12 of 80 Bewdley People - Dr Jenny Frow Spotlighting people making a difference in our community. \ Bewdley Bridge Community Magazine - October 2025
Dr Jenny Frow BEM is well known to very many people in Bewdley, having been their GP for many years, and also through her contributions to many other aspects of Bewdley Life over the years. We asked her if she could recount her life story in her own words… I was born in North Wales to a cricket loving father from Yorkshire and a Welsh farmer's daughter whom he met when teaching Geography at the local Grammar School. It was perhaps fortunate I was a girl as my mum might have been sent to Yorkshire for the birth were it not for the war as only men born in "God's Own Country" could play cricket for the county in those days! My early memories are of seeing a banana for the first time when about three, sweets coming off rationing, and staying Friday nights with my Nainie (Welsh for Nana). Looking back money was tight but it was the same for everyone and I grew up as an only child who was rather spoilt by my Nainie. I went to school 5 miles away on the local bus and at home I helped collect eggs from our hens and feed the couple of pigs we kept. I cleaned out the hen house for my pocket money and had a pet cockerel, a handsome Rhode Island Red I called Charlie Chaplin and who rode around on my shoulder like a parrot. My parents played tennis and badminton, and my father was involved with the cricket club. I used to go down and ‘help’ on practice nights by fielding and was sometimes allowed to bat in the nets. I later played at my secondary school and
university and went with my father every summer holiday to watch the Test Match at Headingley while visiting his sisters. I passed the entrance exam for the local girls' boarding school and went there as one of the minority day girls. I loved it particularly when I realized we played sports every afternoon! Hockey, lacrosse, tennis and cricket were a huge part of my life and I ended up captain of lacrosse and a school prefect, I was an all-rounder at academic subjects and at seventeen had no idea what I wanted to do until one day my father said his golf partner's wife was a doctor and would I like to meet her? I had no idea women could do medicine, and she encouraged me to apply for medical school. I was accepted at London University where I spent two years doing preclinical at King's College in the Strand followed by three years at St George's Hospital which was partly at Hyde Park Corner and partly in Tooting. For the first three years I lived in a hostel near Regent's Park and soon got to know central London well. We worked hard but also enjoyed ourselves although most of us only went out on a Saturday evening to student dances known as hops.
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