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| Dr Salter - the Essex GP lived a full, adventurous and happy life |
Dr Salter, as well as having extensive medical practice and being a recognised consultant over a wide area, embraced in his wonderful career the whole world of sport - boxing, rowing, coursing, cricket and big game shooting.
He also bred dogs, and, for more than 60 years, he braved the rigours of daybreak, wild duck shooting on the Essex marshes.
He did well as a student at King's College, London, and gained many distinctions in medicine.
He started his sports while young and soon had a reputation with the gloves for being remarkably quick.
Perhaps the most notable boxing bout in which he ever engaged was with Jem Mace, the heavyweight champion of the world - and a very 'instructive' time they were said to have spent together!
It is not certain how he lost his right eye, and it was not a subject he was ready to discuss.
Some say he lost it in a shooting accident. Others that it had to be removed after being damaged after he came out worse in a bare-knuckle bout - possibly the one with Jem Mace - in a fairground boxing exhibition at the 1862 Epsom Derby.
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| Jem Mace - champion prizefighter |
In consequence, he was not able to practise as a surgeon. Furthermore his glass eye was said to frighten children.
Dr Salter bought the practice at Tolleshunt D'Arcy years ago, and during that long period carried on his beneficent work over radius many miles.
He knew all the people (plus all the dogs and horses) in that vast radius, and assisted at bringing children into the world to the fourth generation.
No fewer than seven thousand children have been ushered into this world by Dr Salter who described it as "all part of the day's work".
At the same time he became expert in horticulture, an authority on dogs (in his lifetime, he owned a total of 2,696 dogs of which he had bred 2,123) and coursing and on horses.
He was a notable shot and a hunter of the bear and the elk in the wastes of Russia.
He also devoted infinite pains and care to public duties. He qualified as a Justice of the Peace for Essex in 1888, and, sitting regularly on the Witham Bench, became its chairman.
He was also Deputy-Lieutenant for Essex, and served on Essex County Council.
He was also chairman of the Wild Birds Protection Committee and chairman of the local school managers and president of nearly every movement for good in own neighbourhood.
With the late
Mr. A. Wilkin and the Hon. C. H. Strutt, he was one of the pioneers of the
old-age pension movement.
Latterly, Dr Salter's chief pastime has been the cultivation of a garden which he created and which was the pride and glory of his life.
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| Dr Salter's magnificent home and garden |
Despite his years, he also added two more hobbies to his heavy list - he
revived the painting of his youth, with special attention to flowers and dogs,
and started to get his memoirs together.
His life was full of interesting adventure. In total, he visited Russia ten times for big game shooting, and D'Arcy House contains specimens of polar bears, wolves, elk and lynx which fell to his gun.
He went over as vice-president of the English Kennel Club, at the invitation of the Imperial Society of Russia, of which the Tsar was head, to give technical advice on the breeding of pointers, setters, and other sporting dogs, and he was liberally feted.
He became a fluent Russian speaker.
Dr Salter was said to have been "a great doggy man".
He had champions in English pointers, English and Irish setters, black and brown retrievers, Sussex and cocker spaniels and greyhounds.
His strain of pointers was taken to America, and
swept the deck there.
In flowers, Dr Salter specialised in roses and herbaceous plants.
He judged big flower shows in London and village shows in Essex.
He won the Award of Merit of the Royal Horticultural Society for his Mrs. J. H. Salter alstrcemeria, which grew in profusion in his garden.
He had a most tempting offer for this, but he refused to part with it wholesale, because it was "named after a good woman," his late wife.
During the 1914-18 war, it was feared that the Germans might seek to invade England in flat-bottomed vessels via the Essex coastal marshes.
Dr Salter was said to have possessed "a splendid Mauser rifle, captured from Boer officer, and plenty of ammunition",
He intended to exact the severest penalty from the invaders before he and his rifle went down!
Fortunately that was an eventuality which never came to pass, but it indicates the spirit in which these things were regarded.
On the night a German Zeppelin airship was brought dawn flames at Little Wigborough, Dr Salter, was in bed sleeping soundly after a long and tiresome day's work.
"Look, doctor, quick, there's a Zeppelin coming down," a voice shouted in the darkness.
Dr Salter rubbed his eyes, looked out of the bedroom window, and saw a tremendous glare.
Just then his night bell rang."Come quickly, there's been a bad accident near the Zeppelin!"
He went off, and found that the young man who had rushed to the nearest police to give warning of the presence of the Zeppelin had collided on his motor cycle with a motor car (no road vehicles were allowed to carry lights in those days).
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| One of the cars in which the doctor visited his patients |
Dr Salter attended to the man,
saw the Zeppelin's crew under arrest and the military lorries arrive to take
them to Colchester.
Later he had a snuff box made from a relic of the Zepp.
Oh is adopted county, he said:" Although I am a Sussex native, I am an Essex man.
"My sympathies are with Essex; all that is done for the benefit of Essex am pleased with.
"Most of my contemporaries have passed on, but I have always been able to make new friends in Essex.
"I love the county, and lot of the people in it are valued friends of mine."
Until the last few months of his life when he was given to eccentricities (such as wandering in his garden minus his clothes), Dr Salter remained physically fit and strong.
"Hard work, and plenty of it," was his recipe for health. "It is the best prescription for long life and a happy one.
"It is a panacea for most of our evils to-day.
"Do things that suit you, not worry you. It is a bad plan to nurse your troubles.
"A good day's work blows them away makes you forget them. Worry and good health do not rub together at all.
"Keep yourself doing something. Do everything you can, but do nothing to excess."
Dr Salter had the greatest respect for the physique of the young people of the 20s and 30s.
He said: "Although there are individuals I could pick out of 30 or 40 years ago whose records would to-day take a lot of beating, I reckon that, taken generally, the young men and women to-day rank high the matter of sports and physique.
"They have more time, and I am glad that more attention is paid to open-air sports and pastimes than used to be the case."
He would see patients to the very end, even when he was in his bedroom.
They said the sight of him and the sound of his voice did them good.
Late in his life, there was a remarkable incident when he was called out at night to a young lad who had been very badly injured in a motor car accident.
On the bricked floor of a cottage kitchen the doctor knelt for a full three and a half hours attending to the lad and stitching up his wounds.
Dr Salter would not talk about this. "A doctor does a doctor's work, that's all," was far as he would go.
After his day's rounds to see patients, he would work in his garden for three hours "like a navvy".
I don't go in for just snipping off the flowers," explained to a reporter on The Essex Chronicle, "but I do the heavy work, such as wheeling a barrow filled with earth or stones.
"The exercise does me good.
"When the garden work is finished I have a bath and then my dinner.
"I know exactly how to keep myself fit, and I never eat or drink anything between my breakfast in the morning and my dinner at night.
"I never did take luncheon or tea.
"With my dinner I drink a glass, or perhaps a glass and a half of beer, never anything else: never touch wine now.
"Time was when I used to have port with mv dinner and to like a good cigar, sleep exactly five hours at night and wake up with the clock in front of me, just five hours, as sure as a gun!
"The winter before last I frequently went out wild duck shooting at 3.30 in the morning on the marshes and killed as many as 30 to 50 duck before breakfast."
All his work and adventures he recorded in a diary that had reached 80 volumes.
He recorded the times when he was compelled to make journey of 40 or 50 miles on horseback to attend to patients.
One subject that was said to have particularly fascinated him in later life was why people living near the Essex marshes seemed to live such long and healthy lives.
He concurred with a medical colleague that the answer lay with the radioactivity of mud - said to be a thousand times more radioactive than sea sand and therefore more healthy to live near.
This seemed to explain to him why many of his patients who lived within reach of sea breezes, blowing over the low tide of the Blackwater, reached such advanced ages and were blessed with such healthy children.
In one year, he numbered among his patients four over 94 years of age and many between 80 and 90.
In the same year, two of his patients gave birth to triplets and many to twins.
This also explained, to his mind, the extraordinary healthiness of Southend and its radioactive muddy estuaries.
When the conversation turned to the importance of establishing centres for treatment by radium inhalation, the doctor's enthusiasm was unbounded.
The newly-established radium inhalatorium, near the Crystal Palace in South London, was to some, extent due to his encouragement.
According to contemporary reports, it was "already doing good work in combatting many of the most annoying and most common ills of animal and plant life".
Dr Salter believed, fancifully, that the
radioactivity of the Essex sea marshes may have accounted for his suffering no ills from his many long and wet waits for the early morning
flights of duck.
But the science remains unproven.
But the science remains unproven.
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| The good doctor in the company of some of the creatures he had shot - he had many of them stuffed and mounted |
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