My claim for the honour of speaking about my great friend is that although I have not known him as well as most of you, I have certainly known him longer.
I was at Medical School with Graham - as was Brian Scobie, also sadly deceased this year. Brian put it well when he recalled his first sight of “Jop” as he was often known, sitting bespectacled and extremely earnest in the front row of the lecture theatre in Dunedin. His poor eyesight was blamed by his doctors as due to too much book work - the latter was a definite fact, the association was a bit more dubious.
We graduated in the same year, and after some of the greenery was washed away from our ears in NZ hospitals we came to London together, and studied and worked at Hammersmith Hospital. This was in 1955 - 50 years ago.
He became a very distinguished academic, but it is not that which I recall with such pleasure, but rather “larking around” Europe together in a fairly light-hearted way, and always with very good company - mostly female.
Our first adventure was what might be called a “variable transport” holiday in a brilliantly hot summer fortnight in Devon and Cornwall, just after we arrived in England. We hitch-hiked, we walked, we took buses and we spent the nights in the most luxurious Youth Hostels - luxurious because our experience in New Zealand was of tiny corrugated iron tramping huts, with no facilities except perhaps a rather unpleasant latrine up behind a gorse bush.
We were skilled cooks, and became expert in cooking a three course meal on a single primus stove, with the various billy-cans stacked one on top of the other, where timing was of the essence. It was important as everyone now knows (we did not when we started) to get the potatoes going long before the stewed plums.
The undoubted triumph of that particular holiday was our trip up Great Mis Tor to investigate a red flag flying on the top. We took little notice of some booming going on in the distance, and returned to our billy cans and evening meal. From the camp, we could see some serious looking military, scouring the top of our hill obviously looking for the people who had disrupted their artillery practice. We drank their health in a favourite brew we had just discovered: Worthington E.
Camping with Graham was great fun, and my casual approach was well balanced by his meticulous attention to detail. No primus stove ever exploded on his shift, and before we left in the morning there was his disciplined check of the camp site, when perhaps a few coins or a dish cloth would come to light.
The next year we went to Ireland, and again our travel arrangements were worked out as we went. On a memorable day hitch-hiking from Donegal to the Irish border, we rode on the back of a pick-up truck with some lovely light-hearted lads, and we joked and exchanged stories. When asked what, if anything, they did for a living, they told us “We belong to the IRA” - it was almost as if it was the local brewery trade union.
It was in Ireland too that we pitched our tent almost in the dark in the top corner of a field, where there were a few placid-looking cows way down at the end. There was a hint of rain, so we even dutifully dug little rain channels round the tent, and went to sleep with the confidence and ignorance of youth. It was 5am when we were awoken by what seemed to be a huge giant trying to destroy our tent: it was at the same time pouring with rain, most of which seemed to be running across the floor under our sleeping bags. You will have guessed that the cows had shifted their position, and were exercising their curiosity about the strange little white structures at the top of their field. No permanent damage, but very much the end of our night's sleep.
Ireland is a lovely place, and we shared many a conversation with these splendid people hoeing up their potatoes, never too busy to exchange just a few words and always hospitable and friendly. Evenings were spent in front of peat fires usually reading aloud from H V Morton's “In Search of Ireland”, which we had brought with us for education.
I could go on about continental holidays, but I won't: about being glared at for wearing shorts in Italy, about being taken out to a fabulous dinner by one of Graham's patients in Stockholm, and about have a close call with a moose when driving after dark in Norway. Incidentally, Graham later confided in me that he had once had a head-on collision with a cow in New Zealand, which completely wrecked his old Austin 7 - the cow of course ran off unharmed.
I must however tell more seriously of the distinguished career of our friend. He and I were both doing very junior house jobs at Hammersmith in 1955 - he on the Endocrine Unit, I with the Liver team. He had what I believe was a crazy idea of implanting through a needle a radioactive seed into a tiny gland at the base of the brain, to suppress its activity in one of the endocrine people's favourite syndromes. Not only is the pituitary almost adherent to the brain, it is about the size of a marble, and has running over its surface the nerves carrying the visual impulses from the eye to the brain. There thus seemed very limited room for error, and I tried, fortunately unsuccessfully, to discourage him from this mad enterprise.
The superiority of his judgement has since been made very clear. After moving effortlessly from Registrar to Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and Reader, he was appointed to a personal professorship - a status reached by few, and in fact allowing one to continue research and teaching without the dull administrative load of a professor who is head of a department. His academic work extended over a wide range of important issues such as calcium metabolism and growth hormone. One can correctly see Graham as a superb inspiring teacher. He did indeed have that reputation both at Hammersmith and also at the many Institutes around the world where he was invited to lecture - the United States, Europe, South America and South Africa, together with many in the Middle East.
It was a cruel blow that the effects of Parkinson's disease forced him to retire early, but for several more years he kept up his enthusiastic nature on all manner of hobbies and interests. It was the nature of the man to ask me what time we were coming to visit, so that he could adjust his medication to be at his best when we arrived. Sadly, medication proved to be of limited value, and his long period of severe disablement was not something we would have wished for himself. Through it all, he had the great good fortune to be loved by such a devoted and understanding wife - we must today pay tribute to them both.
Even through this, his cheerfulness seldom deserted him, and this is how I shall remember him, optimistic, good company and with an enviable chirpy cheerfulness.