia’s life, having been called in at the eleventh hour by the palace who feared for his life. 

Marsh attended Repton School in Derbyshire where he demonstrated  his adventurous intellectual curiosity by blowing up the chemistry lab. The family, meanwhile, settled in Epping in Essex, and his father became county pathologist.

After Repton Marsh read Medical Sciences at Queens’ College, Cambridge, following in the family tradition. As well as his father, his grandfather, Alfred Marsh had been in general practice. Marsh completed his training at Guy’s, qualifying in 1959 and became houseman at Lewisham General Hospital.

In 1954 Marsh met Heather Vince, a trainee midwife at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. The pair were married in 1959. Daughters Fiona and Elizabeth arrived in 1961 and 1965.

In 1962 Marsh entered general practice, joining a surgery in Hedge End, outside Southampton in Hampshire. After only six months, the senior partner unexpectedly announced that he was moving to Australia and offered him the practice. Marsh accepted and the family moved into the premises, living ‘above the shop’. 

Marsh was part of the generation of GPs that thought little of working 60 plus hours a week, providing home visits at all hours. He applied formidable energy and intellectual curiosity to his work and patients. Colleagues held him in great affection and report that he was invariably late for meetings because he had always ‘squeezed in another visit on the way’.

As the practice grew more space was required, and the family moved out. In the decades that followed, the premises were extended to the rear and side to provide more consultation space. When the houses on either side came up for sale, they were duly bought and the three houses joined together. By the time Marsh retired at the age of 66, the practice had at least six doctors working in it as well as support services. One of the three buildings was named in his honour and ran as a teenage drop-in-centre for nearly 30 years.

With an entrepreneurial mind, Marsh embraced the various governmental reorganisations of the 1980s and 1990s to expand the surgery and the services it could offer. He was extremely proud of the surgery and that it was held up as an example of best practice. Over the years he also raised a huge amount of money for his patients who needed additional support in terms of specialist equipment such as a specially adapted car.

Marsh’s interest in diet as a preventative measure to ensure good health led him to a special relationship with the local health food shop which made a good living on its bran sales as he directed everyone to buy bran as a part of his special muesli recipe. People laughed but he was ahead of his time. ‘He was a great believer in Fybogel and surely must have prescribed more than any other GP!’ recalls a former colleague.

Marsh’s wife Heather died of leukaemia in 2011 at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth where he had had a renal transplant and where he served on the board.

Marsh’s second wife Joyce, whom he married in 2015, survives him. 

Obituary by Alec Marsh, Robin's nephew