COUGH BOY! DAVID GOLDWATER

COUGH BOY!

FOUR EARLY SCHOOL MEDICAL OFFICERS

BY DAVID GOLDWATER (51-62) WITH ALISTER COX (HEADMASTER 72-94)

It was the appointment of Sir James Spence, Professor of Child Health and a paediatrician, as a School Governor which resulted in 1954 in the appointment of Dr Errington Ellis as the School’s first Medical Officer.

Henry ‘Bingy’ Barnes (right) with Simon Wood (72-77), ONA President (1998-2000) at an ONA Dinner He had lost an elder brother to meningitis which influenced his choice of Medicine as a career. After working in London, Dr Ellis moved to a new Child Health Department at the Newcastle RVI. There he assessed children with cerebral palsy, a regional survey of 300 such children forming his MD thesis.

He became medical director of the what was then called the Percy Hedley School for Spastics and, to this day, the Percy Hedley Foundation is a lasting tribute to him. The BCG vaccination programme introduced into the UK in 1953 will have been how I and most of my contemporaries will have met Dr Ellis. The painless jab left us all with a small circular scar for life, as well as an immunity against the killer disease tuberculosis. But there was another short health test administered which included the use of a cold spoon and the order to cough, hence the title of this piece! Need I elaborate? Dr Ellis died in July 2006, aged 84. In the tributes to him, he was described as a kind and gentle man, filled with humility, who effortlessly commanded respect. He was immensely proud of the fact that he never saw a private patient.

He was succeeded in the role in 1969 by an Old Novo, Dr Andrew Smith (33-39), son of another ON, Dr Andrew Smith (1890-94), who had established a thriving practice at Whickham. At a Debating Society Toast List Dinner in May 1983, he gave a most informed and informative speech about the changing fashion in medicine through ‘direct action’ to ‘preventative medicine’, concluding that the patient had a great deal to put up with, but generally survived and was worthy of receiving a toast in reply! Dr Smith, MB, BS, ON, OBE (awarded 1970), was peculiarly fitted for his job at the RGS; as a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners he combined high professional skill with wide knowledge of people. He was described as completely unflappable, honed by his RAMC and Parachute Regiment background. As clinical Tutor in family medicine at Newcastle University he had the background in which to employ his brusque, cheerful and down to earth approach. He used it at School in his chats with individual boys and in form talks, with nothing barred! After 17 years at RGS, he became a Lecturer in General Practice at Newcastle University, obliging him to relinquish the post of School Medical Officer which he had filled so successfully. Novo, in Autumn 1986, bade farewell with great reluctance to a man who was ‘always ready, in the friendliest way, to tell you “to walk more, eat less and smoke not at all”. He could be discovered in the smoky Common Room munching his austere apple’. Andrew Smith died in May 1996.

Dr Henry Greenfield Barnes ON (32-39), affectionately known as Bingy by friends and colleagues, succeeded Dr Smith in 1969 and served for 17 years in the post. As another Old Novo and a GP in Tynemouth and North Shields from 194885, he was well suited to take on the rather nebulous job of School Medical

Officer, noted Colin Nichols (53-86), Second Master, on his retirement. One of the most observant and warm-hearted accounts of life at the RGS is to be found tucked away in the February 1981 issue of the British Medical Journal. Commissioned to give an account of his role as SMO in a day school, Dr Barnes covered all the routine items: his initial examination of new boys; his help in the occasional case of ‘anxiety-related abdominal colic’; his talks to year-groups of youngsters as a contribution to their sex education; his admonitions against smoking, with the visual aid of ‘a pathological specimen of carcinoma of the lung borrowed from a friendly pathologist’. There was also a role as informal consultant to staff who would tell him that ‘Smith cannot read the board, Jones has awful headaches, and Brown is covered with spots’—and often slip in a reference to their own medical problems for a quick professional judgement in a busy life. His account continued: ‘Those who pass from the RGS to read Medicine today may scarcely ever realise that General Practice used until recently to be the poor relation in Medical education, often quite low in the priorities of aspiring student’. This began to change with the creation in 1967 of the Royal College of General Practitioners of which Dr Barnes was a founder member. A central element of his philosophy was the treatment not of a disease in isolation but of the whole person and of the person against the background of his family and social context: the broad perspective, a broad vision of the pulsating life of a busy School in which health care plays its pervasive part.

‘Bingy’ Barnes was captain of School swimming in his time at the RGS in the 1930s, and his 100 yards free-style record was to stand unchallenged for 20 years. He returned as guest of honour at ‘Newts Night’ in 1962, and at all times enthusiastically followed the whole range of School sport in which he had excelled; after all, mens sana in corpore sano would be no bad motto for a School Medical Officer. Although born in the Isle of Man he was a true Northumbrian. He loved his cottage in the north of the county, enjoyed fell walking with family and friends, climbed in the Lake District, Skye, the Pyrenees, and the Alps, and in 1954 reached the summit of the Matterhorn. He loved the theatre, music, particularly opera, played the piano occasionally to his own satisfaction and was an accomplished artist in water colour. He died in October 2004. [In 1986, Michael Borthwick ON (60-67) continued in the post for 22 years until Spring 2008 when he retired, together with the first School Nurse, Gillian Mather who spent 17 years tending to sick RGS pupils. Alister Cox (Headmaster 72-94) recalls their friendship:]

It’s not often in the 26 years since I left the RGS that I have received a ‘summons’ from the RGS, and nowadays I would hesitate in case my memory had begun to fail me. But when David Goldwater asked if I would contribute my recollections of Michael Borthwick to his dossier on the RGS ‘school doctors’, I not only had to say yes but really wanted to. It says something about my relations with him and his wife Margaret that we have kept in touch more than once in those 26 years. They even visited us in our retirement niche in France (a rare feat for an Old Novocastrian!) and in this very last year we enjoyed a chat with them over lunch with mutual friends in Newcastle.

That friendship began over our lunches together during his weekly visit to the RGS as School Doctor, and were in that respect a natural follow-on from my happy relaxed relations with his predecessor in the job, Bingy Barnes. It was clear that they both enjoyed this continued link with their old school, and also the responsibility it gave them for youngsters who were largely happy and healthy, which made a pleasant break from their regular routines with the unwell. Of the many debts I owe to Bingy one was certainly his recommendation of Michael as his successor.

Michael had all the hallmarks of what a good school doctor should be. A reassuring figure for the young at all their stages and with all their foibles. An unthreatening occasional visitor to the staff common room, known to be available and discreet for a confidential word about this or that, but known also for a whimsical humour which could brighten the day. A source equally for emergency support for the HM himself. Without waiting for such needs I did enjoy this regular contact with a friendly face from outside the cloistered world of the RGS. Thanks, Michael, for that, and here’s wishing you well in all your promotion of great music-making in these impossibly difficult times.

Andrew Smith, Michael Borthwick, Henry ‘Bingy’ Barnes, Errington Ellis

[Guest Editor’s note: Michael organised Alister’s farewell concert on 21 May 1994, which included the incredibly ambitious and sensationally successful performance of Tallis’ ‘Spem in Alium’: ‘my biggest debt to Michael,’ as Alister puts it.]