Remembering Dr Tom Sutcliffe 17-07-1943 to 8-04-2024
Former SABC journalist Ed Herbst pays tribute to his lifelong friend, Tom Sutcliffe.
There were three singular facets to the life of Tom Sutcliffe — his family, wife Kathy and children Theresa, Victoria, Anne Robert and Alison, medicine and fly-fishing.
He was best-known, locally and internationally as a fly angler, the most influential in this country’s history and internationally through the seven books he authored, his website ‘The Spirit of Fly Fishing’ and a monthly newsletter which had subscribers in 92 countries.
His medical career was similarly distinguished. Such was his cricketing prowess as a schoolboy in Johannesburg that he was approached by an English county side but his father insisted that he first earn a degree, assuming that he would graduate from Wits University.
Tom, however, had discovered that a trout stream, the Eerste, ran through Stellenbosch and he graduated there in the late 1960s.
He served his housemanship at Grey’s Hospital, having heard that big trout were being caught in dams in the Dargle area.
He later entered private practice in Pietermaritzburg, becoming a muchloved family doctor, before moving into hospital administration as deputy director general of Health in Natal.
I first met him in the late 1960s as a reporter on this newspaper, but it was another decade before we linked as fly anglers, by which time I was working as a television news reporter for the SABC in Cape Town.
Our long distance friendship became a local one when he accepted the post of DG of Health for the Western Cape in the early 1990s with a staff of thousands and budget of billions.
It was a poisoned chalice. In collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières he and his deputy, Dr Fareed Abdullah, started an anti- retroviral programme to combat the HIV-Aids pandemic — to the intense enmity of the government at the time.
Today, the disease rarely makes the headlines and the lifespan of those so infected has been substantially increased.
Eventually, the political interference made his position untenable and he resigned without other employment in prospect — a courageous move for a family man holding a highly-paid and influential position.
Fortunately, he was quickly employed by the mental health review board, which led to him being appointed as an honorary psychiatrist by the Colleges of Medicine.
As the opening quote on this article indicates, he was a passionate member of the Red Cross Children’s Hospital Trust and, through the fly angling fraternity, more than half a million rand was raised for the hospital.
In so many people, in so many places, in so many ways, his death leaves an unfillable void.
— Ed Herbst.