Further experiences in UK and Europe, 1952-54

My second hospital job in London in 1952 was at the Edgware General Hospital, half an hour from Oxford Circus on the Northern Line of the Underground - closer to the heart of the city, but not as intellectually stimulating nor as pleasant socially as Hillingdon Hospital  had been. I had good clinical experience in pediatrics under the direction of Margaret Baber, but at this hospital I learnt more both medically and culturally from the senior registrar, Fred Binks. Sadly I note that he, along with “Baron” Barnes, Jack Mickerson, and several others with whom I worked later in those years in England, have all died recently. With the exception of the Baron, all were close to me in age too. On weekends off duty that summer, I went hitch-hiking several times, travelling to the Cotswolds, Norwich, Cambridge. Encouraged by Fred Binks, I explored London's theatres and cinemas.  The Everyman Cinema at Hampstead was a few stops towards London on the Tube, and there it was always possible to see wonderful old art movies.    

Stowe on the Wold 

Ruins of Tintern Abbey

Interior of Wells Cathedral 

Polpero Harbour, Cornwall 

Warwick Castle

King's College, Cambridge 

I was doing a little study too. I had decided that I ought to take a formal postgraduate course, and after some exploratory inquiries I enrolled in the three-month course that was then held annually at the University of Edinburgh. This sounded better value for money, and more relevant to my interests than the course at the Hammersmith postgraduate medical school in London.

As the summer faded into a damp autumn, I took the overnight bus to Edinburgh, and went to stay at the Victoria League in the West End of Edinburgh. From there I walked daily to and from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, to sit all day in an uncomfortable lecture theatre as the stars of clinical medicine and medical science from the University of Edinburgh trotted out their latest wares. Many were superb teachers, and I learnt a lot, though not as much as I had hoped - I had been expecting it to be a simple and painless process, which of course it was not. Unwisely I chose the most difficult of all specialties, cardiology, and although this brought me in touch with Rae Gilchrist and his two junior colleagues Bobbie Marquis and Michael Oliver (both of whom I got to know much better a few years later) the details of clinical cardiology were too much for me most of the time. I got more out of the stimulating lectures of Peter Michaeljohn, the nutritionist/epidemiologst, and had I the wit to see it then, could probably have made my way in epidemiology from then on. On the whole, it was for the best that I continued on my eclectic way for a few more years, getting experiences that made me a well-rounded physician and contributed to a convincing career trajectory.

At the Victoria League, the company was excellent, including several stimulating South Africans as well as some Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians. The South Africans included Theo James, who became a life-long corresponding friend, Solly Marks, later a distinguished gastroenterologist, and a wild raffish man from Johannesburg, who drove me back as far as Warwick at the end of the three months - a journey I was lucky to survive because of his crazy driving. The New Zealanders included Joe Dobson, who had been with me at Hillingdon. I was on excellent terms with all these and others, but they were less energetic letter-writers than I, so over time the ties of friendship have weakened and eventually atrophied from disuse.

On Saturday nights the Victoria League had a regular weekly session of Scottish Country Dancing, which those of us who lived there watched rather sourly from the sidelines - they made so much noise it was impossible to study while this din was going on, but we were all Sassenachs or colonials with no interest in Scottish Country Dancing.  Among those who came dancing there on some of those Saturday nights was a young woman from New Zealand, Janet Wendelken. We were destined to meet a few years later under very different circumstances.

Towards the end of my time in Edinburgh I began looking for my next job. I went south twice to interviews, the first time to the National Heart Institute, where I was interviewed for a house officer post at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital at Taplow in Buckinghamshire. I didn't particularly want this job, buried as it was in a remote rural area far from public transport; and the interview with Eric Bywaters went badly when I started asking how he told parents that their children might get a placebo rather than an active drug, in one of the randomized trials then in progress. If I had got that job, I would very likely then have become an epidemiologist, like Alvan Feinstein who worked there at about that time. The days I spent in London for that interview coincided with the great smog that killed several thousand people. This great smog at times was so dense that as I walked along Piccadilly I remember looking down and being unable to see my feet - my legs disappeared into the murk just below knee level.

My other interview had a happier outcome; I came south again towards the end of my stay in Edinburgh, and was offered and accepted a position as senior house officer at the Highgate Wing of the Whittington Hospital, in the acute medical service directed by Dr. Howard Pearson.

Like Hillingdon, this was an excellent hospital, on the fringe of another London teaching hospital just as Hillingdon had been. The linkage was with University College Hospital; several of the chiefs at the Whittington Hospital had staff appointments at UCH. Severalof them were at the summit of their specialties; these included John Yudkin, a nutritionist, and Adrian Exton-Smith who became the doyen of British gerontology. As at the other hospitals where I worked in England, I lived in the residents’ quarters, where I had interesting and worth-while room-mates: Sula Woolf who later married the psychiatrist Henry Walton with whom I worked very closely in Edinburgh a few years later; and Eleanor Till, wife of a distinguished medical scientist and friend of several film stars of the era. I went to several parties that included some of these film people, mostly heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking loud-mouthed bores; an exception was Deborah Kerr, who was quiet, witty, intelligent, and a modest and unassuming young woman.

Queen Elizabeth's golden coach

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was in early June 1953, towards the end of my time at the Wittington Hospital. My mother came to England to see this and we had seats in a stand near Westminster Abbey, among a large number of other Adelaide people, so it was like a reunion of sorts as well as an unforgettable occasion.

Leaving Club Med Camp, Corfu, 1953

At the end of my six month appointment at the Whittington Hospital I went to Corfu and Athens with a Club Mediterranee group. I took the train and ferry to Paris, and on the appointed morning, met a large and noisy group of young people - noisy because all were chattering at the tops of their voices in French. Naively I had assumed at least some would be speaking English! By signs and occasional pidgin English, we communicated with each other, and I joined the party on the train that would take us to Venice. I sat quietly reading Pickwick Papers, one of the two books I had brought along (I never go anywhere without books; the other one on that occasion was Homer’s Iliad); somewhere between Dijon and the Simplon Tunnel, a tall young man speaking English came into the compartment, and introduced himself to me. This was Peter Collett, and our meeting was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. We discovered that there were two others of British origin in the group, Thetis Hill, daughter of an archeologist, and Bob Cairns, a militant Scottish nationalist, a school-teacher from Aberdeen who had taken part in at least one terrorist attack (he called it liberation): blowing up a high-voltage power pylon carrying good Scottish electricity south to the vile Sassenachs. On this trip, however, he was very civilized and quite harmless.

The train deposited us in Venice, where we had a wonderful day sight-seeing, and stayed overnight at the Hotel Splendide-Suisse to which I returned the following year on my own. Then next morning we travelled down the Adriatic as deck passengers on a little Greek coastal steamer, calling briefly and in darkness at a port in Yugoslavia, then at Brindisi, before crossing the bottom of the Adriatic to the Ionian island of Ithaca. There had been a severe earthquake not long before; the entire ancient town that had clung precariously to the steep slopes of the horseshoe-shaped bay perhaps since the mythical days of Odysseus and Penelope, had slid down into the water. What remained among the ruins was enough to show what a lovely place it must once have been. Here as at the other ports where we stopped, we took on deck cargo such as crates of live chickens and piglets, and many peasants travelling from one island to the next. In the morning when I woke up my sleeping bag was surrounded by crates of live chickens and piglets The magic of the wine-dark sea began to communicate itself to me, perhaps to all of us. The sea really was wine-dark, it looked bottomless, deep, going on forever. The jagged mountains of the islands and the mainland, the softer profile of the Peloponnesis, the fragrant scent of flowers, the familiar aroma of eucalyptus from the many Australian gum trees that have proliferated throughout the Mediterranean, all this made me feel as if at home. I wanted to spend much longer in this part of the world than time allowed.

Our next port was Kekyra - Corfu - where most of the Club Mediterranee party got off; but Peter Collett and I, and some twenty of our French colleagues went on, first to Patras, then through the Gulf of Corinth to the port of Athens, Pireas. In Athens we stayed at a comfortable, spotlessly clean hotel where the daily room charge was half a million drachmae, an astronomical sum that translated into only a few shillings, because the drachma had just been devalued.

Temple of Zeus, Athens; Acropolis in the background

Temple of Apollo, Delphi

Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sunion

Tholos at Temple of Artemis, Delphi

In Athens we met a Greek guide whose French was so bad that a good deal of the time I could understand him better than the French people could. We went to the Akropolis, the Parthenon, the Archeological Museum of which I saw little other than the inside of a toilet, thanks to an untimely bout of diarrhea, the ancient and the modern Olympic stadium, the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sunion, where the Greeks had defeated the invading Persians 2500 years ago and strolled in the Plaka, the jumbled mediaeval streets and markets, where I bought a magnificent book of photos of Greece that I still have, and a few souvenirs. 

 We went on a day trip to Delphi, to see the temples and the spectacularly beautiful mountain scenery; our bus deposited us on a ridge half way up Mount Parnassus and we climbed a good deal of the rest of the way, pausing to drink from a bubbling spring - which I later regretted when I got another acute attack of diarrhea. The temple of Apollo at Delphi is among the most esthetically perfect sites and settings I have seen anywhere in the world; my powers of description, like the photos I took of it, can't do it justice. I hope I can go back there one day to see it again. (I wrote this long before our visit to Greece and Turkey in 2004).

Dancing at Club Med camp, Corfu, 1953