Rev Dr Harry Holland, doctor and missionary; born February 23, 1911, died August 28, 1996
THE Rev Dr Harry Holland, who has died at the age of 85, had a lifetime of public service, shared between the Indian sub-continent and Scotland. In this he carried on the medical and missionary tradition of his father, Sir Henry Holland, the legendary eye surgeon who worked for the Church Missionary Society on the North-West Frontier and built up Quetta Hospital in Pakistan and the eye clinic at Shikarpur - the latter famous for its cataract operations.
Harry Holland was born in Edinburgh but spent some of his childhood in what would later become Pakistan. A King's Scholar at Durham, he trained as a doctor at Edinburgh University, and became a house surgeon at Stirling Royal Infirmary in 1934. His misionary work started the following year in the hospitals of Quetta, Bannu, and Peshawar. He had been at Quetta only three weeks when the hospital there was destroyed by an earthquake which killed some 25,000 people.
Harry Holland was subsequently awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind medal for gallant service in rescue operations; among those rescued was his own father who also received the medal as well as a knighthood.
During the Second World War Harry Holland served in Burma with the Indian Army Medical Corps and, in the upheavals following the partition of India in 1947, worked with refugees. Afterwards he returned to his duties in his three hospitals till 1952.
After resigning from the CMS in 1953, he did a year's theological training in Edinburgh before taking up an appointment with the Overseas Service Joint Committee on Lay Training for Missionaries, based at Farnham Castle. In 1964 he returned to the CMS and Quetta Hospital, where his brother was now medical superintendent, before going on to Peshawar. From both bases he continued to work regularly at the annual eye clinic in Shikarpur.
He was ordained by the Bishop of Lahore in 1967. On his return to Edinburgh four years later, he worked as a GP for a decade, also taking an interest in political and ecumenical affairs and in the Student Christian Movement. Fifteen years ago he and his wife Andrea, a fellow Edinburgh graduate whom he married in India in 1937, moved to the Borders. His last role in a lifetime of public service was as part of a rural team ministry in West Linton.
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