She was born and brought up in Hong Kong, where her mother was a doctor, but with the outbreak of war in 1939 and after the death of her father she and her twin sister Jeannie moved with their mother to Nairobi in Kenya where she stayed for the next six years.
In 1948, she attended Durham University to study botany, but in her final year realised she wished to continue in the family tradition and train as a doctor.
She enrolled at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
She soon found her primary interest was in looking after sick children and, after her marriage to husband Alan Rudwick, she travelled to Ghana and worked in the Princess Marie Louise Children’s Hospital in Accra.
She later joined the Department of Child Health at the newly formed Medical School of the University of Ghana, where she specialised in paediatrics and worked until she and her husband left Ghana in 1977.
