She was the first woman student in Singapore of mixed European and Asian ancestry to win a Queen's Scholarship in 1933, and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II.

Her younger sister Mae Noeline Oehlers was principal of the Raffles Girls' School.

[3] Thora Oehlers was a student at the Raffles Institution, a bright and athletic young woman,[4] when she became "the first Eurasian girl scholar in Singapore" to win a Queen's Scholarship in 1933, for study in England.

[10] She went to Belgium with the British Liberation Army in March 1945, and served at a military hospital in Ostend, and at medical stations in Egypt and Palestine.

[13] At age 45, Oehlers married British civil engineer William Peter Winston in 1959.