Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society

Dr Freddie Morgan, M.D. (Masaryk University 1936), AFOMRCP

First of all; I was born in a place called Brno, in German Brűnn, which in those days was predominantly German.This was in Moravia, second province of Bohemia,in those days of course Austria-Hungary, which it had been for hundreds of years. The name Brno was possibly based on the Celtic root Bryn (like Bryn Mawr) as the original preGerman inhabitants were Celts - the Boi, hence Bohemia.

I spent the first two and a half years of my life, before the First World War, in Brno, but I remember distinctly various aspects of life there, just before, and in the early part of the First World War, which did not really affect me very much.My father was called up in the Austria-Hungarian army and was stationed in Krakow, in Poland - a lovely city, by the way - and we followed him there and I spent there at least three or four years which were quite impressive.

Austria-Hungary had 38 million inhabitants in 1914, and extended from Eger in the west to the Russian marshes and the Carpathians, from the then German Silesia to Lake Garda, along the Dalmatian seaboard, to Albania. German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Croat, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, were all spoken in this kingdom, ruled by the Hapsburgs.

I learnt Polish and I have never forgotten Polish since. We returned to Brno when the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up, which was 1918.I remember distinctly Emperor Charles (Carl), the last Emperor of the Austria-Hungarian Empire - - first of all when he was crowned, taking over from the ancient Emperor Franz Josef and then when he was deposed when the First World War ended . His son Dr Otto Hapsburg is now an MEP.

So we returned to Brno in 1918, when Masaryk and Beneš founded the Czech Republic, - a democratic country - and I stayed there, apart from my frequent holidays, until 1939.

The impressions of my childhood - it was a middle class family, in those early days we had servants.I had a brother, a very loving mother. My father was quite a bit older than my mother. Krakow was a lovely medieval city; it still is in the centre, quite untouched bywar.I’ve been there since.And I remember as a child, in Krakow, the medieval centre, the main Glowny Rynek, which is the main square, with St. Mary’s church, a very lovely Gothic church.And the Renaissance Cloth Hall. - in German they were called Tuchlauben - it was called Sukienica in Polish. Originally in the Middle Ages there were German burghers there, selling cloth. I can still see the snow, the patina of church sires, horse drawn drozki – a magic atmosphere, dream like.

I was born in 1912, and school started there in those days at age 6.So I had no schooling in Krakow but my mother taught me to read. I was able to read in Polish and in German. During the war my father’s partner invested their textile business’s stock into war bonds, which became worthless.So in 1918 he had to start again from nil. And then I started in Brno again, in a German-speaking primary school.

The children were very poor, it was quite common that children would not turn up in school because they had no shoes, and the weather is quite severe in winter.Most of the children had free meals at school. It was shortly after the war, and I remember America very generously sent food to all these countries, because there was a severe shortage of food, certainly in the big cities.I understand that in big centres like Vienna the children were really underfed – saved by US food donations.

It must have been, I suppose, in my moderately early teens.I was always interested in nature studies, and the nearest to nature studies seemed to be medicine, in those days.I was fond of children, and I thought I would like to be a children’s doctor, specialising in child health.But that really crystallised in my middle teens, not before.I liked nature, and the sporting life.

Really any sport.In those days, in those countries, everybody played football, but not very organised.You just went into a park, there were boys playing, and you would just join them.Athletics.Now I was never good, but I was very keen and I joined them all, and my brother was certainly better.So there was running, jumping.And we played hockey, and in winter of course skating, and at a very early age, skiing and swimming.

I entered Masaryk University. I must just say a word about Masaryk.He was the first president of the Czech Republic.The name is spelled in a slightly Slovak way, which he insisted on.His father had been originally born, I believe, a slave,(?)andhe came from very humble circumstances. His mother was a Germanized Czech - and he was brought up in poverty. He was obviously at an early age a very able person, and entered the German Gymnasium, in Brno, which was the grammar school. He got there a chance to act as a tutor to the son of the police president in Brno, and later on had quite an exalted career as university professor.He was a humanitarian, and a very admirable person. He was a great admirer of Western (Anglo-Saxon) democratic ideals. His motto was Pravda Vítĕzí (Truth will prevail)

My university was very recently founded, with the birth of Czechoslovakia.It was the Czech University.There were also two technical universities in Brno, one was German, one was Czech, but the university which I attended had of course various faculties, one of which was medicine.It was rather, so I believe, unlike the German model of university, which prevailed at the Prague University. That was part German, part Czech, one of the oldest in Europe, called Charles University, after the Emperor Charles IV (Holy Roman Empire, of the Luxembourg Dynasty)

At the Czech University the professors and the lecturers, called docent, were much more friendly and understanding than their German counterparts.The hierarchy was very democratic and friendly, convivial.The students called each other "thou", (whereas I believe at German universities they had a much more formal attitude), and altogether it was free, and easy, and friendly.I suppose they were pioneering.They were probably modelling themselves more on the French model rather than the Austrian or German model, quite deliberately I believe.

The lectures were voluntary...you could attend or not attend.There was a mixture of students. The majority of my fellow students came from a peasant background, which was very Czech, from the country.They had stipendia, which means scholarships; their education was practically free.There was a certain number of, I think only male students, who got a scholarship from the army.

They were destined for the military medical profession.

I am very keen on sport.I suppose it went back historically, there were the Turnverein, in German, which were founded by Jahn.It started as physical training, plus political overtones.The Czech answer was Sokol, which is "falcon", and that was a liberal, national movement modelled on Garibaldi.And again emphasis on fitness, and there were excellent gymnasts in the Czech Republic. The German Turnverein became hotbeds of German Nationalism and Nazism.

Now, the University had lots of physical training, all sports, even rugby was then taught. So twice a week I went for two hours at least, very hard training, circuit training, running, hot showers, etc. etc. in order to be fit for skiing, skating, and of course skiing in those days was mostly cross-country plus ski-jumping, the so-called Nordic combination - Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish.I have skiied since the age of 12. I was rather enthusiastic, and was very keen - never very good, but always very keen.And then at weekends, after all that hard work at the hospital, I went skiing quite regularly.

We would catch the train at four o’clock in the morning, a very long, slow train went up into the mountain regions and we skied all day. Of course in those days there were no lifts, there was no skiing teaching, everyone taught oneself, but it was exhilarating.In the train, of course, we sang folk songs. Everybody had a connection with the countryside.

Later I went by coach into Sudeten, Beskid, and the Tatra Mountains – arranged by clubs or by my brother and me. From the end of December till mid March we went skating in the evenings, under flood lights, after our hospital work.

I loved rowing, and was Stroke in fours and eights. We also played Land Hockey and tennis, and my late brother was a very good athlete.

Oh, quite a number.As I say it was very democratic.I remember, even in those days, which was quite remarkable, some of the young ladies lived in private apartments with their boyfriends, who were also medical students. That was rather new for those days, in 1930. But of course quite a few of my fellow students were living in special colleges, which were supported by the state.

There was initially practical anatomy, biology and chemistry, separate disciplines of course, physics, histology, and professors taught all these. All of this was very academic, and there was no question in those early years of any meeting with patients.It was entirely theoretical. I think there were at least two to three pre-clinical years. I presume it was the French model.

I remember I had to apply to be attached to a clinical team, or walk the wards, as you put it. Again, nationality came into it.Brno had a good twenty, twenty-five per cent German population, because after the first war quite a few surrounding villages were incorporated so there was a Czech majority.But even so there was a German-speaking head physician, called Mager, and there was a German-speaking head surgeon, called Leichner, and they each had their own clinics and wards.I remember Mager was a very good clinician, and I believe the surgeon was also very good, and both rather nice and decent people, which is important because politics came into it a great deal. So they were reluctant Nazis.

So the physician would do a round, and discuss it with his assistant, chief assistant, and with the other doctors, and with the medical students.It was all rather pleasant and friendly, and there was very little of the "Herr Professor," which I believe was typical of German universities.

Well, the main one was tuberculosis, TB of the lungs, and so much so that half of the large ward - it was an open style ward - were TB patients.Other important conditions were syphilis, typhoid, and rheumatic fever, almost in that order.Of course there were what we call nowadays cardiac conditions, almost entirely cardiac infarction.The nurses were not nuns, (in some parts of the country they were nuns), but paid nurses, and quite helpful, but didn’t have any very special training.

As for the young doctors, we had to learn as we went, we learnt from older colleagues, who could be very helpful, and some who were perhaps a bit indifferent.One started very early, I suppose I had to be there at seven-thirty, and I had to travel from my home to the hospital, and one travelled by tram - very few people had cars, or even bicycles in those days - there was a good tram system.

On arrival I then had to examine all the new patients, and their urines, ESRs, blood tests.And by the way we routinely did a blood test not only for sedimentation rate - ESR - but also for typhoid, and for syphilis, because every patient was screened.That was a slightly more Germanic approach, which I think was due to the head physician, Mager. It was a diagnostic net with a very fine mesh.It just shows that, for instance, typhoid was comparatively frequent, and of course syphilis. We just had the Wasserman test for syphilis at that time.

In those days we had to do a very great deal, we had to learn as we went. We did lumbar punctures and examined the cerebral spinal fluid under the microscope. We did all the blood tests, and had to do the blood pictures and stains, and deliver judgement.We had to do, of course, urine tests. In those days that was rather tiresome because there were no test-strips, you had to doFehlings test, and you had to boil the urine - which exploded sometimes. Faecal specimens had to be examined for occult blood.I remember freely using benzidine, which is nowadays, of course, a major hazard as a carcinogen.

Then we had to write it all up, take a very thorough, what we called "anamnesis", that means a past history, which was time honoured and considered a very important part, and examine the patient from head to foot. A diagnosis had to be chalked on the board above the patient’s head, and the head physician came at about nine-thirty, ten o’clock, and did the rounds, and we had to be all ready with a ready-made diagnosis based on our (non-existent) clinical acumen.

1936. November.

Well, I was accepted as an unpaid clinical assistant in a Brno hospital. I don’t think we got anything at the hospital at all, not even a cup of coffee, but we got a white coat.

The first chore in the morning, apart from examining everybody who had come in during the night, making a provisional diagnosis, having examined all the bloods, urines, faeces, and sent them away for analysis, then I had to give fifteen, sometimes twenty intravenous injections of calcium chloride.Very corrosive, had to be strictly intravenous, and sometimes quite difficult - I was sweating blood.This was the treatment for TB.In half the ward were TB cases, an open ward, and as I say it was quite a difficult task because some people had bad veins. Clinical examination skills were paramount – auscultation, percussion, and palpation. X-rays and path lab exams were rationed due to cost.

One thing which I feel I ought to add.The nurses were helpful but they were not really fully trained.The input from more senior doctors was minimal, they expected us to educate ourselves all the time as we went, and to read up and look up all the different blood pictures for, say, the different leukaemias, and make ideally the correct diagnosis.

Number one: Rest, hope, calcium chloride IV. The treatment was entirely calcium injections.Calcium chloride, not calcium gluconate.The gluconate, much less corrosive, would not have mattered so much to have extravasation.But it was more expensive and of course economy was paramount.We were very cheap labour, the doctors.I saw a patient die of a fulminating haemoptysis – TB had eroded an artery.

There was no other treatment.We were not very far away from Phrenic Crush and other much more invasive surgical procedures, which are now completely unknown.In those days chest surgeons were very much in the ascendancy, getting more and more work, trying to make the lung collapse and giving calcium in the forlorn hope that it would settle in the lungs and therefore you’d get calcified TB. Artificial pneumothorax was just about then starting. I don’t think that in those days we yet used rib resection in order to compress the lesions.

Food was part of the treatment; just the ordinary, fairly typical Czech fare, lots of dumplings and bread, a simple diet, hoping that people’s TB would settle.

In the early 1930s, in summer the ideal was the Swiss treatment, where people were exposed to fresh air, but if they had too much sunshine that was also felt to be bad for the TB. Winter starts there early, it’s quite severe, and minus twenty is fairly common.I used to go skating and skiing in minus twenty, but sleeping outside was impossible. Davos was the place to send rich people to, where they had a combination of good food, injections, and the forlorn hope that nature would take over, and cure.

We were really unpaid doctors working there.It was quite hard work because there was the exacting assistant physician, who was really doing all the work, and he was a hard-working person who was of peasant origin, a rather interesting man called Horák.I remember so well when he talked to the patients; emotion had not much place.There was a peasant woman, in traditional dress,and he said, ‘Well mother, you have got cancer of the stomach,’ and she didn’t bat an eyelid, and that was that, and then we went on, and saw the next patient.So there was not much emotion, or support, or counselling of any description, and people were rather unemotional. In those days life and death were facts of every day occurrence. Acts of God!

Many died from conditions such as tonsillitis, scarlatina, diphtheria, typhoid,septic wounds, pneumonia. And of course there were many, many deaths from TB.

Well, we had a very impressive professor of paediatrics, and I believe Bristol only acquired that chair many, many years later.Anyway, Professor Teyschl had written a very good book, which I even remember mentioned BircherBenner, of muesli fame, and it was wide-ranging, it included diets, balanced diets, with quite a bit of foresight.I found children congenial, I like children, so that was an enjoyable part of my career then.

There were children’s wards, in the same building as the adults, but quite separate.

From ’36 to roughly ’38 I worked in this same department of internal medicine, general medicine, and we had good liaison with other departments. Post mortems were discussed, and of course it was quite a matter of pride to have made the correct clinical diagnosis.And the professor of pathology then came and sometimes conferred with our deputy head physician, called Horak, and discussed the cases.

There was an interesting radiologist who came quite often and discussed X-rays with our head physician - he, by the way, came from the country, he was called Munk .He, unfortunately was Jewish and afterwards was sent to Terezine, Teresenstadt.As a final act of vengeance at the very end of the war, the Nazis killed him, because I think he would have been a fount of knowledge, as a witness of the terrible things which the Nazis perpetrated.

In the early 1930s life was comparatively peaceful still.There had been the terrible financial crash in ’28 which then percolated especially to the more industrialised parts of the Czech Republic,the Sudetenland. There was unemployment and politics were very important.

I believe, unlike British students(at least based on what I hear from my wife who was at a British university) Czech students became at a very early time politicised, and divided, and there was a sharp division between right and left, quite apart from the nationalities.The students could be divided - on the left there were social democrats and communists, or people who were interested in the left, quite often intellectuals, and of necessity quite often they were Jewish.The right was rather militant and nationalistic, and tried to base itself on the Fascist movement in Italy. Later, under the Nazi occupation, there was some Czech collaborators. Col. Moravec, and the Vlajka movement. After the war I even saw some Czech POWs in Nazi uniform.

As a rule the majority of the professors and, I think, the teaching staff, were liberal democratic, progressive, in the good sense of the word.There was of course a lot of propaganda, there were demonstrations, there were strikes, elections, so all that impinged quite a lot on the students, who were as I say much more politicised than I believe they were in Britain.

In early 1938 I went to Paris for six months and did post-graduate work, which was very interesting indeed.I followed the example of a colleague, who had been there.I was accepted at the Cité Universitaire, which was a very large complex in Paris, where there were students from all over the world.

I remember I was very pleasantly received there by the head of the Institut Agronomique who was a Breton. I had a special affinity with the Bretons having walked through France to Brittany.When we were students, every summer for about one to three months, my brother and I and one or two friends walked through various European countries. We slept in the open, on occasion in Youth Hostels, or we slept in the open, in ditches, we had no tents, we had just rucksacks, and it was a lovely holiday which we planned ahead every year.

I got to know and like the French people very much, and of course got a good insight into the economic and political situation.It sounds highfalutin, but we were staying with, for instance, the peasants and fishermen, we met the local people on our walking and backpacking holidays.

Now Paris - there were post-graduate courses and French medicine I thought was very good indeed.It was very much lebon sens médical, good medical common sense.I remember very well one Professor Sergent, who was an expert on chest diseases, and his clinical acumen and experience were such that he would examine a patient and then sketch a picture, show it to us, and say, ‘This is the X-ray picture you are going to see.’And lo and behold, the X-ray showed there were cavities, all the signs of TB.Very impressive.And I’ll never forget those little asides - he was asking a local man, in French of course, and he said, ‘Mon ami,’ he said, ‘Have you had venereal disease?’ ‘Mon Dieu! My God! Certainly not, mon professeur.’And the professor said, ‘Mais, c’est un accident, c’est pas un péché - this is an accident, it’s not a sin.’

I remember in the medical sphere there was a very good doctor, Dr. Gutmann, who was a very nice person, and an excellent clinician, a gastroenterologist. In those days the X-ray diagnosis was so important. He was the first one to promote co-operation between medical and surgical specialists, and he got a surgeon to do a combined round, which has always impressed me. Gutmann called it "Reunion of the Divorcés"

In many respects very impressive, and French medicine at its best, and we went to various hospitals, e.g. Saint Louis, and the Salpetrière. Everybody was very nice and very friendly, but politics were very, very pervasive in France.It was the summer of 1938, just before September, the Munich Agreement.I knew France, I spoke very good French, almost like a Frenchman, and I had very good French friends.

With my one-track mind I arrived in Paris, at the Cité Universitaire, and I said, ‘Are there any Youth Hostels here?’And of course it was politicised again - France had the official, or perhaps almost official, Association of French Youth Hostels, which was right-wing and Catholic, and the left-wing one called Centre Laïc - that means non-clerical - Centre Laïc des Auberges de la Jeunesse - of Youth Hostels.There was a big one at the Cité Universitaire where I stayed.

I made friends for life there; every weekend we went into the country.They were students - not all were students, some were gardeners from the suburbs of Paris - a very nice mixture and we became very good friends.We spent a whole Saturday and Sunday in tents - whoever had food brought it, if we had no food we shared everything, and it was extremely nice and friendly.I suppose people would be surprised, but absolutely no eroticism of any description, nothing of the frivolous French attitude at all, which was non-existent then and there.

I can’t quite compare with the French students, except I know what French public opinion, what the newspapers said, that was a different story.I was rather appalled, because Le Matin, which was just the newspaper for the middle classes, and I thought the majority of the other French newspapers like Le Matin, had all been bought, literally bought, by the Italian and German governments. They were voicing in a subtle and a not-so-subtle way the official propaganda of Germany and Italy.That was "on va pas se battre" - we’re not going to fight for -Danzig, that was one thing, and two, very much in the forefront, was the Czech Republic.

I’ll never forget Le Matin publishing a map of the Czech Republic.There was Bohemia and Moravia where the Czech-speaking population, had some very slight regional differences.They were called Horák, and Hanák, and Valach, and so on - the same differences as perhaps between Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen.ButLe Matin showed a picture of Moravia, for instance - and Bohemia -with eight of those areas, and each had a little inscription andthe tribal name which was absolutely irrelevant in every respect, and said "this is a conglomeration of so many different nationalities".

It gave absolutely the wrong picture, so that the average French - and of course France had such terrible losses in the First World War - recoiled and was subtly and not-so-subtly indoctrinated with the Italian and Nazi idea of laissez-faire, let it go.And there was a very strong anti-Jewish bias on the political right: there was Maurass, and Daudé and Les Camelots de Roi, there were factions called La Francisque, and Croix du Feu.Any ill was put down to the Jews.So Vichy, Pétain, and the collaboration with the Nazis was no surprise to me.

.My friends in the Youth Hostels were left-wing or very left-wing, and they were multi-national, there were some very nice Danes, I remember, and they were all amongst the best memories I have of that time in France.

Well, one weekend all the people on our post-graduate course were invited to Vichy. There was the most marvellous French meal - I’m not normally very keen, or very expert, or very knowledgeable about food - but it was really marvellous. And then there were speeches.

I remember I spoke about Czechoslovakia, and there was a rather deathly silence, because people felt that things were obviously hotting up and I made it plain what I thought. In those days the Czech Republic was very well known, Beneš had been very vocal, and very much appreciated in the League of Nations, when he was the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister.He was a disciple of Masaryk.Masaryk had died by then, and Beneš became President.

I could see, I thought, that France was at best indifferent, far from being the big ally on which the Czech Republic, and Yugoslavia, and Romania, the little ententes, as they were called, relied.

France, where public opinion was indoctrinated now by those newspapers, which had been bought by Goebbels, and Mussolini, France was, I thought, not going to do anything.I was writing home, I received a letter from my father saying, ‘Dear child, you must not be nervous, England and France would never allow anything to happen.’I knew better.

The next thing was, I returned to Czechoslovakia when everybody else, if he had any foresight, and the possibility, was fleeing. But my brother was in the Czech army, my parents were there – my place was there in Brno.Then Munich intervened. That really was the end of Czechoslovakia, because the whole surrounding area was taken over by the Nazis.People fled from there to the centre of the country, which remained as a rump, called the Protectorate - Bohemia, Moravia - and was really not viable.So that was in September 1938. Munich happened in October 1938 and in March 1939 the Nazis marched in.

I lost my job in the hospital, unpaid as it was anyway.I came to this country, to England, again because of my Youth Hostel connection.I had also been to Youth Hostels in Belgium and Holland in 1935 and got to know there a Scottish medical student, Louis Finlay, who arrived with his friend called Jack Watson, who was an Australian of Scottish descent, and Jack Watson wore the kilt.We were all in the Youth Hostel and we got to know him very well, became very friendly.I then kept in touch with Louis Finlay - that must have been ’35, ’36 - and I came to visit him in London, with my brother, in 1936.

He was by then a doctor and he was especially interested in diabetic children.He had a special centre for diabetic children, I think near Woking.He had been to the States, and being a Scot, and having a very lovely nature, he could get on well with Americans, and with anybody from a dustman to an admiral.We kept in touch, and he wrote to me from America. He loved Arizona. And when Munich came he wrote to me and said, ‘If there’s anything I can do, I will.’ His father was Professor of Theology, in Aberdeen.Professor Adam Fife-Finlay.He was one of the Wee Frees.Louis Finlay, or his father, actually, had to guarantee the sum of one thousand pounds, which must be at least forty thousand pounds, I believe, nowadays, to guarantee a transit visa for me.

And then he got a friend who had never even heard of us, another professor at Aberdeen - in those days universities were able to nominate an MP in the House of Commons - his colleague and friend called Cruickshank, had to do the same for my brother, whom he had never even heard of.

My brother and I had by then put our name down to emigrate to the States, which was quite difficult because there was a quota for different countries. There was a law in the United States, which must have been passed in 1906 or thereabouts, which favoured immigrants from Northern European countries, Scandinavian countries, Great Britain, Germany, and was not in favour, repeat not in favour, of immigrants from Russia, Central Europe, Italy, Greece.

Therefore the Czech Republic, part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, was the least favoured, and therefore there was a very long waiting list.In order to be able to be admitted into the States, you had to get an affidavit, that means somebody in the States was going to guarantee that you were not going to become a burden to the United States.And I wrote to anyone who had the same surname as myself.There were quite a few who I had found out in the New York telephone book, in the main post office, and I wrote to all those people and said, ‘I am perhaps related, can you possibly give an affidavit?’And then finally we found a cousin of my mother’s.

My late grandfather who came from Slovakia - in those days that was part of Hungary - now his many, many brothers had all gone to Budapest because that was the centre of the country. One of them had gone to the southern part of the United States, and he very kindly sent an affidavit for my brother and me.He had never seen us, but that enabled us to put our name on a list.I had to go to Prague for my visa. There was a very nice lady at the US Embassy who said, your brother is lower down on the list, I’ll put him next to you, and that will help you. A very nice lady.

Then of course we had to go through a tremendous amount of applying to the Nazi authorities to allow us to emigrate.They had to come and look at our books, looking for any subversive literature.We had to pay for every handkerchief we took out of the country, or were hoping to take out; my parents had to pay Reichsfluchtsteuer. Reich is self-evident. Flucht is flight, and teuer is a tax.A tax for fleeing the Reich!So we had to pay for that.

And then I had to get a permit to leave. Perhaps quite madly I went to the local Gestapo - I was quite mad - it was a nice hot summer, I had shorts, and I was sunburned, and had blond hair and blue eyes, and I said, ‘I’m Jewish and I have the chance to emigrate, what is your advice?’

He said - he was quite a nice chap from the Gestapo, in riding boots as they always had - he said, ‘Well, if I can advise you, go as soon as possible.’So I had to queue every morning at about four o’clock in the morning at an office - fortunately it was summer - to get a signed permit, to emigrate.I’m sure the person who was dealing with this, who had been a caretaker in the local girls’ school, who was probably part-Czech anyway, I think he rather enjoyed it, saying, ‘Oh, nothing here. Next.’

So, every morning I had to queue up there.And then I arrived one Saturday morning, and there was a Reichs German there, who I think just for show, because he was probably a fairly decent chap, shouted, ‘You come and trouble me here on Saturday! Here it is.’And there was the permit.I believe it had been there all the time.And I think the shouting was just to mask that he did something moderately kindly.Well we left Brno in August 1939.War broke out in September.In mid-August; we had shorts, and a rucksack, and ten marks in the pocket...

That’s right.My brother.And my parents had to buy a ticket on the Hamburg-America HAPAC Line, to go on a German ship to the States, to support the German economy.So we left in mid-August, went first of all to Holland.There was an incident at the station.I suppose I just took it in my stride.My brother, who had more foresight and more feeling, he was also a doctor - started to cry and said, ‘We are never, never going to see our parents again.’ We never did see them again.

We travelled by train from Brno, through Bohemia, came to the German frontier of the Protectorate where they had some sort of customs officers there, in a uniform.He looked at my passport, which had a big J for Jude - Jew - and he looked at me and she said, ‘Nicht ein Jude - you are not Jewish.’And I said, ‘Yes I am.’But he just shrugged his shoulders and let us go on.There was a little child there, and I remember we had some grapes, and my brother gave the child some, and he said, ‘Well, they are probably saying, the Jewish person is poisoning a gentile child.’Anyway, we arrived in Holland, stayed with a friend Maria Rijsterrborgh again from the Youth Hostels, for a week.Then we went from Hook van Holland by ship, on a lovely, very calm day across the Channel.We came to Harwich, and I remember the customs officers were very nice and very friendly.

Then we stayed with a friend of Louis Finlay’s, who was the chief dietician at the Hammersmith Hospital. By then the war clouds were gathering and the arrangement in Britain was, there were EMS -Emergency Medical Service - sectors, and Louis Finlay, by mistake, had been appointed in charge of a big sector.He was a comparatively junior doctor, but he was called L. Finlay, and they mixed him up with a very well-known consultant, who was apparently in Malaysia, on the high seas somewhere.But he did so well that they then confirmed his originally erroneous appointment.Then I remember so well, Mr Chamberlain speaking, and war broke out, and we were in London, which was depressing, at best.

Oh, we were quite certain what was coming. All along when I was in France I knew that war was coming.This was based not only on what I had seen in France but what I had seen in the Nazi Youth Hostels, because - madness rampant - I had been staying in Nazi Youth Hostels repeatedly during the pre-war years.And on one occasion, I’ll not forget, I stayed in Berlin in the main Youth Hostel in Wedding, and as it happened, just fortuitously, it coincided with the Welt Treffen Der Hitler Jugend, World Meet of the Hitler Youth.

We were staying there and there was a curious incident.Now the drill in the Youth Hostels was, you were called for breakfast in groups, and you just collected it on a tray. The call came for "Kaffee Palestina", and I thought that’s a Nazi joke, but no it wasn’t, because there were hundreds of young boys and girls- and they all had the Hai Jot, or Hitler Jugen, triangle on their arms,for countries such as Chile, Finland etc.And some said Palestina.I knew vaguely there had been German settlers there, who had gone there in the early 1800s, 1830, 1840, to settle in the land of the Saviour, and they were known as Gut Templars.They came I think from Wűrttemberg, Baden, from southern Germany.

They were Protestants, very sort of low church Protestants, and had established agricultural colonies.And I spoke to one of the boys, and I said in German, ‘Wie heist du - what’s your name?’ and he said, ‘Franz Wagner,’ with a sort of southern German accent, which was very much like my accent in German.I said, ‘What do your parents do?’ and he said, ‘They’re peasants, or farmers.’And I said, ‘Well, who buys your milk and butter?’He said, ‘Jude - the Jews.Do you know, a man comes there with a beard, he’s called a rabbi, do you know what that is?’ So I said yes.He said, ‘Well, he looks at it and he makes it kosher, then it’s correct.’I said yes.Then I said, ‘And tell me, how did you get here?’He said, ‘By ship.’ ‘And from where?’He said, ‘From Haifa, to Genoa, then over the Alps, and here we are.’I said, ‘Who paid for it?’He said, ‘Oh, the German government.’

So one could see how well organised the Nazi movement overseas was. We saw all the books and the newspapers in the bookshops, and we saw the Hitler Youth, so we knew that obviously they were gearing up for expansion, for war, for conquest.It was so obvious.Now, my brother and I had much more knowledge of the political situation than some of the high-ups in this country and in Czechoslovakia, some of whom didn’t want to see, and some who were just ignorant.Lord Runciman, I remember, came to the Czech Republic and he was greeted tremendously by the Sudeten German folk, by the Nazis.And he went shooting with Goering and with Prince Hohenlohe, and separately with the Czech Minister of Agriculture.I’m sure class came into it tremendously, and I’m sure Lord Runciman was very much impressed by his aristocratic host.

I actually read Mein Kampf, and I read a lot of the Nazi literature, and of course there were some Sudeten German students from my grammar school. I remember I went skating - the Nazis were already in Brno - with one of them and he said, ‘If I were you I would go as soon as you can.’ Now, this was easier said than done. Of course nobody wanted to accept beggars because one was not allowed to take anything out of the country, and of course there were various other fears, and prejudices no doubt, so it was all very difficult.I was absolutely certain of that, although I personally had never suffered from any marked anti-Jewish feeling at all, unlike some of my friends, who I suppose had been scarred by early experiences: scars which I fortunately entirely lacked.

I had one experience as a child, which was very funny really.I came back to my mother - I was a child in Cracow - and I said to my mother, ‘Mummy, what is a Catholic and a Jew?’ I suppose I must have been four, four years old.So mother said, ‘Why, my child?’ So I said, the child - I’d been playing with a little girl - showed me some pictures of saints.So I looked and they were nice pictures, and she said, ‘Are you a Jew or a Catholic?’And I said, ‘Mummy I didn’t know, so I said Catholic.’So that was the first experience I ever had and fortunately, later, I never had any similar experiences, because it was just fortunate I did not look Jewish.

That made all the difference, as some of my Jewish fellow students said to me, ‘How can you possibly be friendly with them, I’m sure they hate you.’So I said, ‘Why should they?’I always had non-Jewish friends, I belonged to non-Jewish sports clubs, I got on very well, but I suppose once bitten twice shy.It must be a very painful and horrid experience for a Jewish child, and that leaves a lasting scar and leads to all sorts of thwarted feelings and reactions.

Not on that scale, I don’t think anybody did.And I don’t think the Nazis were aware of this, although they always said, ‘Aus Rotten,’ etc. etc. and of course we listened to it throughout, the elections in Germany were of crucial importance.But the underlying sentiment was so strong in the Nazis, and of course I’d read lots of Nazi literature, so I was absolutely certain that war and persecution were to come.

I met lots and lots of young Nazis, in Germany, in the Youth Hostels, and then some who were anti-Nazi, in the Dutch and Flemish Youth Hostels. In Belgium, I remember being in a Flemish Youth Hostel and there was a group of German youngsters and they all had black shorts, which was the Catholic Youth uniform, and they were able to wear this in the Flemish Youth Hostels, but not in Germany because that was forbidden, of course.There they could only belong to the Hai Yot, the Hitler Jungend.

So they looked at my brother, and they and me said, ‘You are Nordische, Ostische Gemischt - you are Nordic Ostic.’So I looked at them, and they were all dark, had dark hair and dark eyes and I said, ‘I am Jewish.’It just showed that even the Catholic Youth, who admired Bishop von Galen, who had spoken against the Nazis, the use of racial theory had tremendously infected even them, even though they didn’t look at all Nordic and were Catholic.

We were very fortunate in a way.We were staying with a friend of Louis Finlay, a Miss Simmons, who was the head dietician - she had been treating the King for his duodenal ulcer, by the way - so she was quite a well-connected person, at Hammersmith Hospital. My brother and I went to various lectures at the post-graduate school at Hammersmith, which was excellent, of course, perhaps the very best medical school in Britain, and very pleasant, and people very friendly, and I suppose they felt sorry for us. There were people there who became quite famous afterwards.There was somebody called Bywaters, who became Professor Bywaters, Sharpy Shaeffer, Paul Woods the cardiologist, Braine, who was a dermatologist and I met Newman, who was the secretary, quite an important person there.

We didn’t quite realise that everybody else had to pay to attend there, but my brother and just went there.We had no money to pay, but they very kindly closed not one eye but both eyes and we could just go and meet the foremost people in those days.They were very good and indulgent and we were able to sit in and listen, and trying to learn about English medicine. It was very helpful to see British medicine at its best.

Otherwise it was real ly depressing because there was quite a severe winter. The weather in the Czech Republic was much colder, but a dry cold. London was cold and damp. I had never had chilblains before.But of course there were the first casualties. Miss Simmons’ brother was a captain in the Merchant Navy, and of course she dreaded ... she worried about him, and perhaps we had a bit of a reminder of what war was about.She was very kind, very nice, she was an amazing lady, and a great friend of Louis Finlay’s, whom we didn’t see of course because he was busy with his sector.

This was the "Phoney War" - nothing very much was happening, certainly not in Britain.But I was amazed at the British press - with the one single exception of the Manchester Guardian, as it was called then - the British press was unanimous in their opinion that the war would be over very quickly, one was going to bring Nazi Germany to its knees through blockades.And I thought, what folly, and they’re completely unaware.

It sounds very ... how shall I say ... presumptuous, but my brother and I knew only too well that Nazi Germany’s might was there.All the newspaper reports about dissension in Germany etc. etc. was just perhaps to boost morale, but quite mistakenly.We thought it was a terrible mistake to underestimate the Nazi Germany of those days.

The only way we could keep in touch with our parents was through having met a rather nice Swiss girl, who then went home to Switzerland.We used to write to her - she was called Leuzinger and lived in Horgen near Zurich - and she sent on letters to my parents and then we got letters back.

My mother in those days couldn’t say anything very much in her letters. I must perhaps explain that even before I left we had to surrender to the Nazis any watches, rings, jewels of any description, wireless sets.So I think that the Nazis got into their stride very quickly, having organised it in Germany a bit more slowly, in Austria quite a bit more quickly, and in Czechoslovakia very quickly.Afterwards - I’m not quite sure when - my parents were expelled from their home.Of course all the furniture, everything, everything was taken. Very often there were Gentile neighbours who were only too delighted to either take it or at ridiculously low prices buy it from the German authorities, who I believe themselves were of course stealing things, so it was a free-for-all.

There was a notorious story from my own town - there was a very good physician called Blum, who was an excellent diagnostician, I remember, who then survived the war in Glasgow and became a very excellent radio-diagnostician.Anyway, he had a very early ECG apparatus.One of his friends and colleagues and patients was a German physician with a very Czech name Wokurek, which means Cucumber. As soon as the Nazis marched in he rushed to the consulting rooms of Dr. Blum’s and took all the apparatus. That was rather typical of that person, and of the attitude of the vast majority of the Sudeten German population in Brno, with some honourable, tremendous exceptions, including Professor Josef Gajdeczka, a friend and a professor there.

It’s a Polish-Czech name, but he was of German stock, and he had been a professor of German at a German middle school, where they taught artisans, a technical college, and he was absolutely splendid, an Anti-Nazi.Anyway, as soon as the Nazis came in, they put him into prison straightaway and his former pupils all came and banged on the door and jeered at him and said, ‘Now you’ll see what’s going to happen to you.’He was gentile of course.Apparently he came to see my mother afterwards, and told her he had been interviewed by a Gestapo official who happened to be a poet from the Rhineland. You see, the perverted intelligentsia flocked in large numbers to the Nazis.

So he interviewed Professor Gajdeczka, and he said, ‘I know you are of Aryan descent,’ and Professor Gajdeczka said, ‘Yes, I believe in the Germany of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing,and so on.’ Then Professor Gajdeczka said, ‘I’ve known very many very nice Jews’.He was cut short by the so-called poet, who said, ‘Jew remains Jew.’But nothing happened to ProfessorGajdeczka because that poet said, ‘Well, let him go, he’s cracked.’So he survived the war, I believe.His son was a very strong anti-Nazi person.I had a gentile Sudeten German girl friend called Trude. She and her sister had to flee their Nazi SS brothers – both of them survived the war.

But these were the very few exceptions.The rest were Nazis.I saw boys and girls, young ones, teenagers, very young teenagers marching and singing in German, ‘Wenn Judenblut von Messer spritz - When Jewish blood drips from the knife.’Their parents were sheepishly, (that was my interpretation, perhaps not, perhaps triumphantly) walking behind that little group.So that just shows the attitude of the local population.They were trying to be super-Germans, very often they were of Czech descent, they had Czech names, they were first generation German, so to speak, because in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire to be German-speaking and German was at a premium if you wanted to get on.The same applied in Slovakia where you had to be Hungarian-speaking, and people just became assimilated to the ruling class. The so-called Auslanddeutsch (ethnic Germans) in the Czechoslovak lands, in Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania often became rabid supernazis.

I can only piece together what happened subsequently.Well, my mother was a tower of strength; she was quite a bit younger than my father, who was shattered by the whole thing. They were evicted from their home, everything was taken, they suffered the fate of everybody else there who was Jewish, they had to wear the yellow star, no doubt.They would not have been allowed to buy any vegetables or fruit, and they had to go shopping after four o’clock, when all the goods had been sold, they were not allowed to go into a park, or swimming pool, anything of that sort.And finally they were sent out to another suburb, in sub-standard accommodation, because of course any money they had was completely stopped and confiscated.

Then the fateful thing happened. First, the Nazis appointed a person from the Jewish community to be in charge of the consulting body (the Judenrat) - which meant they had to do exactly as the Nazis said.The Nazis said, right, we’re going to send everybody from Brno - having got everybody from the countryside into the Ghetto there- we’re going to send you to Teresenstadt, or Terezine, which was an old fortress north of Prague, which I’ve visited actually.

Now I think that was the last straw to my father, who was by then in his upper seventies, and he had a stroke, mercifully perhaps, a fatal stroke.It was just the night before they were going to be deported.So I think he was just buried, and my mother, a widow overnight, was deported to Terezine, in northern Bohemia, with hundreds of other people, and they arrived in Terezine where she stayed about a fortnight, I believe.

And I have now been able to ascertain, having been there, what happened. She was just over fifty and a widow that meant deportation to the east.Now my mother could speak Polish - and she thought that her mother and aunt were possibly alive in the east somewhere, and so she volunteered to work there.But I believe she was instead deported with a transport, as they were called, to an extermination camp. I believe not a single person survived that transport.It went either to Sobibor or Treblinka-ghastly places where volunteer Ukrainian, or Latvian, or Estonian guards just killed people systematically under SS command.(Vernichtungs Lagerextermination)

And of course to be deported under terrible conditions, in cattle-wagons for days, without any protection, any preparation, any food, any water, any toilet facilities, is still a terribly traumatic idea to imagine.I’ve got books here which show sixty-eight thousand names of the Czech people deported, who all went via Theresine to be killed. The Nazis had priorities, and those useless to them - to the Nazi point of view – were the children, the old, and the widows. Slovakia suffered an identical fate with the co-operation of father ISO, Slovak President and wartime ally of the Nazis.

How could the nation of, as you put it, the Enlightenment, come to produce such horrors?How could the "Volk der Dichter und Denker" of poets and thinkers,of Goethe and Schiller, ofHeideggerand Hegel, become the "Volk der Verbrecher und Henker" (criminals and hangmen)?

Firstly, I’ll refer to Hitler and politics. The recently deceased Maria Jose, former Queen of Italy, born of the Coburg – Gotha family referred to Hitler as a cretin and a madman – no doubt echoed by millions of people who had suffered so terribly. She said this when Hitler and his NSDAP and victorious Nazi Germany were at the height of power, apparently invincible, pitiless rulers of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Volga – glorified, even deified across geographic, ethnic and religious divides. He had promised the "Dritte-Tausend Jaehrige Reich". It almost came to pass but for the British Empire rallying around the mother country standing alone in 1940.

General Weygand, the Senior French General had said "Angleterre – they will have their neck wrung like a chicken."He had prestige – he had helped organise the Polish victory against the Red Army on the Vistula in 1921, defeating the Bolshevik Army of Trotsky and Buddenny. And Senator Joseph Kennedy, US Ambassador in London thought the same. Well, as we know they were proved wrong.

If I can be Devil’s Advocate- well, I do think he was a devil.He had incredible charisma, influencing, converting, nay mesmerising millions of Germans, Ausland Deutsch (ethnic Germans), Volks Deutsch, extreme Nationalists, Racists, narrow bigots, failures, desperadoes of all nationalities, and originally I dare say idealistic, simple people. But, also highly intelligent technocrats, captains of industry – first of all in Germany.There was another Germany, and he never had a majority on the Reichstag (before the powerful Communist Party was outlawed).

He was helped by default at the party political level. The Communists were ordered by Moscow to fight against the German Social Democrats, to target the socialists as Sozial Faschisten.The Stalinist line was that the Nazis would collapse due to their internal inherent contradictions. The big Catholic party – the Centrum – was ordered by Rome to dissolve and stop any political activity. The Pope had been in Germany in WW1, was pro-German, and he and his advisers thought the violently anti-Communist Nazis would be useful Allies. This was despite the violence against some Catholic institutions, and persecution of some Catholic clergy. The father of a friend of mine was a gentile Catholic politician in Innsbruck. He was sent to Dachau KL while Cardinal Innitzer greeted the Fuhrer with a Hitler salute. Talk about supping with the Devil, or riding a tiger!During WW2 the Pope never supported suffering Catholic Poland.

So there was in Germany no organised resistance. The first victims of the Nazis were German Socialists, Communists, Jews, and Pacifists in that order. I had met anti-Nazi young Germans in Youth Hostels in Flanders, Holland, Switzerland. There was an educated, liberal democratic middle class- they also suffered.

What persuaded many – in spite of misgivings- was the undoubted success of getting the unemployed back to work (re-arming, building strategic motorways), and the stopping of street battles between Nazis and Communists- by jailing Communists and other resisters in pitiless, inhuman, utterly degrading Concentration camps.

The Reich grew in prestige. Foreign governments, whether democratic or authoritarian, were impressed by Hitler’s successive victories; Saarland, the occupation of the Rhineland, (the West’s most fateful caving-in),the Austrian Anschluss in that order, culminating in the Munich accord, sealing the fate of the Democratic Czech Republic. Western democracies hesitated, and suffered disunity and divisive attitudes. Some hoped the Nazis and Communists would just fight each other.

Hitler’s mythical intuition, lightning decisions, and faits accompli always took place at weekends. British statesmen were off duty, playing golf, hunting, shooting and fishing. The French: on fait l’amour.

In Russia, Molotov replaced the (Jewish) Foreign minister Litvinov. Then came the bombshell of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact. The Fuhrer had again outwitted the world. His undoubted international successes were based on his contempt for the effete, spineless west, riven by rivalries. Success breeds success, and to the jubilant Nazis he appeared to have divine powers. He always rhetorically appealed to der Allmaefgtige (the Almighty).

Nazi Germany was admired and feared. At no cost to Germany the Saar, Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia were absorbed. He almost got away with Poland; France hesitated to stand by its ally, but Britain insisted and war was declared.

Secondly, the German population. This was recovering psychologically and materially from the defeat in WW1 until 1928, when the stockmarket collapse in the USA ushered in widespread unemployment. This particularly affected the German population in the industrialised Sudeten.Austria suffered more from direct interference from Germany. But Germany was the "sick man of Europe" and suffered unemployment, strikes, and very intensive political strife. Scapegoats had to be found. The horrendous inflation and devaluation of the German currency affected everybody, but especially the middle classes, who were standard bearers of nationalistic, xenophobic anti-Semitism.

Other factors were hatred of France after Versailles, and the Danzig corridor cutting off East Prussia, and the loss of Upper Silesia; contempt for Slavs, especially Poles, (Polnische Wirtschaft, Polish mismanagement) and the feeling that Jewish competition in business and professional life was unfair. With eight million unemployed, this was an explosive mxture of real and imagined, inflated and exaggerated wrongs.

Thirdly, the theory and ideology of the NSDAP. Take the substratum of economic misery, hopelessness, and unemployment. Preach the gospel of racial superiority, exclusivity, and pride. How appealing to even the dullest member of the Volk.

The theory had very old roots, in medieval Christian religion plus economic hardship, plus envy (the worst of human negative traits). All that was needed was a "scientific " theory appealing to the Germanic mind.

The underpinning and justification of the resulting horrific crimes was illustrated by the French Comte de Gobineau, postulating that the ruling classes were of superior Germanic descent throughout the Middle Ages. Another example was Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He was very pro-German and elaborated a comprehensive history asserting that all progress in human history had been entirely due to the Indogermanic race who were creative, innovative, brave and honest, all shining examples of positive virtues. All admirable heritage was due to the Indo-European descent of these societies. Art and administration were passed down to European culture via Greeks and Romans; the same applied to the Germanic ruling class in Early medieval France and Italy.

The complete antithesis of shining Siegfried with all these virtues was the abject, cringing and utterly criminal Jew. This simple recipe meant the lowest uneducated even deviant or criminal Aryan was remediable but non-Aryans were beyond the pale. In short, parasites, contemptible and dangerous, nay lethal to the heroic Aryan world and culture. Slavs were to be regarded as an inferior race and could be used as slaves, though their intelligentsia were to be exterminated. Jews and Gypsies were dangerous vermin with no redeeming features, and the Nazi world of the future had to protect itself against them as eternal enemies of mankind.

This was the all-pervasive official line, enforced and taught. Inhuman treatment was right for such inhumans. As Goebbels said, when told by some German "the Jew is also a human" he replied "the flea is also an animal".

I’ll now mention Hitler as a catalyst. Hitler played cunningly on the weaknesses of the early small band of Nazis, making himself leader of a small insignificant gang of ex-soldiers, inducing them to adopt Heil Hitler as the official greeting, calling it "Der Deutsche Gruss".He cleverly got Generals Ludendorff and von Hindenburg, heroes of WW1, to tolerate him and later to appoint him Reichschancellor. He played off the factions in his party and killed off his old comrade Roehm, head of the SA. Western diplomats were outwitted, and Stalin was fooled into sending oil to Nazi Germany, despite warnings of the impending onslaught. He overruled his senior advisers’ objections to what seemed to be suicidal attacks – which came off brilliantly.

Fortunately he failed to finish off the British army at Dunkirk, he did not invade Britain in June 1940, he made the mistake of attacking Russia, making war on two fronts – this almost came off but for General Winter. He underestimated the USA’s war effort. He (and his racist minions) failed to accept the Ukrainian and Belorussian peasants who welcomed the Nazi troops but antagonised them by atrocities into joining the Red partisans. He did not develop the Nuclear weapon (Nazi experts called this Jew physics – developed by Bohr, Meixner, Fermi, Teller etc).He sacrificed whole armies by insisting on "No retreat" at Stalingrad.

But I still marvel regretfully how he mesmerised a whole generation – not merely the bourgeois professors at Grammar Schools who so eloquently gloried in the rape and pillage, the horrors of the Goths, Vandals, Swabians, Langobards etc.

This, plus the virtues of zeal, application, perseverance, and the talents of a population reared on obedience and conformity laid the basis for what followed. This generation was seducedand misled by Adolf Hitler, and was responsible for the horrible death of millions of innocent people from all nations – and of almost all my own family.

When did you join the Pioneer Corps?

I joined from London in May 1940.I was told we were going to a place which I pronounced Bide-a-ford, which was Bideford in North Devon. I remember going there by train, and I must say I enjoyed it very much. I was a private in the army.We slept on the floor in the New Ring of Bells in Bideford, and, again on the floor, in holiday camps at Westward Ho! and Northam, and we marched, but mainly - it was an emergency measure - we were digging up golf courses in North Devon against troop landing aircraft, gliders, etc! The Nazis had been so successful with these in Belgium, Holland, France.

We joined up as privates because our degrees were not recognised.In those days the BMA was very strict and would not allow any foreign degrees.There was a very small number of German - and highly qualified - and Austrian physicians who were allowed to take exams and then to practise, but a minimum, I suppose the numbers were forty or fifty and certainly that did not apply to my brother and me.But we were delighted to be in Bideford, first of all, and then Westward Ho!and then Northam, all in north Devon, then Ilfracombe, and to do marching, and rifle drill, and guard duties.It was a gorgeous summer.I volunteered for guard duties, and then in the daytime I could go and swim in the very lovely sea at Westward Ho!

There was a cross-section. The Pioneer Corps (the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps) was a conglomeration, it was a most exhilarating, interesting group of people. Highly educated some, others from the poor parts of Berlin and Vienna, it was an interesting mixture.Of course we had fellow soldiers from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra – all privates, marching, digging, drilling.

I suppose a good sixty, seventy percent were Jewish, from Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic.Quite a proportion were non-Jewish, anti-Nazi, either German, or Austrian, or Czech, there were republican Spaniards, there was the French Foreign Legion.Lecturers in Hamburg etc. and some anti-Nazi, nationalist Germans who just fell foul of the Nazis because they wouldn’t conform, and were sent to Dachau, to Buchenwald concentration camp for example for just reviving the Boy Scouts.

One of my friends in the Pioneer Corps was called Paulchen (Little Paul) although he was a big fellow.He had been sent to Buchenwald concentration camp for starting a Boy Scout movement in Germany, called the Pathfinders, which was proscribed because only the Hitler Youth, the Hai Jot (HJ - Hitler Jugend), were officially permitted, and fostered.

He came home after Buchenwald to his German national; gentile parents and told them about Buchenwald. They said, ‘Oh surely this can’t be true, such things couldn’t happen.’And he thought, if his parents don’t believe him, who will.So he emigrated to Hungary, of all places, and started chicken farming in Budapest.But far from keeping his mouth shut he was talking, and apparently the German Embassy sent him an "invitation" to return to Germany, which he "declined", and felt this is getting dangerous.So he came to England, where he continued chicken farming, and then volunteered for the British Army, and like all other foreigners who volunteered he was sent to the Pioneer Corps in north Devon where my brother and I met him.

There was the Westward Ho! lovely golf course. We were digging it up to prevent troop-landing aircraftlanding or dropping paratroops on golf courses, or beaches. It was a glorious summer, called the Hitlerwetter, perfect weather for Hitler’s tanks to roll across France. We were also route marching, rifle drilling, hedging and ditching, and digging; at least – at last – we were doing something positive far from depressing London.

Of course we got the news from France, which was disastrous, and it rather confirmed what I felt about France, that apart from perhaps the leadership the morale of the people was such that they felt, why should we?And of course, that kind of decision one can always justify, no doubt, and give it some sort of moral standing.

I remember one incident.I was sitting in the NAAFI canteen, having a cup of tea, and the manager came and sat down next to me. He knew I was A.M.P.C (Pioneer Corps) .so he said, ‘What do you think is going to happen next?’And that was just about when the Nazis had just broken through to Abbeville on the Channel coast, and encircled the British army.And I said, ‘Well, it’s very serious.’‘Ah,’ he said.And it stuck in my memory, I can see him now. He said, ‘You know what we are going to do?’That was in May/June 1940 when the British army, defeated, without weapons, were streaming back, by the grace of God, from Dunkirk.

He said, ‘Now you know what we are going to do?’And I said, ‘What? Tell me.’He said, ‘Now, we are going to invade the Continent.’

And I was delighted to hear it, because I felt that the ignorance of the British public, bless it, complete ignorance and lack of education, was marvellous to behold.The fortitude and knowledge and courage of Churchill combined with the ignorance of the general population and their stalwart determination - ‘We are British, they can’t do anything to us’ - that combination was invincible.They had only a shred of the education of the German working class, and of the whole European community, which was so certain that Hitler was going to win, and of course to any sane person on the Continent it seemed to be absolutely inexorable.Well, Britain would have been done for, but for the fortitude of the British population, based to some degree on ignorance, and Churchill.

I with my extrovert nature enjoyed the Pioneer Corps very much, because I could do something, even the digging of anti-tank ditches was something.I had some rather nice comrades there, including a young German who was an anti-Nazi.So the next thing was, I think they wanted some medical orderlies in Ilfracombe because the Pioneer Corps moved to Ilfracombe.

It was a mixture of duties, really what a nursing orderly would do. Lieutenant Colonel Coles who was commanding us had a duodenal ulcer and he was bleeding, so we had to watch over him at night, but mostly it was dressings. We had very interesting people to deal with, and I can speak various languages, so when they had to go before the commanding officer, who was Lord Reading, for some offences, I had to translate from French or Italian or Spanish or whatever, into English. And once- madly – I swam and nearly drowned in the raging sea at Watermouth Beach, Ilfracombe in midwinter. I rejoiced all day afterwards at just being alive.

Well, when Britain saw the imminent danger, in 1941 my qualification was suddenly recognised and I would have been able to join straightaway as an officer in, I suppose, any of the services.But I felt I ought to try and refresh my medical knowledge a little. There was a chance I could go into something called the Medical Reserve (Wartime).I worked at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, and afterwards at the EMS Hospital in Exminster, near Exeter, which was a very big mental hospital, where half the mental patients had been pushed to one side, and we were dealing with air-raid casualties and patients from the services.

There was general medicine, dermatology, and a great deal of orthopaedic surgery because there was a very good orthopaedic centre in Exeter at Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital - PEOH - with a Mr Capener who was an outstanding operating orthopaedic surgeon.Norman Capener.

In those days, TB was rife.TB of bone and spine was quite a common condition, and I remember sweating blood, giving an anaesthetic to a patient. The operation lasted for almost three hours, and entailed the bone-grafting of a tubercular spine when a piece of bone from the iliac crest was hammered into the spine. I had to keep the patient sufficiently deep not to react to the hammering, and sufficiently light to survive. I had had no training – just a Boyle machine. It was possibly almost as traumatic to me as it was to the patient.

A lot of orthopaedic surgery, lots of fractures, tibia and fib, despatch riders, plaster work (POPs) based on Trueta’s experience in the Spanish Civil War.

There was one case, which still I feel is very tragic, and affects me still.The RAF attacked German battle cruisers called the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which made a daring dash through the Channel to escape the British Navy, from their base in northern France.Anyway, the RAF attacks were unfortunately unsuccessful in so far as the ships got away, and one of the RAF casualties was admitted to our hospital.

He had been severely injured. As a pre-operative measure I examined him and took his blood pressure, which seemed to be satisfactory.In those days there was no pre-operative resuscitation [what we now call the Golden Hour].Of course, one felt we had to operate very quickly.Mr Capener operated and I gave the anaesthetic.Unfortunately the patient died on the table.It was very tragic. I still feel guilty (although everybody else just accepted it)

I suppose, under the circumstances it was the accepted procedure - there was no resuscitation done by anybody really, in those days, it would only sink in later that during surgery on shocked patients the blood pressure sank, plummeted, whereas it had been satisfactory, pre-operatively.

I think the Americans had the same experience at Pearl Harbour, didn’t they, where they had a lot of wounded casualties, and they realised afterwards that they died of hypovolemic shock during surgery.

I believe so!

In those days I had a bicycle, which had cost eight shillings, I believe.My wife bought it for me - she was then my girlfriend.Anyway, I cycled down to Dawlish Warren, and swam in raging seas between tree trunks and iron stakes, which were all on the beach, to stop troop-landing aircraft.And that was, to my simple mind, exhilarating after working quite hard in the hospital.

Anyway, from ’41 I worked.It was mainly orthopaedic, general medicine, air-raid casualties, dermatology, a mixture. And we had a mixture from various nationalities too, including a Polish airman, called Morawski.We had an air-raid.I remember I was having a bath at the time, and the Nazis dropped a bomb, and actually some of our service patients were killed - I remember one called Yarrow, who was Jewish -I got out of the bath and went straight to the operating theatre. I had nothing on except my dressing gown. The nurses were highly amused, and made me a sort of loincloth, and we operated all night.There was a very nice New Zealand surgeon called Lilley.

Then, all next day, of course we worked, and after we had finished in theatre there was the debris, and under the debris was the Polish airman called Morawski.And somehow nobody thought of doing anything about it.So, not that I had any experience, but I said, ‘Would anybody like to help me?’And a rather thin, weedy individual called Cassidy, bless him, came and said, ‘Yes, I will.’He was one of the Army patients there.

So we dug under the debris, got out Morawski alive but deeply unconscious, and fortunately it did not collapse on us, and he survived. I’m sure he had Crushed Limb Syndrome, which of course was only then being recognised, about the tissue damage, and renal failure etc. but Morawski survived.

Then at night, again and again we could hear the bombers – the German engines were unsynchronised. I remember we had another Polish airman, who had a fractured thigh, injured when the Nazis bombed the airfield, and there he was with his fractured thigh in a Thomas splint, if you remember those.Of course he was rather terrified- having had that experience of being bombed once - he thought, well, this is the end, and he was very, very worried. Fortunately I could speak to him in Polish and say, we’d be all right (hopefully!). I remember walking up and down the ward – Nazi planes droning overhead – on the so-called "Baedecker" raids.

I became very restless there, because I felt I must do more than that.So I volunteered for the Navy, because I loved the sea, and the Navy said, well, no, you are not of British descent.Then I volunteered for the Airforce and they said no.Then I volunteered for the Army, and the Army said, where are you? Come, come.So they had me straightaway.I had a medical, by an Egyptian doctor at Mortonhampstead Army Hospital. He forgot to listen to my chest – not that it mattered -and I went and rejoined the Army in March 1943.

I had the initial training, which I enjoyed very much actually.There was a very nice Colonel Boyd, I remember, who remembered everybody’s name.At the time I thought ... Well, my name was going to be published in the Official Gazette.It’s an unusual name, a German name - Morgenbesser - so while I hoped my parents were still alive, I thought it might be safer for them if I changed it. It was shortened to Morgan, and stuck ever since.I might very easily go back to Morgenbesser.But that’s by the way.I did not know that my parents were by then dead.

So the Army was very good to me.I had tropical medicine training etc. etc., found it all very interesting, and they found very good people to teach us - then I was posted to an infantry battalion in Dorset, which I liked very much.They were the Second Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry - KSLI.

Very nice young officers and I became very acceptable, because my predecessor, apparently, had neglected his duties, I’m sorry to say - I didn’t know him at all, but that was the consensus of the opinion, the colonel’s especially.The Doctordidn’t teach any first aid, and he did not give any VD lectures, he did not inoculate, and I think he went whenever he could to the cinema in the nearest small town.Anyway, I did all the things I was required, and I was, with great enthusiasm, going on the route marches at night, and commando training. I got on very well and the colonel was very complimentary, and they were very sorry to see me go.Because I was posted again.

Flashback – to Exminster. I’d met, just a casual meeting, a medical brigadier who came to Exminster. I had been looking after some skin patients, and Brigadier McKenna - that was his name - noticed that my dermatological notes had been nicely typed.He spoke to me, and said, ‘I understand you want to go back into the Army.’I said, ‘Yes, I want to go back into the Army.’So he said, ‘Well, I’ll keep an eye on you.’Anyway he became very friendly, and very helpful in my later career because he somehow picked out my name.

And the next thing was, I was with the KSLI and very happy there; they were part of the Wessex Division, and Dorset was beautiful, lovely in spring, long barrows, and short barrows, and - I’m rather romantic - we had route marches at night and it was magic.

I was a lieutenant, and I must say my training in the Army was very thorough, and very good, and very enjoyable.I am perhaps different from other people, but I enjoyed it all.There was a very charming Colonel Boyd in the camp who knew everybody by name.We had training in Army Medicine, and then we were sent on a special course in tropical medicine. I had a friend, Bushell, ex St Mary’s, who was another officer.We used to go running through London every morning before the lectures, along the Thames from Millbank across the Bridge to Lambeth.

He was staying at Millbank - an ancient, hallowed building with huge books about the Indian Mutiny, and the brigadiers having breakfast with us in the morning.I rather enjoyed it.They were, I think, very good people who trained us for Army medicine.

And suddenly I was given embarkation leave, so I decided to marry and I had to get permission from the colonel.My wife was in the ATS, she was a FANY ATS, driving ambulances, and I’d met her previously in north Devon.Then the next thing was, I was sent abroad, via Leeds - there was a holding camp, Beckett’s Park - and I still don’t know whether we departed from Gurock or Greenock, because security was strict.

I ended up in Gibraltar.It was supposed to have been India - there was a big notice at the embarkation place there, saying, ‘Do not embarrass the officers here by asking where you are going.’We sailed in a ship called the Laetitia, and we had to sail far out into the Atlantic to evade U-boats - it was still touch and go, it became better later in the war.

On board the Laetitia there were mostly Army, and Wrens, which was the Women’s Royal Naval Service.I can’t remember any RAF.There were some Free French forces.

On one occasion the colonel in charge asked me to come round with him to inspect the whole ship, and I rather enjoyed it, except it became very rough and I apparently must have become rather green, and he said, ‘Well, I think that’s quite enough.’But anyway he wanted me to join him - but I didn’t in the end - to be a doctor on all those troop ships.

Of course there was the usual lifeboat drill and sunbathing.In those days the accepted wisdom was, expose yourself to the sun as much as possible so you are sun-tanned and you will not suffer from sunburn, which nowadays would be frowned upon, to put it mildly.

Then, one nice day there was activity, lots of activity, because we were being attacked by a U-boat.I later met the Naval officers who were responsible for attacking the U-boat and sinking it.That was a bit of excitement. The officer who had spotted the U-boat was on HMS Active (a destroyer).I met him later in Gib, and often sailed on anti U-boat sweeps. He – Jimmy Walker, RNR, was South African born and became my best friend. I was his best man after the War.

The previous troop-ship, or transport, had been sunk, including sixty Wrens who all perished.So although the tide was on the turn in Britain’s favour, it was still really touch and go, one had to go far out into the Atlantic to avoid the U- Boats.

Experiences in Gibraltar

Then the sealed orders were opened, and I got off at Gibraltar.And that started me in Gibraltar, where I couldn’t get away from, in spite of volunteering for all sorts of things.

I was their command dermatologist and venereologist.They were combined in those days.Skin diseases and VD were one.

I looked after patients from all Allied Nations, Army, Navy, Airforce, and there were Greek, Polish, French, American, all nationalities.And the reservoir of VD came from Spain, just across the border. In those days, personnel from the Gibraltar military base were allowed into Spain in mufti, which were lent to them, and there were, I believe - I’ve never had any knowledge of them directly, only what I was told - quite a few brothels in La Linea, with very attractive ladies.But of course quite a few were infected, so apart from GC there was a lot of syphilis. Prophylactic treatment, condoms, all were issued, Nevertheless! There were cases galore from all over the world.

How was syphilis treated?

Apart from some mercury, which was now becoming obsolete, we gave injections of salvarsan, which was arsenic. It had to be strictly intravenous and we didn’t have that many syringes - syringes were boiled but no doubt that led to quite an outbreak of jaundice. This was really viral hepatitis, but in those days we considered it was a reaction to arsenic. There was something else we did.The only antibiotic we had at the time was M&B 693, which was German-invented. I had to give all the injections, there were quite a few, and all the patients were inpatients during their treatment, which also included Bismuth IM. I only diagnosed syphilis after a thorough dark ground search.

The numbers of these patients were comparatively large, and I also had to examine all the people who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe via Spain, and came to Britain.It was rather tragic - people had absolutely no idea about VD. I had to carry out a thorough medical examination, and I found a primary chancre in a person who was completely unaware that he had got it.It was pathetic - he was a nice Polish person who said in Polish to me, ‘Doctor, she was a piano teacher.’Who obviously spread her favours poor dear.There were other cases with primaries of lip, thumb, and of course many, many of penis.

.There were some tragic events, because some people actually went off their heads, poor men, and threw themselves into the sea and perished.

The stigma, and also possibly a reaction to the injections which were not all that pleasant, although we tried our best.Salvarsan again had to be given strictly intravenously, which was not all that easy sometimes.But fortunately I suppose the results were quite good.

I had a close connection with the pathology department who carried out WRNS, which was the only test we had then.Certainly there was much clinical material, and I saw, I suppose, in one week, more cases of active syphilis than our colleagues in the Bristol VD departments see in a year nowadays ...though I understand there was a recent outbreak in Bristol.

In addition to dermatology and venereology, I volunteered, and I did my stint as Fortress Medical Officer.We were looking after a very large service population, because it was still touch and go, still a miracle that Franco did not give in, repeat did not give in to Hitler, and allow the Nazis to march in.It might have changed the whole progress of the war, because Hitler was very determined to occupy, or have a go at Gibraltar from the land side.Gibraltar would have been untenable.

Of course there were some service doctors who had established strong links in Spain - social, possibly emotional - and I remember there were one or two who were sent back to the UK for security reasons.The senior medical officer, Major Frank Bowtell who came from Bristol, had been an ex-member of Mosley’s party, the British Union of Fascists, which was rather strange. I suppose it was felt it was safer to appoint him to that position overseas - it was common knowledge.

Those were the days of GeneralMason Macfarlane, who was Governor, who had a distinguished service career.Spanish people were invited to the Rock, at a very high level. Some of the ladies had actually been on the Russian front, in the Spanish armed forces fighting against the Soviets.I think they were called Guardia Azul.I was first of all in the general hospital which was then run by Colonel Jackman, who was a Bristol surgeon from the Children’s Hospital, a very nice, jovial gentleman.

After some time they sent my patients and me to the Monkey’s Cave Hospital, a very new hospital established in the Rock itself on the Mediterranean side.It was a cave, and should have been safe from air attack.There was a beach, and I swam there. There was an officer’s beach, and another beach for the other ranks.

Anyway, on the officer’s beach there were the officers from all the services, ATS, Wrens, and WAAFs.I established this friendship with a Northern Irish officer, from the Royal Engineers, called Newman, who was a very great friend.He was six foot seven.We used to build boats, and launch them into very big waves.He was in charge of airfield maintenance.

On one occasion, an RAMC, a private called Neal, had tried to climb the Rock of Gibraltar from the Mediterranean side. It was very steep, a dangerous, loose rock, and his friend and companion decided halfway through to come back, it was too dangerous, and warned that his friend was up there on the mountain.

He had a fall, fell onto a ledge, and was marooned there for at least twenty-four hours.The whole Rock was very unsafe.The three services tried to rescue him, the PE instructors, company Sergeant Majors, an officer called Pennington - who had been an Olympic runner and was in charge there - they all tried to and had given up, it was too difficult.

The Royal Navy had sent Swordfish aircraft to try and drop ropes and they were unsuccessful.So after twenty-four hours there was a large crowd of people at the bottom of the Rock on the Mediterranean side, very near my Monkey’s Cave Hospital, and there was Brigadier Veal in charge of the rescue operations.I went up to him and said, ‘Sir, may I try and rescue Private Neal?’He said "Alright."And Colonel Moody, O.C. Medical Division, was rather doubtful, he felt it was a very dangerous expedition, and said, ‘Are you sure, Freddie?’He was very kind to me.And I said, ‘Well, I’ll try.’

I had done some previous climbing with the student section of KČST, the Czech tourist club in Brno, in my home town.So I and Newman and another two or three people climbed up. We had a rope, but the rope was not long enough, so I had to sit high up on a pinnacle for two hours, with the sun burning down - beautiful views - and waiting for more rope to come up.Finally they found the rope so I climbed up higher and found Neil sitting on the ledge, who put on his hat the correct way, stood up and saluted me and said, ‘Good morning, sir.’So we then secured him, and got him down.Coming down, one hand-hold broke and I fell about thirty feet, but I was on the rope, so apart from some nasty rope burns nothing happened to me.

When we arrived at the bottom, great rejoicing, because the Army had succeeded where all the other services had failed, including launching aircraft.A day later, Brigadier McKenna, who was in charge of all the dermatology in the British Army, arrived and was told that one of his officers, particularly, had been involved. He was delighted, and I was promoted within two days, and became a major.

I felt I ought to do more.I had language qualifications, and I was fit, and I wanted to join the Paratroops.

I made two, or even three, unsuccessful applications, turned down by the officer commanding the medical forces on the Rock, who was a full colonel, ADMS. I believe his rank depended on the number of officers under his command, which would have been depleted by my leaving, so he turned it down.Colonel Moody recommended me, reluctantly because he felt it was a dangerous thing. The old Army rule, I think it’s correct: if you do not volunteer you are sent, if you do volunteer you are not selected.

And my fitness. All of that would have been, I felt, the right thing.There was a British naval officer who had established a little private practice in Gibraltar amongst the civilian population, and he was sent to Yugoslavia.Of course he had no idea of Yugoslavia.I had been to Yugoslavia, I spoke Serbo-Croat.He, poor thing, an officer who just spoke English, was sent there, against his will, of course.

Well, I suppose I’m fluent in Czech, Polish, German, French, and I had fairly good knowledge of Serbo-Croat, and some Italian and a little Spanish.On one occasion I was selected to be the King’s Courier taking important documents to British consuls abroad, including Spain and Morocco, but then at the last minute it was countermanded because I was still not a British citizen.

I finally got away in ’46. I was fit in those days, very fit, if I say so myself, because I did all the commando training, so I thought Paratroops, Special Operations; with my languages I should be alright.

When I was in Gibraltar, it was just when General Sikorski, in charge of all Polish forces, was there. He took off in that ill-fated plane, and perished - everybody perished except the Czech pilot, whom I visited in hospital, a nice chap. He mentioned to me of course Sikorski, and he also mentioned one of his crew, Flight Sergeant Abrahams, who all perished except him.And of course there was that terrible story by Hochuth that Churchill engineered this accident, (Goebbels had started that rumour).

Afterwards, in the military hospital - by then I had become a dermatologist - I treated a naval officer - his name was Lt Cdr Merriman - and he very kindly said, ‘Freddie, would you like to come out in my destroyer?’So I said, ‘Oh yes.’

So I went to see Colonel Jackman, who was a Bristol paediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital, and he was the officer commanding the military hospital at Gibraltar, and I was a mere lieutenant.I stood to attention and I said, ‘Sir, may I possibly accept this invitation?I have been asked by a naval officer to go out in his destroyer.’He said, ‘Well, I don’t know why not.’

So I went on trips in the HMS Active.The commanding officer and the other officers were extremely friendly and some became life-long friends.My brother-officers at the Gibraltar Hospital were green with envy because they’d been on the Rock for ages and nobody had asked them, and I’d arrived and two months later I was asked to go out in a Destroyer. I went on various anti-submarine sweeps, as far as Nigeria, and finally on marvellous trips to the Azores, with the French battle cruiser Richelieu, screening her in our Destroyer, HMS Active.

I also went flying a lot.This was in Beaufighters and in bombers. They had Wellington bombers with searchlights for anti-submarine night-flights. I also went in a submarine, I was even allowed to steer her.

And one of my duties was, to examine anybody who escaped from the Continent to Gibraltar. They came over the Pyrenees, then via Miranda, the internment camp where Franco kept them.I had to examine the majority of these refugees, so I met people from Poland, from Belgium, from all sorts of countries.It was quite an experience.

Having worked my way up from being a lieutenant to a major in Gibraltar, I had treated people from all the different services, different nationalities, all the Allied nations. I came back to Britain in ’46 andworked at the military hospital at Chester. I became Command Dermatologist and Venereologist for the whole Western Command, which was the whole of Wales.Really from Tewkesbury to Hadrian’s Wall, I inspected all this area and had patients there galore, and I kept in touch with Brigadier McKenna - who wrote a textbook on dermatology, R. N. B. McKenna of Liverpool.I would have stayed in the Army because I had become a major, but if I had they would have sent me to West Africa.So I decided to leave the Army in ’47.

Wives were not then able to come to West Africa – and long separation is bad for married couples.

Apart from being in dermatology and venereology, I was also Fortress Medical Officer, dealing with any kind of casualty whether it was medical or surgical etc. including some Italian prisoners of war. So I was quite experienced.To practice in Britain, first of all some authorities suggested I ought to do all the exams, and then just some exams, and in the end no exams, so I’ve never done any.But I’ve kept up, I hope.When I was in the Pioneer Corps I was able to read the Journal, the British Medical Journal, and ever since I kept up as far as I could, with contemporary medical knowledge.

Because my wife’s home was in Exeter, I came to Bristol as the nearest place.And I became an ex-service registrar in General Medicine at Southmead Hospital, and lived in P Block, which has now been pulled down.I worked for somebody called Short, one of the Rendall-Short family.He became a consultant cardiologist in Aberdeen afterwards, and looked after the Royal Family.

The next thing was, I thought it would be interesting to go on with dermatology so I went to the hospital for skin diseases in Manchester, in Kay Street, (I believe it doesn’t exist any more,) where there were eminent people such as Mumford, Savatard, etc. and especially one person called Twiston Davies who became a very great friend.I’ve been very fortunate in meeting people, who have been terribly kind to me, because in the Army there was Colonel Moody was extremely kind to me, not to mention R. N. B. McKenna.

Next , I applied for various appointments and lo and behold I was actually selected, and went to Liverpool and I became, not a full consultant but Associate Specialist in venereology and dermatology at Liverpool.There was a delightful person called Ross, who again became like a father to me; a terribly kind person.But in those days, and still nowadays, I suppose, the diagnosis is really laboratory based, microscopic, so you get very little contact with people, and I missed that.Besides, it would have meant staying up north.My wife comes from up north but didn’t want to go back there, so I think that was really decisive.

Starting in Avonmouth

In Bristol I had met somebody called Medhurst, ex-Royal Navy, and I was invited to join him in his general practice in Avonmouth.There was a Dr. John Llewellin William Davies, and John Medhurst, and K. C. P. Smith.K. C. P. Smith wanted to give up, and took up psychiatry, and I joined that practice which was mainly shipping, industrial medicine, and that’s where I started, in ’49 - perhaps earlier - in Avonmouth.

It was very demanding because I worked literally day and night.I was called out at night to ships, and I went to the docks and jumped on board in the locks and might see fifteen Indian Lascars. I remember one who had a death wish, which I believe meant a very serious diagnosis, and perhaps a final one, because I was told, ‘Doctor, he’s going to die whatever we say because somebody’s cast a spell on him.’And I believe he did die, in Liverpool.

I applied to start a practice there, and through the good services of Professor Perry who was Medical Officer of Health for Bristol, and a commanding person and extremely kind to me, I got the job.This had a negative side because the Local Medical Committee, who had been very friendly to me, suddenly turned against me. I had no idea why, but it was because they felt I was Professor Perry’s protege.He recommended that I got a council house on the estate and I started general practice there to the chagrin of the LMC, which was livid.In the end, I later became LMC chairman.How things change.

I lived and worked amongst my patients in a very ramshackle bungalow with my wife and three small children.The children went to the local school and I had a lot in common with so many of the patients, because we’d been ex-service.

It was in Lower Knole Lane, very near the Old Crow roundabout, the Homestead, which I remember was beautiful farmland to start with and then overnight, almost, they started to build, or should I say throw together council houses. People moved in in their droves from the old established neighbourhoods of Bristol.They were all Bristolians, and torn away from their background, from their families, and of course lonely, and uncertain what to do, and they came with all their problems to my wife and myself, nobody else to turn to.

And there were no shops, no pharmacist, there was nothing here except, in winter, there was mud galore. It was a bit hard on them and I suppose hard on me because I was on call day and night for a whole year. I had about three thousand patients at one time.Later the list dropped to about eighteen hundred patients.

I never had a day off and the local doctors did not want to co-operate to have any sort of arrangement for overtime, or night-time, or weekends, let alone holidays

It was in late ’49, ’50, and the estate had just been built. We lived in a ramshackle bungalow, which was made of some sort of cardboard, I think, because my little son was able to shoot through it with a bow and arrow, - it was really incredible. In the Czech Republic the houses were very solidly built with cellars and lofts for insulation, and double windows,a sort of double glazing, so were more resistant to cold. Also the climate in Brno had been a dry cold, not as damp as over here. I was used to going skating and skiing every day; of course you couldn’t get that sort of exercise here.

Anyway, I started there, and of course it was very interesting because people were moving here in their droves, from the centre of Bristol which was being demolished.They were absolutely without any helper, adviser etc. and they turned to my wife and me. I was still working in Avonmouth, while I was starting in Brentry Henbury.Of course I had no financial resources, I had a wife and three children by then and so I worked.

Patients came from all parts of Bristol, from all the slum areas, from Barton Hill etc. Once I got fifty-six new patients in one day.If they had any worry they came to see us, there was nobody else to turn to, there were no shops, there was nothing, nothing.My wife lost pounds of weight, and she’s not medical, her brother’s a doctor, her sister-in-law’s a doctor, her nephew’s a doctor, but she’s not and she had to give answers and help to people who said, ‘Doctor, what am I to do?My daughter has run away to Old Market.’They were very, very full of homesickness, because they had come from those old established neighbourhoods where they had their relations, so I could quite understand.Anyway, many patients became really firm friends for life

Yes, single-handed.There was one year when I was on call every night, and every day, and every weekend, and I didn’t have a day off, and of course had to deal with everything.

I kept in touch having got to know medical people at Southmead Hospital. Many of the consultants were contemporaries of mine from the services, which was quite a strong bond. I knew Norman Brown, John Naish, John Mitchell, Marjorie Dunster Bennett, Gavin Jones, Francis Page, Gordon Mather. So I used to go and sit in and see patients with them, they were very helpful.But I was single-handed to start off with.

The local GPs were still scalp-hunting, nobody wanted to have any sharing, or weekend cover.I was fortunate because I found Dr. Colin Ross and Dr Tarleton in Lawrence Weston.They stood in for me and I think I got a weekend off, which was marvellous, and then we established a firm rota.

Then the patients became quite accustomed to the one thing which really saved my life, and that was to have three holidays a year.We had an arrangement that we had a salaried partner. This colleague had the same duties, the same privileges, and the same time off, and I said - because I had started to work a great deal in industry too - ‘We must have six weeks holiday.’

A travel bureau asked me to take parties for them, skiing, swimming, mountain walking, so at Christmas, and at Easter, and in summer I took parties - mostly young people, and quite often my family too- either skiing in winter or mountain walking etc. in summer. We went three times yearly for twenty years. I was the party leader or ski instructor. My patients still meet say, and me ‘Doctor, are you still skiing?When are you going skiing?’It was a nice change from general practice.

I used to go skiing at Christmas, and skiing at Easter, and then in summer mountain walking or swimming, sailing. My family quite often came with me, they also became party leaders, and of course I rather enjoyed meeting people from all walks of life in lovely surroundings, all over Europe.

I’ve been to Switzerland, to Zermatt, and I’ve been to Saas Fee, and to Villars, and to Verbier, and, in France to a place called Châtel, Méribel.In those days France was not all that popular.There were very many places in Austria, they were very popular, and I went to Alpbach, and Gerlos, and another place in the Ötztal again, Sölden, Hohe Sölden, and Obergurgl and most places there, Lech.

And in summer I went as far as Yugoslavia. That was very exciting because Dalmatia was very lovely, lovely folk songs. I had a very nice sort of affinity with the Slavonic element there. They heard me speak Serbo-Croat and they said, ‘Mr Czech, you are a Czech,’ they could hear by my accent, because I’d been taught Serbo-Croat in 1930, the very first time I went to Yugoslavia.I loved the Yugoslavs, especially the Serbs, and got on very well, had very nice friends.

We had au pairs from there that are still lifelong friends.I took an archaeological expedition to the south-west of France. I met people from all walks of life.Many of the young people who came skiing with me, came from places as far away as the Argentine, Peru, and Kenya, and they were British by descent, then sent to Britain, to London, to be educated, but their parents and their roots were in those countries.

And very nice young people, some really had worries well beyond their age, especially the ones from Kenya. As I say it was an antidote to general practice.

The Rota

I survived because of the very nice arrangement with my medical neighbours, Drs Tarleton, Page, Eastman.We never had a cross word, and the unorthodox arrangement of having a salaried colleague as partner, who was quite happy until he went from here into general practice, saved my life. That worked because I’m sure one could not survive the grinding work which I had to start with.

Colin Ross went off to Australia – so then there was Dr Tarleton, Dr Page, and Dr Eastman, who I all knew very well, friends; Dr Eastman had been my assistant for a bit.We had a rota system, once a week one of us was on duty at night, and the weekends we also shared, and holidays and sickness was all shared between us.

I always started early and I suppose I worked all day.In those days there was no appointment system.I did all my own bloods; I typed my own letters.Last thing at night I took the specimens to Southmead, to the pathologist, Dr. Brown there.

I first used the DDS fairly late on in my career. Perhaps I was silly but I did not want to opt out. I noticed that the introduction of deputising services caused some increase in patient demand. Perhaps they were trying to get "second opinions".

No official complaints at all, ever.Later, I had to sit at complaint hearings, when I became chairman of the local medical committee, and of course nowadays it’s rife.

Oh yes, especially when I was covering Lawrence Weston, and to some degree Shirehampton, and Sea Mills, I would get night calls for trivialities sometimes.Of course I remember - the awkward ones stick in my head, in my memory - a person who had been bleeding for forty-eight hours from a socket after a dental extraction sent for me at three o’clock in the morning.I said, ‘What about the dentist?’‘Oh no, I wouldn’t dare to ask the dentist.’And there was no emergency arrangement for dental care at all, so I had to deal with that myself.Well, quite often they were trivial, but they could be serious too. ...I recall one who said, ‘Doctor, I was very worried about my daughter last night but I haven’t got a telephone, the telephone’s down the road, so I thought I’d leave it until today,’ and the girl did have acute appendicitis. She was ok after surgery.

In a way one couldn’t blame patients because after all they’d been brought up in very poor circumstances, they certainly had no knowledge of medicine, they had no granny or aunt to turn to, so they turned to me.

The besetting worry in those days was still TB. Many patients had skeletons in the cupboard, some extra-marital relationships, some children, which was quite understood, they knew I knew that they knew, and we got on very nicely.

They all spoke with quite strong Bristolian accents and they would refer to children as, ‘He’s mickey, doctor, he’s like a ball of fire,’ and that was quite sufficient of course to call us at night.

And of course patients were so very ignorant, they didn’t really know which is which, and what is what.So I was called out to mumps and chicken-pox, and similar things, at night sometimes.As a rule - there were some hardy annuals, hardy individuals.I remember one family with twelve or thirteen children who were notoriously always calling at night.And of course the father never, never worked, because he was otherwise engaged, you see?

And in a way we were fortunate, I never had a complaint, I don’t think I dropped any major clangers, thank the Lord, because I had very nice support from consultants.In those days many of the consultants were contemporaries of mine, and they’d been in the services, and I’d got to know them quite well in Southmead where I’d been working previously as an ex-service registrar. So I could ring up for advice, domiciliary visits etc.

So they were personal friends on first name terms, and in those days it was very much easier. I could ring Mr Crossley about obstetrics, gynaecology, or Mr Mitchell about GU problems, John Naish about medical problems, and Marjory Bennett about obstetrics later on, and all the other doctors were very well known to me.

I tried all the time, I tried to go on learning, and I remember my children saying, ‘Daddy, have you got to go to a medical meeting on Sunday?’ and I said, ‘Well, yes.’And those were the days when we were in on Sunday and at Southmead they started post-graduate meetings; there was Norman Brown, and there was Frank Page, and they came in on Sundays. There were eight consultants and six GPs, and that was the post-graduate meeting.I’m grateful because they were so helpful and friendly, and of course it makes it so much easier because I was then able to draw on the knowledge they shared with me.

When was your last night call?

About 5 years ago, that was to the Prison.

Well, in the early fifties TB was still rife. I remember having to beg for a bed for one of my patients with TB. I was delighted when we afterwards got support from the Chest Physicians - Dr Craig, and Dr Roberts, who were most helpful.

Polio was a worry, because in July, August, September, whenever I saw a child who had a febrile illness I worried, is it going to be polio?And there were, in those days, the infectious fevers, measles etc. and I became quite well-versed with them: sometimes you could get a sort of "forme fruste" with a very slight rash.

Some children were really undernourished in those days. One had to look out for rickets and similar things one practically never sees nowadays, except I suppose you see them in the more recent ethnic arrivals.In Czechoslovakia I had seen a lot of rheumatic fever, I almost saw none here, except its cardiac sequelae.

Diphtheria.Now, I remember very well in Czechoslovakia seeing a child, he was quite ill, and he had abdominal pain. I was just about to think, this is appendicitis, when I remembered the head physician’s advice. So I examined him from top to bottom and saw the membranes on his tonsils, and that child had diphtheria, with some sort ofmesenteric adenitis, I presume.

In 1937 I stood in for a very nice Ukrainian doctor, called Korbushko, a refugee, in Koryčany, Czechoslovakia, and he actually suffered diphtheria, and was afraid of myocarditis.I don’t think he had it but he felt as a precaution he ought to rest, and lie down. I didn’t see diphtheria in this country at all.

That was a great worry because the vaccinations had only just come in.And I remember on one occasion, my children had quite a bad dose of pertussis, and I was able to give them chloramphenicol.It had just come in.In those days we had quite a few lung conditions which had originally originated with a bad dose of pertussis - lung abscesses, and bronchiectasis. I also had one case when a child had inhaled a nut and that nut had lodged, and he then got a lung abscess.

Not terribly prevalent.I remember, I’m sure I stuck out my neck, and I said, ‘Please, my dear, in the nicest possible way, your breasts are not only for your husband, they’re also for your child.’

Midwifery was important, and the flying squad was helpful, very helpful but otherwise all this I had to do myself.I had, in those days, no secretary, no nurse. The midwife and Igot on very well.Only later on did they have children’s clinics and a midwifery clinic.The professor of obstetrics, Professor Lennon, and his understudies McGillivray and McGregorwere all very helpful.I used to go avidly to Southmead whenever I could and sit in with the paediatricians and obstetricians.

In those days it was almost all home deliveries.I was sweating blood with everything, retained placentas, you name it.But it was very helpful when I knew there was Professor Lennon and the flying squad,and I owe a lot to him and to his department.I used to go in there on Monday afternoon and felt cheered when I heard that they had missed something like an occipito-posterior position or twins.

I had the ante-natal clinic in my home.In those days there was no midwife, because they were very busy.There was one on the estate, we got on very well, but she didn’t have time to come to the ante-natal with me; I had to take all the bloods, and take them then to the hospital to be processed.I got my wife to help me, but she was rather disinclined.I was so proud I got into the vein straightaway, and I said, ‘Is there anything wrong?’ and my wife said, ‘Yes, I can’t face the sight of blood.’

We had three children, she’d had twins, and she said, ‘I never saw a doctor antenatally’. I was in the forces, I was abroad, during the war.And she never saw a doctor during her pregnancy.The babies were delivered by a midwife, and the twins were undiagnosed.So one of the besetting things, I always felt the one thing that I must not miss myself was a multiple pregnancy or an ectopic.

Prof Lennon and his registrars were most helpful to us in general practice, we had very much more contact then with the hospital.

Unfortunately there was one lady, she was a grandmother and she didn’t want another baby but she became pregnant, and she would not come to ante-natal clinics. I had to go and visit her at home and finally I had to almost force her to go into hospital.She had a Polish husband.

Poor dear, she perished in hospital, because she had a post-partum bleed, which Mr. Percy Philipscould not stop.I remember I used to go - I still do - attend what was called a Death Watch Committee Meeting, and this was discussed at length.

That was when for the first time a ministerial investigation was carried out into every maternal death, whereas previously if a baby died it was an act of God, and the same if the mother died.But I was exonerated because I had tried my best to get her to the ante-natal clinic, and Percy Philips, bless him, gave her transfusion after transfusion; maybe she ought to have had an emergency hysterectomy.But he was very nice and very helpful, and there is a ward called after him at Southmead.

When did you move to Southmead Health Centre? How were your Southmead patients different from the Henbury ones?

I moved in1969. I suppose more of the Southmead patients were from social class 5, and some were certainly criminal.I also kept on a surgery in Brentry. I was one of the founder members. Drs Otlet, Leech, Isles,and Reeves and Esler were the others. I was single handed. I stayed there til the 1980s.

Definitely the introduction of antibiotics. I remember seeing patients with quite minor things like a tonsil infection who developed septicaemia, and someone who cut his finger slightly in the post-mortem room and died of it.

Well I have always been a great believer. I felt that young people had to be advised, and they came actually in large numbers - it’s quite untrue whenever I hear that they can’t get any help from GPs, I’m sure that most GPs, perhaps all of them want to give advice. They certainly came, unbeknown to their parents, and I felt I must wait until they are sixteen in those days, and I would have to say, ‘Please, my dear, be careful, use condoms...’

And I certainly advised and instructed, and in those days of course that was pre-pill, and one fitted of course diaphragms, etc.But then the pill came. With the exception of the heavy smokers, or the elderly ladies, I felt the pill was as safe as anything and I always advised it.And I’ve never had any problems.There were one or two young ladies who in spite of all the advice I gave them became pregnant again and I suppose they were playing Russian roulette, and I felt that in the end abortion on demand was misused by some of the young ladies.

Czech patients were quite open about sex(especially in the rolling countryside of Moravske Slovacko – Moravian Slovakia). Their motto was Wine, Women and Song. I arrived to start as a locum inKyjo in 1937. I met the Doctor’s brother in his insurance office, and he said"Look at Marenka" ( a pretty, rosy cheeked young office girl). "I’m asking her whether she is still a virgin...and she won't tell me" Marenka’s answer was a cheerful enigmatic smile. This set the style. When seeing patients in the morning, in came a young girl in the lovely colourful local costume with her mother. "Doctor tell me, Is she pregnant?" I examined her, and said "Mother, it’s too early – one can’t say"."Oh, Mr. Doctor" said the mother, rather to my surprise" I hope she is pregnant". Next, in came a big peasant woman. "Is she pregnant?" I answered "I cannot tell you- it’s strictly private". "Aha " said she "I hope she isn’t – you see, Mr Doctor, she is a poor wench, and my son is rich". Some girls would come again and again with "bellyache", or just to see the new doctor.One had a well-healed appendectomy scar, and repeatedly came to expose her considerable charms on the couch. It took me some time to realise what was on offer...an offer I did not take up.

England in 1939 was very different. "How do you do" but no handshake, formality reigned. Once I commented how attractive a passing girl looked to some English friends.A deathly silence followed, until eventually someone said "Let’s go and have Tea". But this formality changed fairly quickly with the blackout, the bombing, and all the Allied Servicemen and women. And nowadays what a change; middle class couples kiss on meeting each other, and discuss any and everything.

On the council estate, my patients were not restrained.I was always willing to discuss marital, and extramarital, and young people’s problems. Illegal abortions were a problem, but the birth of an illegitimate baby became less and less of a problem. Eventually mothers started to come with their daughters "Doctor, please put her on the Pill" (which I did).

Not all that much asthma in those days.Occasionally there were some children where I said quite definitely this is asthma, because the child had previously been described as being bronchitic. I remember seeing children who were sown up for the winter, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one - newspapers were wrapped all round the chest, then a vest and they were sewn up for the winter.

Well, they were basically all council houses, very few pre-existing houses, but the council houses were all I think thrown together, they were wet, and cold, and of course that was rather bad.And I had to teach people to try and conserve heat, or use hot water bottles for certain ailments, which was a novelty to them.

Once central heating was introduced it was really a tremendous boon, and that was one of the best things for the people here.My house - the bungalow in which I lived, was atrocious, we had lots of fungus on the walls in the children’s bedroom, it was a terrible house.So I lived in the same conditions really as my patients – possibly worse.

I and my patients all thought the prefabs were very pleasant to live in. We were sorry to see them go.

Every year until about ’56 or’58 I just dreaded the months of October, November, December, when there was thick fog, and we got it quite badly here in Brentry/Henbury. If there was a late call my wife had to drive the car, I had to walk in front, and then go and see, say, Mrs Jones for some bit of nonsense which I had to turn out for, which was rather unfortunate.It was really very bad. The smog was bad for one to breathe in and very bad to drive in, and I was delighted when the government took action after that terrible dying of cattle at the big cattle exhibition at Smithfield in London, it was in 1956 I believe.

All the small coal fires in the myriad of homes were stopped then, and people started to get central heating.

In my time of work there were practically no drugs on the estate.On one occasion, there was one boy who I think had been smoking cannabis, but otherwise certainly not on the Brentry/Henbury estate.I also worked at Southmead; it was all really pre-drugs, and also Brentry/Henbury, no criminality.We had some awkward people and the Corporation sort of more or less moved them out, I suppose they had not paid their rent.It was a nice law-abiding, friendly population. And I helped at various Youth clubs and other clubs and so on, to try and fit in. and of course my children went to local schools, which was helpful, but alas they were beaten up at the local schools too.

I was very lucky because I got on very well with the Executive Council (Mr Foster, Mr Wilcox), for a variety of reasons.I filled in the forms correctly; of course it was a thing one had to do oneself in those days.Coming home in the evening I had to fill in the forms and write referral letters to hospitals, and before that I had to take all the bloods etc. specimens, to the hospital. Later on, of course, once I worked in a health centre, there was no need for it any more.

I was typing away with three fingers every evening to write the letters, and get them ready for the following day, to be sent off.

Mr Foster, the Chairman of the Executive Council really was quite a determined person, north-eastern, from Durham. I think he interpreted the law- if there was a doubt - rather in favour of the doctors.And I got on very well with him, and with Mr Willcox and his deputies. I found the department very helpful, after the initial considerable hiccup when they all felt that I was the pet of Professor Perry’s, and I didn’t know what had hit me.

Well, the LMC was quite unpaid then.I attended as often as I could.They dealt with everyday occurrences, and doctors’ complaints, and patients’ complaints and of course they were giving advice. There was Peter Lee, and Douglas Pleasant, who was a great friend of mine, and Tony Edwards, and they were secretaries and chairman for a long time.I remember years ago when there was a Doctor Dix, and I was amazed because he was eighty-four and he was still working.Well, I have followed his example, and more. I quite enjoyed being Chairman of the LMC, though there were so many late meetings (it was all unpaid then of course).

There was almost full employment because in those days, in Brentry/Henbury, most of the people were skilled craftsmen, or artisans, and they worked for Bristol Aeroplane Company, or Rolls Royce.So in that respect it was all right.

I had very few patients who were chronically unemployed, very few misfits, and most of the people were trying hard and have done very well, bless them.I’m delighted because in the past, the patients’ holiday outing was to go to Severn Beach.Weston was a bit more expensive but holidays abroad were quite unheard of. In those days, I never had any swish cars. In the early days I never locked my cars, I left my car unlocked outside the surgery - but then came a time when patients would say to me, ‘Doctor, when are you going to get a new car?’I still haven’t got a new car.

Open surgeries to start with, but then I started an appointment system, but never a very rigid one, I always saw patients the same day.I’m amazed when I hear nowadays ‘Oh, the doctor cannot see you for a week,’ so the patient tells me, I always saw them the same day.

Some awkward customers unfortunately of course I had to ask to be removed from my list.There were some people who had been very rude to my doctor friends who stood in for me, that sort of thing, or they were really so difficult I felt we could never get on.Some, of course, were allocated and came back to me.That was unfortunate.

I’m not sure about other doctors.Very possibly they gave antibiotics, I never did.But I was quite determined; I felt it was physiologic