Tributes to ‘gentle and thoughtful’ cricket loving and countryside campaigning Southwater doctor

He will be greatly missed as a loving husband, father and grandfather: as a doctor in Horsham for over 40 years; as a member of Horsham Cricket Club; and as a founding member and chairman of Keep Southwater Green.

Ian Thwaites was born in Brighton in 1943, the youngest of four children and the son of local General Practitioner, Dr Guy Thwaites.

He became a man of many talents. He was a fine cricketer, playing several seasons for Sussex Second XI and Cambridge University, winning a Blue in 1964. He went on to represent Horsham Cricket Club for many years, most notably for the ‘Thursday XI’.

Having trained at Cambridge and St Thomas’ Hospital, he was a dedicated, caring and thoughtful doctor.

Originally attracted to Horsham by the excellence of its cricket club, he joined Horsham’s Orchard Surgery in 1970, after a spell as a flying doctor in Africa. He worked in the practice until 1990, when he left to practice as an independent musculoskeletal and sports physician from his home in Southwater.

There he manipulated, injected, acupunctured and jovially encouraged many of West Sussex’s injured and aching population back to an active life.

He had a long-standing passion for good food and wine, enjoyed in the company of family and friends.

He was an excellent chef, a talent which lead him to write culinary articles for a medical magazine for many years and he was runner-up in a Sunday Times amateur chef of Great Britain competition (a forerunner of ‘Master Chef’) in 1983.

Complementing his love of good food was his enthusiasm for producing his own ingredients and he cultivated an extraordinary array of produce (from potatoes to pigs) in a highly ordered garden.

His work, his sport, and his garden combined to produce a deep connection with the area and its communities. He viewed the poorly considered proposals for housing development in Southwater as a direct threat to all that was good and worth preserving in the area.

Through the formation and chairmanship of the pressure group Keep Southwater Green he tirelessly fought the district council’s and housing developers’ plans to build on Southwater’s green fields.

His family have received many touching tributes to his life over the last two weeks.

There are three words that are common to nearly all of them: he was ‘gentle’, ‘kind’ and ‘thoughtful’. But to his children and grandchildren (and possibly many others) he was also an inspiration. He approached life with enormous energy, high intelligence, and a healthy disregard for received wisdom.

He cared little for outward appearance (to the occasional frustration of his wife, Linda); what mattered were character, integrity, loyalty and living a full and loving life.