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Although a career in hairdressing or acting briefly crossed her mind, Helen Rees always saw herself becoming a doctor. She grew up in Harpenden, north of London, but vacationing with her grandparents in Wales – along with her “very Welsh parents” – are what shaped her. Her father, a coalminer and trade unionist, and her mother, a Welsh methodist who would’ve loved to become a doctor if she had the chance, both instilled in her a strong sense of social responsibility. “It was about caring for other people, and so that fitted in well with medicine, because medicine is, ultimately, about caring for individuals and for the community,” she says.
Rees, now 72, didn’t just care quietly. Even as a child, she was outspoken. Her weekly school assembly talks always turned political. “I would get into trouble because it's meant to be a religious assembly and I would talk about the injustices I was seeing,” she recalls. As a teenager in the 1970s, she joined the Stop the Box demonstrations against apartheid in the UK – one of the many social struggles that would eventually draw her far south.
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