For some people, the work they do and the life they lead are in perfect alignment. My friend and colleague Bob Grose, who has died aged 71, was one of those people.
He did historically important work on HIV/Aids for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Africa, and for polio, HIV and leprosy for the Overseas Development Administration (ODA, later DfID) in India. Writing for War on Want in the mid-1980s, Bob was one of the first to predict that truckers would be high-risk vectors for the HIV epidemic in Africa. He was quickly snapped up by the WHO’s Global Programme on Aids (later UNAids) in Geneva, where he worked from 1987 to 1992 as a technical adviser. He was ahead of his time, mobilising community groups in Africa to raise awareness of the epidemic: a focus of UNAids to this day.
As the ODA’s senior health and population adviser (1992-99), he oversaw several huge projects: the eradication of polio (every year more than 100 million children were immunised in a single day); the launch of India’s efforts to combat the HIV epidemic; and the elimination of leprosy. All of these stories have happy endings: polio has been eradicated in India, HIV is well controlled and 200,000 people were cured of leprosy on his watch. Bob is remembered by his colleagues there as a consummate professional, kind, wickedly funny, with a complete absence of ego.
Bob was born in his grandmother’s nursing home in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, to Nicholas, an auctioneer, and Kathleen (nee Rushworth), a physiotherapist, although the family lived in Fowey, Cornwall. He attended Truro school before qualifying as a chartered surveyor at the College of Estate Management in Kensington, London. He travelled a good deal before doing a master’s in international administration at Cornell.
It was in 1983, during an early posting to Yemen, that Bob met Jane Springham, who was working as a nurse at a small clinic on the Red Sea coast. They married in 1988.
Bob was determined to raise his young family near the Cornish countryside where he grew up, so in 1999 they moved from India to a farmhouse in Brownston in the South Hams, Devon. Bob spent the final decade of his career at HLSP, an international health consulting firm. When he retired in 2014, he became deeply committed to climate activism, and was arrested as part of Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations in April 2019. The couple moved to Totnes when Jane retired three years ago.
Bob was fearsomely fit. He performed a seven-minute plank during a family lockdown competition and thought nothing of a 20-mile kayaking trip. In Jane’s words, “he died as he lived, cycling up a hill on a mountain bike, covered in mud, with a smile on his face. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”
His family remember him as “the most extraordinary man to live with”, a devoted father who woke up every morning interested in something new.
He is survived by Jane and their daughters, Catherine and Eleanor, and by his brothers, Timothy and Richard.
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