11 FLOREAT
FEATURE ARTICLES...
FEATURE ARTICLES...
Plane Speaking
The Swan at Southrop
Professor Robert Cocks (Past & Current Parent) outlines his job as an aviation doctor and the journey he travelled to reach it.
By Jerry Hibbert (Past Parent)
My five years at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London flew by, and in 1981 I qualified as a doctor. One of the first things that I did during my houseman year was to call BAMS, the British Airways Medical Service, to ask about a career in Aviation Medicine. When I was told that the first step would be to embark on a six-month full-time Diploma course at my own expense, I thought that this goal might have to wait for a while. In fact, it waited 21 years! During our final year of medical school, we were allowed to go abroad for ten weeks for an “elective period” to experience medical practice overseas. I opted to go to Sabah, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. In 1980, the longest stretch of tarmac road in Sabah was only 16km. long, the rest mainly dirt track. Landslides blocking these tracks were frequent, particularly on the steep roads winding around the majestic Mount Kinabalu. I divided my time between General Surgery and Orthopaedics and became fascinated by the treatment of injuries in a setting where there were limited resources. Because of the remoteness of some villages, a local charity named the Sabah Foundation funded a helicopter service and I was able to spend a week as a flying doctor (well, almost a doctor!). This elective shaped my subsequent career, and I decided to train in Accident and Emergency Medicine (A&E). Following three years of general professional training, I obtained a Registrar post at the Royal Free Hospital and passed my final FRCS examinations at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and in 1986 was lucky enough to secure a Lecturer position in A&E Medicine at Manchester University. Although working in a very practical specialty, my path led me further into a clinical academic career when I obtained my first Consultant post as Senior Lecturer at the Hammersmith Hospital and Royal Postgraduate Medical School in 1990. After five years immersed in busy clinical work, teaching and research, I received an offer in 1995 to move to Hong Kong as the founding Professor and Director of a new A&E Medicine Academic Unit at Prince of Wales Hospital, the teaching hospital of the Faculty of Medicine of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A busy career in A&E had brought me some success and a lot of personal fulfillment, but I still carried a small flame for Aviation Medicine - what happened next rekindled this. Hong Kong is a mountainous territory with many inhabited islands surrounded by the South China Sea. Anyone lost or injured at sea or up in the hills, or who suffers an emergency while living on the islands, relies on the helicopters of the Government Flying Service (GFS) to rescue them. In 2000, I was one of the founder members of a new GFS Auxiliary Medical Section, which aimed to provide A&E trained flying doctors and nurses for the helicopter medical service. At last, my two interests could be combined! Not content with even this happy situation, I returned to the UK and embarked on my long-awaited Diploma in Aviation Medicine course in January 2002. 37
ISSUE FOUR J A N U A RY 2 0 1 1
Winner of ‘The Best Restaurant in the UK 2010’ award from the Good Food Guide
My interest in Aviation has its roots in my schooldays at Boston Grammar School, where I joined the Royal Air Force section of the Combined Cadet Force. The first annual camp was held at the RAF College at Cranwell in my home county of Lincolnshire, I flew in an aeroplane for the first time. Waddling out to the De Havilland Chipmunk in my parachute (which also served as the seat cushion) and cloth helmet, I recall feeling rather nervous. The fact that the Chipmunk engine was started with something akin to a blank shotgun cartridge did make me wonder what I was climbing into, but I will never forget the exhilaration of that first flight. I continued in the cadets until the sixth form, indulging my other passion of full-bore rifle shooting in the school team and finally reaching the rank of Cadet Sergeant. Academic achievements as a biologist and chemist were modest, and my Headmaster was not confident of my chances of securing a place at medical school after A-Levels, and indeed my physics performance let me down. I took a gap year and re-sat my physics A-level – in a travesty of justice scoring an A-grade without any further serious revision. The reason for my laid-back attitude was that another medical school had offered me an unconditional place based on my earlier results! Probably not something particularly common these days!
F L O R E AT
I am not a restauranter; my wife Caryn, although the finest possible cook at home is not a chef, and my (now ex) Cheltonian boys and daughter (at Marlborough) are happy with whatever food is put in front of them. So why, you may ask yourself, did we buy a restaurant? Having bought it, I have asked myself that question many times. However, back in 2005, there was a reason.
This 6-month full-time Diploma course was, without exaggeration, exhilarating for a doctor interested in aviation. The course was attended by a mix of military and civilian doctors, and the philosophy was that we should experience all of the physiological stresses that pilots had to go through, and that included fighter pilots! So, as doctors we had to be spun around at 8G (eight times the force of gravity) in the Human Centrifuge, experience the oxygen deprivation found at 25,000 feet altitude, and learn to escape from an upturned helicopter cabin submerged in six feet of water (in the dark). In a cold February, we travelled to RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall for a week at the RAF School of Combat Survival. We spent a night in a forest at the edge of Bodmin Moor, learning to survive with a waterproof poncho and the small survival axe (carried in all RAF ejection seats along with a few glucose tablets) and how to make fire and collect drinking water. Later in the week we were dropped into the cold sea off Fowey, to survive the morning in individual life rafts, before being rescued by RAF Sea King Helicopter. Unexpectedly, Hong Kong called once again with the offer of a sixmonth commission to teach paramedic skills to the Aircrewman Officers of the Government Flying Service, and I was back in the Far East by the beginning of 2003. While undertaking this task, Cathay Pacific Airways approached me. I continued to practice airborne emergency medicine with the GFS helicopters until 2008 as an auxiliary Air Medical Officer. In my current role I care for pilots who have suffered injuries and serious illnesses, preparing them for a return to flying. Apart from the other major task of medically recertifying pilots each year, my job as Cathay Pacific’s Senior Medical Officer involves planning facilities for in-flight emergencies among passengers. There are about 2000 such emergencies each year among the 19 million passengers travelling with the airline, and all aircraft carry a doctor’s kit and a defibrillator. Cabin Crew are trained to make an initial assessment, and are supported by satellite telephone with advice from a trained emergency physician at MedLink, based in Phoenix, Arizona. Cheltenham College has produced a well-known Aviation Medicine doctor – Dr John Fowler. John was educated at College from 1951-56 (Leconfield) and became an aviation doctor in the Royal Air Force before moving to Hong Kong to establish Cathay Pacific’s medical department. John was elected by his peers to receive the George J. Kidera Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Aviation Medicine in 1999, and still continues to practice part-time in the specialty in his mid-seventies. Clearly this is a field of work that just won’t let us retire! 21 years was worth the wait to combine my two interests, and if there is a message here, I think it may be that no matter how far you have progressed with a chosen career, it is always worth making a leap of faith to take it a stage further, even if the final destination is not immediately clear. Professor Robert Cocks is Senior Medical Officer in Aviation Medicine at Cathay Pacific Airways in Hong Kong and Honorary Professor of Accident and Emergency Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
We live in Southrop, just south of Burford, and modestly consider ourselves to some extent a ‘foodie’ family. I work in the animation industry in London, eat in restaurants every day, and was beginning to wonder what business might interest me if and when I ever went into semiretirement. My wife Caryn loves cooking and has dreamt of having a food school one day, and even our son Charles (BH ’07) showed an interest in cookery as a teenager. So when our village pub came onto the market with Chef, Bob Parkinson, and front of house, Graham Williams, in place, temptation reared its head. Everyone said “Don’t do it!” “Restaurants are hell!” “You’ll never make any money.” But we did it anyway. And all went well to start with. The food was great, the service excellent, and the restaurant was full. But then one day in 2007 disaster struck; the chef and front of house resigned to go their separate ways (to ‘Made by Bob’ in Cirencester, and ‘The Cafe Anglais’ in London). So we tried to put our own staff in to run it. Oh dear. All those people that said “Restaurants are hell!” are
wrong. Restaurants are much worse than hell when they go wrong. It was a terrible time. I calculated it would have been cheaper to stand outside the door with a basket of £20 notes and hand one to every customer who turned up, telling him to go to the next village and eat there instead. Meanwhile in London, Sebastian Snow (of ‘Snows on the Green’), his wife Lana and new baby were looking for an opportunity to change their lives, and the Cotswolds was their favoured destination. A friend made the introduction, and the Snows moved lock, stock and barrel to Southrop, and suddenly everything was great again. So great in fact, that this year The Swan won the Good Food Guide’s award: ‘Best Restaurant in the UK 2010’: no mean achievement. Now of course, we can hardly get a table ourselves. Following on from the Swan’s revival, Caryn has opened her Food School, ‘Thyme at Southrop’, www.thymeatsouthrop.co.uk, and guests to that and the Swan are now able to stay in the recently refurbished cottages: www.southropmanorestate.co.uk
A Greenite Gathering I, G. Harry McLaughlin, PhD (pictured extreme right) attended a conference in Rome with Beverley Hills psychiatrist Eleanor Lavretsky, MD (standing, centre) in March 2010. On my way home to Los Angeles I gave a lunch at the London Chancery Court Hotel for some Greenite contemporaries: Peter Beauchamp (standing next to me), Brian Denney (standing left), Anthony Taylor (seated left) and John Lawrie (seated right). Also in the picture are my cousin Mrs. Brigid Reeve (standing) who attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and Egyptologist Mrs. Cheryl Hart for whom I did research at the Getty Museum Library.
But it has been a journey, and there are some lessons here for all those young Cheltonians thinking about going into the restaurant business: 1) Running a restaurant isn’t a job: it’s a lifestyle. And you need to be prepared to live it. 2) The work is grinding. It is not possible to stop for a couple of hours, and pick it up later if you’re tired. Customers want their lunch at lunchtime after all. 3) Be prepared for your social life to take a knock: your busiest working hours will be when everyone else is out having fun. 4) Dealing directly with the public is a challenge in itself. On the other hand, the food and drink business must be one of the most pleasurable. It is entrepreneurial, creative, hands-on, hugely rewarding when you get it right, and a life of giving pleasure to others can’t be all bad. Don’t listen to the people who’ll tell it’s hell; it really doesn’t have to be.
By Harry McLaughlin (H’46)
the BBC and the Foreign Office in the Far East. Anthony, a solicitor, has homes in London and Portugal. John, who had not seen me for 64 years, was a Coates cotton executive in many parts of the world.
Ten days after the lunch I had a heart valve replacement. I am now more active than ever!
All five Greenites are globe trotters. I, a retired psychology professor, and Peter, an international business consultant, have both visited more than 100 countries. Brian worked for
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