St. Joe’s hospital set to honour generosity of Thompson family at gala

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From putting London at the forefront of Canada’s oil industry in the 1920s to developing award-winning speedboat technology in the 1940s, members of the Thompson family have been making waves in London for more than 100 years.

The London family behind business ventures such as Supertest Petroleum and Sunningdale Golf and Country Club is being recognized for saving lives by helping a London hospital become a global pioneer in the development of cancer imaging technology.

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This fall, St. Joseph’s Hospital says it will unveil work related to a “new frontier” of imaging technology at its annual donor-appreciation gala where it will also recognize the Thompsons for decades of financial contributions that helped the hospital develop generations of advancements in medical imaging technology.

“Many of those advancements happened because of the Thompson family,” said Michelle Campbell, president and CEO of the St. Joseph’s Health Care Foundation. “They’ve invested in a lot of previous technology that helped to get us to this (point). So, we wouldn’t be here were it not for their investments.”

The hospital has been internationally recognized for advancements its made with imaging technology. In 2023, GE HealthCare announced St. Joseph’s as the first hospital in Canada to be designated as a centre of excellence in the area of medical imaging and theranostics.

Campbell attributes achievement like this to financial contributions that started from the late Jim Thompson and his wife Beverley in 1971.

In 2008, the couple contributed to a fundraising campaign to bring the first MRI machine with breast imaging capability to southwestern Ontario. At the time, the region didn’t have the precision MRI technology to properly screen women with dense breast tissue for cancer. This meant many young women, typically in their 30s with young children, would not be screened, Campbell said.

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“Without the technology, by the time they came to our breast care centre, they might be Stage 4,” Campbell said. “They didn’t even know they had cancer because they weren’t caught in routine screening.

When St. Joseph’s set about to bring this technology to London, Campbell says the couple made a “leading” six-figure donation that allowed the hospital to acquire the machine.

“(Women) wouldn’t fall through the cracks any longer by virtue of the fact they had breast tissue that couldn’t be properly imaged,” Campbell said. “It meant we were going to save women.”

One of the couple’s five children, Gordon Thompson, says his parents recognized the technology as something that had the potential to transform cancer treatment.

“They felt that it was a very worthwhile endeavour to support in the early days of imaging,” he said, adding the younger generations of the Thompson family strive to continue the “intense” community giving started by the older generations, made possible by the family’s success in business goes back over 100 years.

Before opening Sunningdale Golf and Country Club on his 40-hectare ranch north of London in 1934, John Gordon Thompson co-founded Supertest Petroleum.

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Supertest began with one gasoline station at 362 Dundas St. east of Waterloo Street and eventually grew to around 1,600 gas stations across Ontario and Quebec. After the oil boom hit Alberta, the company expanded operations to Calgary in the 1950s. Supertest merged with British Petroleum in 1971, at which point Jim Thompson had become president of his father’s venture.

The family also gained recognition in the world of hydroplane racing with their Miss Supertest speedboats, a venture originally started by John Gordon Thompson to promote their oil business. Jim Thompson’s propeller design on the Miss Supertest III is what gave their racing team “a real leg up” to win three consecutive Harmsworth Trophies from 1959 to 1961, according to his daughter, Leslie Johnson.

Johnson says it was the propeller designed by her father that allowed ultimate success in these “very important races,” but he gave his crew full credit for their wins.

While it is “not their style” to seek the spotlight, Gordon Thompson says the family is pleased to be honoured at the hospital’s upcoming tribute dinner.

“We all feel deeply honoured and very, very proud of the community support that we provided over many years,” he said.

The St. Joseph’s Health Care Foundation’s annual tribute dinner is set to be held Oct. 9 at RBC Place London, the downtown convention centre.

Tickets can be found at www.sjhc.london.on.ca/foundation

nbrennan@postmedia.com

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