James Hamilton Doggart
Encyclopedia
Dr. James Hamilton Doggart (22 January 1900 - 15 October 1989) was a leading ophthalmologist, http://www.tomfolio.com/bookdetailssu.asp?b=15811&m=36 lecturer, writer, cricketer,http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/england/content/player/12211.html and a member of the Cambridge Apostles
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sy8Ym9N3tgUC&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=james+hamilton+doggart&source=web&ots=kWmTLwdV5q&sig=nyLiSL9PXsVqbO7yEqS9JF_usxo and the Bloomsbury Group
.
Motor cars were rare, slow and often out of action, so that we had plenty of scope for spinning-tops, games with marbles and cherry-stones, tipcat, and a bowler and hoop… Riding on a milk cart was a special treat. One stood up beside the driver, behind those jangling, swinging cans, out of which the driver would ladle measures of milk. (Reflections in a Family Mirror, Red House, 2002) http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0954353307
was spent in the shadow of war, helped him to learn that lesson. When he went up to read medicine at King's in 1917, many of the young men who would have become his friends were dying in the trenches. Most of the dons who would have taught him were in Whitehall. There were only ten undergraduates at King's that year, including a seriously wounded soldier, two choral scholars, and two visiting students from India
and China
. http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/visitors/history.html
He filled the grim emptiness by throwing himself into his medical studies. He sailed through chemistry
, physics
, biology
, anatomy
and physiology
, and finished two years of medical studies in one. In May 1918, he persuaded the Admiralty to accept him as a surgeon-probationer and began his first job in medicine, as an anaesthetist. There were no antibiotics or blood transfusions. The only anaesthetics available were chloroform and ether. His notes from the period express particular distress at wounds involving the knee-joint, and the regularity of gangrene
-induced amputations. http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/wars_wwI.html
The quality of Jimmy’s work earned him a transfer to HMS Sikh,http://www.clydesite.co.uk/clydebuilt/warships/vessel.asp?id=11467 a newly built destroyer. Its mission was to escort troopships across the Channel, and to carry out anti-submarine patrols. Jimmy's medical duties were limited to treating engine-room artificers for burns and distributing medicines for venereal diseases. His literary abilities were exploited with the job of keeping code systems and other confidential books up to date, and with the unenviable task of censoring letters.
If he was lucky to escape a German submarine attack in the Channel, he was even more fortunate to survive influenza, contracted while on leave in Cambridge. This was no normal ‘flu bug, but a pandemic that swept the world. It would claim more lives than World War One itself. In hospital, Jimmy saw young men who had survived the Somme killed by influenza. Thanks to a kindly nurse who gave him extra quantities of castor oil, Jimmy recovered within a month, just in time to celebrate the Armistice
declaration.
, and enjoying a rebirth of university life:
It was in Keynes’ rooms at King’s where friend and writer Peter Lucas introduced Jimmy to a secret society known as the Apostles. http://www.modern-humanities.info/groups/apostles.htm Founded in 1829, this elite group of intellectual Jedis boasted Alfred Tennyson and Rupert Brooke
amongst its past members. During Jimmy’s association, fellow Apostles included philosophers Bertrand Russell
and Ludwig Wittgenstein
, writer Lytton Strachey, Soviet spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, novelist E.M. Forster and future Provosts of King’s Jack Sheppard and Noel Annan. Members took it in turns to read a paper on a philosophical or academic issue, which became the basis for lively debates. Jimmy forged some of his closest friendships among the Apostles, who brought him into contact with leading lights of the Bloomsbury group, such as Virginia Woolf
, Duncan Grant
and Dora Carrington
. His correspondence with Forster, Carrington http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/carrington.dora.html and Strachey remained vigorous and affectionate until their deaths. “Even my well-known cynicism”, Strachey wrote in a 1920 letter, “melts away under your benevolent beams, and I’ve hardly a jibe left.”http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/strachey.lytton.html http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0272%2FPP%2FCHA%2F1%2F173(ibid, 2002)
Jimmy's intellectual and personal adventures deepened his love for Cambridge and, specifically, King's College—the evening light on the Cam; the naked opening note of Once in Royal David's City
; January snow on the crown of Henry VI’s statue. King’s became the place he cherished the most for the rest of his life.
Indeed, the exam failures prompted him to take a careful look at what direction he wanted his career to take, and led him to find his real vocation: eye work. In February 1923, he landed a job as an ophthalmic house surgeon, and embarked on a further round of studies.
His commitment to medicine was strengthened by a six month stint as a casualty officer at the Royal Northern Hospital:
His self-belief was tested again in May 1927, when he failed his preliminary exams to qualify as an ophthalmic surgeon. He resumed preparations, took the exams, and failed again.
“This was very discouraging,” he wrote, “because I was no further on. The people teaching the course had all expected me to get through.” (ibid, 2002)
He struggled on and, in December 1928, passed the Final Fellowship exam:
I could have let out a yell of joy and relief. The formal words of welcome were pronounced by Sir Cuthbert Wallace who, as Dean of the Medical School of St. Thomas’, had rebuked me a few years earlier for being so frivolous as to go off to South America before I had qualified. (ibid, 2002)
In fact, that trip was not only Jimmy’s first journey outside Europe; it led to his first significant contribution to medical research. The adventure came about when the eminent scientist Joseph Barcroft
invited him to join an Anglo-American expedition to Peru
to study the physiology of mountain sickness. The group sailed from Liverpool
in November 1921, stopped off at Havana, before passing through the Panama Canal on the way to the Peruvian port of Callao
. In Peru, they spent the entire winter, huddled in a converted railway baggage car at Cerro de Pasco, 14,000 feet above sea level. Jimmy was entranced by South America, where he returned to lecture on various occasions.
Jimmy’s love of travel started with childhood seaside holidays in the north of England, the pierrot
troupe on Saltburn beach remembered with particular pleasure. He loved Scotland
, where his daughter Sonia would spend much of her life:
An enchanting land, offering hills to climb, burns to cross, glorious scones, cookies and cinnamon balls and of course boats, especially the kinds that you could propel standing up, by means of a single oar resting on a concave notch in the stern. (ibid, 2002)
A lecture tour to the Soviet Union
in 1957 with his life-long friend Patrick Trevor-Roper
yielded new adventures.
Throughout his life, Jimmy was an enthusiastic sportsman. During the First World War, he sought out edelweiss-rare rugger matches. Between the wars, he rock-climbed, skated, and played golf. He played cricket for Cambridge University http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/england/content/player/12211.html and for St Thomas's Hospital, where his fast right arm led the team to two successive victories in the inter-hospital Cup Final.
under the spell of the Siren
s, he was bewitched by beautiful women – especially the dangerous ones—throughout his youth. At age five, while attending Westholm School for Girls:
I felt the first pangs of love, especially for the three fascinating Errington sisters, one word from any of whom would produce an ecstasy of tongue-tied blushes. (ibid, 2002)
At Cambridge, he attracted much female attention. Virginia Woolf
describes him affectionately in her diaries as a “spruce innocent young man; with eyes like brown trout streams.” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2 1920-24, Penguin, 1981, p. 8) http://www.librarything.com/work/218440
In 1919, Jimmy became romantically involved with a girl at Newnham, but the engagement was short-lived: the attractions of a single life were still too great. In Montreal
, he wrote: “I was astonished at the glorious complexions of all the girls in that cold crisp air.” A year later, at the Downside Ball in London: “all the girls were beautiful and walked like panthers.”
In 1925, he began a flirtatious correspondence with Dora Carrington
which lasted six years. He became engaged for the second time, to a girl whom he had met at a dance in Leicester. He temporarily abandoned his studies for her because, as he explains: “being in a hurry to get married, I did not like the prospect of examinations looming up at me.” He broke off the relationship.
Little is known about his first marriage. His writings allude only to the bare facts. In 1928, he met Doris Mennell, and married her the following year. They had one daughter, Sonia. They separated in 1931, and the marriage was formally dissolved in 1938.
Jimmy met the love of his life, Leonora Sharpley, in October 1936. They were introduced at a dinner party hosted by Sebastian and Honor Earl, the niece of one of their favourite writers, Somerset Maugham. ‘Leo’ was an elegant lady with an aquiline nose, a mellifluous voice, and a seraphic lightness of movement. She was born in Lincoln in 1904. Her father, George Sharpley, was a stern, devout man who ran a heavy engineering business and was also High Sheriff of Lincoln
. Leo grew up with two sisters, to whom she was close. After leaving school, she went to art college in London. She met and married a theatre impresario, Jack Gatti, with whom she had two fiercely independent sons, John and Peter. Jack found the starlets appearing in his theatre irresistible. The marriage collapsed.
When they first met, Leo and Jimmy were both emerging from painful divorces. About a year later, Jimmy proposed to Leo, who Leo accepted. The couple were married in London on May 7, 1938. Jimmy's marriage was the bedrock on which he built his successful career. His gaze ceased wandering to pretty nurses and focused instead on using medicine to make a real difference to the world.
These publications turned him into a leading player in the world of ophthalmology. His workload mushroomed, and he found himself juggling all kinds of responsibilities. He ran between consultancy appointments at Moorfields
, St George
's and Great Ormond Street
hospitals, and still managed to find time to serve a growing private practice. He presided over the Faculty of Ophthalmology and sat on a host of other medical committees. He wrote numerous papers for medical journals and became an editor on the British Journal of Ophthalmology. He was a highly sought-after lecturer on the international circuit and a patient teacher at various hospitals. He even pushed ophthalmology into the political field, lobbying parliament to outlaw boxing
because of the eye damage it causes. http://bjsm.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/36/6/428.pdf http://books.google.com/books?id=WHKvDcGxAqUC&pg=PA282&lpg=PA282&dq=doggart+boxing&source=web&ots=7ELyoWJb2D&sig=TxE1iNqGE79uaJrBUaINQmylfk0
Jimmy’s career spanned a period of enormous advances in medical technology, from the development of antibiotics to the introduction of laser surgery. He played a part in this progress through his own teaching and research work, and by spearheading a new means of advancing medical knowledge – global networking. At conferences, through exchange programs, by written correspondence, and as a member of the Order of the Knights of St. John, Jimmy forged links between doctors and eye specialists around the world – from the Soviet Union to Australia
, Argentina to the United States. He created an informal World Wide Web for medical research.
Leo missed her husband's company and found a house in Wendover, near to his airbase at RAF Halton
. She made the move in a small Austin car, with a chicken-house on a trailer. In those years of scarcity, the chickens were a major asset, ensuring that Tony had a regular supply of soft-boiled eggs.
Jimmy was similarly enterprising as a parent. He once arranged an aircraft trip to St. Eval, near to where his daughter Sonia’s school had been evacuated, and paid her a surprise visit. In 1943, he cleverly purchased a large house in Cambridge called Binsted, on the site of what is now Robinson College
. He, Leo and Tony moved in during the summer of 1946, and Binsted became their first stable home.
Leo and Jimmy’s roots became increasingly intertwined as shared friendships strengthened. Jimmy’s university friend Jack Sheppard
became Provost of King’s and they saw a lot of each other. Leo’s Sunday lunch parties (and her Queen's Pudding) became famous, invitations eagerly accepted. Some of their closest friends were Noel and Gaby Annan, Tim Munby, Patrick Wilkinson and the man whom Jimmy called “the best man-friend I ever had, and the wisest man I ever knew” – his brother Graham Doggart
. Leo loved laughing and gossiping with her friends, the closest of whom were Nora David, who later spoke for Labour on education in the House of Lords, and Joyce Carey
, the actress at the centre of Noel Coward
’s circle.
Jimmy’s work required him to spend weekdays in London where he spent many evenings with friends at the Garrick Club
. A painting still hangs there, depicting a trip by Garrick members to the Derby. Jimmy is portrayed rapt in conversation with a colourfully dressed gypsy woman. More interested in the mythic than the mundane, he seems unaware that a smudge-faced child, possibly the son of the gypsy, is sneaking his little hand into his pocket.
. Here, they devoted great energies to educating and entertaining their two grandchildren, Sebastian Doggart
and Nike Doggart
.
Some of Jimmy’s closest friends were writers he had never met. Perhaps his closest friend of all was Homer
, in whose tales of nobility and adventure he found a kindred spirit. As an undergraduate, he read the Iliad
in Greek on the banks of the Cam. The classics provided an escape from the realities of the Second World War:
I was spending two and a half hours in the train six days a week, practically all that time reading Homer and other Greek authors. (ibid, 2002)
Jimmy and Leo shared many literary ‘friends’, including Jane Austen
, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling
and the Brontë sisters. Jimmy would often read these authors aloud to Leo, who listened intently as she embroidered exotic parrots on cushion covers. As in all good couples, they had their private friends. Jimmy favoured Aristophanes
, Thucydides
, and Plato
; Leo had weaknesses for Barbara Cartland
and Nigel Dempster
. Jimmy had rather more literary enemies, especially D. H. Lawrence
, whom he slammed as vulgar and amoral, and urged others never to read.
Jimmy had a hard time growing old. Moving from a hectic career into retirement was a tough task. He set about creating projects to fill the time. He combined his literary and charitable energies into reading books onto cassettes for the blind. He approached this as a craft, taking speaking lessons so that his recordings flowed freely. His listeners, attached to the charity Calibre, rewarded him with a steady stream of fan mail, appreciative of his performances as Mr. Darcy or Charles Strickland. http://www.calibre.org.uk/Search/show/author/2451
Deep down, old age infuriated him. He was mindful of his cherished friend Somerset Maugham’s last words that “dying is a very dull dreary affair and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.” The deterioration in his eyesight – the very gift he had devoted his life to preserving in other people—forced him to stop reading for the blind. That was a cruel sleight of fate. His depression became clearer with every passing year. His face lit up when he saw his children or grandchildren. His family was his only Prozac, and, unlike Leo, he did not have religion to lean on.
Jimmy's Christianity had been destroyed at the age of seven, when his father subjected him to Total Immersion
. His rejection of his father’s Baptist beliefs became a source of inner turmoil throughout his life. On the one hand, he disagreed with what he saw as his father’s religious intolerance and blinkered piety; on the other, he was mindful of his filial duties:
My father would have swooned for joy if I had decided to be a medical missionary, but alas, it is impossible to turn these things like a tap, just to oblige another, even if that other is owed an enormous debt of gratitude. (ibid, 2002)
Although he found no truth in organized religion, he did find God’s hand in both nature and mankind. Sitting alone in a box at the Royal Festival Hall, he found God listening to Fritz Kreisler
playing the violin. He found Him in the first crocuses of springtime and looking through a microscope at a child’s retina. He found him in the echo of Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn.” And he found Him, infinitely, in the fanned vaulting of King’s Chapel.
Jimmy Doggart died October 15, 1989, aged 89 years, 266 days.
Cambridge Apostles
The Cambridge Apostles, also known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, is an intellectual secret society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who went on to become the first Bishop of Gibraltar....
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sy8Ym9N3tgUC&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=james+hamilton+doggart&source=web&ots=kWmTLwdV5q&sig=nyLiSL9PXsVqbO7yEqS9JF_usxo and the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
.
Early life
Doggart was born exactly one year before the death of Queen Victoria. Remembering his childhood, he wrote:Motor cars were rare, slow and often out of action, so that we had plenty of scope for spinning-tops, games with marbles and cherry-stones, tipcat, and a bowler and hoop… Riding on a milk cart was a special treat. One stood up beside the driver, behind those jangling, swinging cans, out of which the driver would ladle measures of milk. (Reflections in a Family Mirror, Red House, 2002) http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0954353307
First World War
Doggart's first year at King's College, CambridgeKing's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....
was spent in the shadow of war, helped him to learn that lesson. When he went up to read medicine at King's in 1917, many of the young men who would have become his friends were dying in the trenches. Most of the dons who would have taught him were in Whitehall. There were only ten undergraduates at King's that year, including a seriously wounded soldier, two choral scholars, and two visiting students from India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
and China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
. http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/visitors/history.html
He filled the grim emptiness by throwing himself into his medical studies. He sailed through chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
, biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
, anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...
and physiology
Physiology
Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
, and finished two years of medical studies in one. In May 1918, he persuaded the Admiralty to accept him as a surgeon-probationer and began his first job in medicine, as an anaesthetist. There were no antibiotics or blood transfusions. The only anaesthetics available were chloroform and ether. His notes from the period express particular distress at wounds involving the knee-joint, and the regularity of gangrene
Gangrene
Gangrene is a serious and potentially life-threatening condition that arises when a considerable mass of body tissue dies . This may occur after an injury or infection, or in people suffering from any chronic health problem affecting blood circulation. The primary cause of gangrene is reduced blood...
-induced amputations. http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/wars_wwI.html
The quality of Jimmy’s work earned him a transfer to HMS Sikh,http://www.clydesite.co.uk/clydebuilt/warships/vessel.asp?id=11467 a newly built destroyer. Its mission was to escort troopships across the Channel, and to carry out anti-submarine patrols. Jimmy's medical duties were limited to treating engine-room artificers for burns and distributing medicines for venereal diseases. His literary abilities were exploited with the job of keeping code systems and other confidential books up to date, and with the unenviable task of censoring letters.
If he was lucky to escape a German submarine attack in the Channel, he was even more fortunate to survive influenza, contracted while on leave in Cambridge. This was no normal ‘flu bug, but a pandemic that swept the world. It would claim more lives than World War One itself. In hospital, Jimmy saw young men who had survived the Somme killed by influenza. Thanks to a kindly nurse who gave him extra quantities of castor oil, Jimmy recovered within a month, just in time to celebrate the Armistice
Armistice with Germany (Compiègne)
The armistice between the Allies and Germany was an agreement that ended the fighting in the First World War. It was signed in a railway carriage in Compiègne Forest on 11 November 1918 and marked a victory for the Allies and a complete defeat for Germany, although not technically a surrender...
declaration.
Cambridge and the Apostles
Doggart returned to King’s, sharing rooms with his brother Graham DoggartGraham Doggart
Alexander Graham Doggart, JP was an English administrator, cricketer, footballer and magistrate.Doggart was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. He was educated at Bishop's Stortford College and Cambridge...
, and enjoying a rebirth of university life:
1919 was a most exciting time to be in Cambridge. Undergraduates of mixed ages poured in. A few had gone up in 1913, joining the Forces at the outbreak of the War… John Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard KeynesJohn Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...
resigned from the Treasury, violently disapproving of Lloyd George's policies at the Versailles Peace Conference, and got back to King’s for the May term of 1919… The Fox-trot, the One-step and the Waltz dominated the dancing world, and the girls of Girton and Newnham, duly chaperoned in those conventional times, were ardently courted… There were the Pitt Club, the Hawks, the FootlightsFootlightsCambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club, commonly referred to simply as the Footlights, is an amateur theatrical club in Cambridge, England, founded in 1883 and run by the students of Cambridge University....
and a host of friends at King’s and in other colleges, and games of rugger. I did very little solid work, and of course I fell in love. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0954353307(ibid, 2002)
It was in Keynes’ rooms at King’s where friend and writer Peter Lucas introduced Jimmy to a secret society known as the Apostles. http://www.modern-humanities.info/groups/apostles.htm Founded in 1829, this elite group of intellectual Jedis boasted Alfred Tennyson and Rupert Brooke
Rupert Brooke
Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier...
amongst its past members. During Jimmy’s association, fellow Apostles included philosophers Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
, writer Lytton Strachey, Soviet spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, novelist E.M. Forster and future Provosts of King’s Jack Sheppard and Noel Annan. Members took it in turns to read a paper on a philosophical or academic issue, which became the basis for lively debates. Jimmy forged some of his closest friendships among the Apostles, who brought him into contact with leading lights of the Bloomsbury group, such as Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, Duncan Grant
Duncan Grant
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, potterty and theatre sets and costumes...
and Dora Carrington
Dora Carrington
Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey....
. His correspondence with Forster, Carrington http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/carrington.dora.html and Strachey remained vigorous and affectionate until their deaths. “Even my well-known cynicism”, Strachey wrote in a 1920 letter, “melts away under your benevolent beams, and I’ve hardly a jibe left.”http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/strachey.lytton.html http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0272%2FPP%2FCHA%2F1%2F173(ibid, 2002)
Jimmy's intellectual and personal adventures deepened his love for Cambridge and, specifically, King's College—the evening light on the Cam; the naked opening note of Once in Royal David's City
Once In Royal David's City
Once In Royal David's City is a Christmas carol originally written as poem by Cecil Frances Alexander. The carol was first published in 1848 in Miss Cecil Humphreys' hymnbook Hymns for little Children. A year later, the English organist Henry John Gauntlett discovered the poem and set it to music...
; January snow on the crown of Henry VI’s statue. King’s became the place he cherished the most for the rest of his life.
Early medical career
Jimmy’s appreciation of hard-won success grew out of his own experience with failure. Perhaps his bitterest setbacks were suffered in his medical training after leaving Cambridge in July 1920. He failed papers on medicine, surgery and midwifery on three increasingly painful occasions. After those intellectual body-blows, many people would have abandoned a medical career, but he persevered, and eventually prevailed.Indeed, the exam failures prompted him to take a careful look at what direction he wanted his career to take, and led him to find his real vocation: eye work. In February 1923, he landed a job as an ophthalmic house surgeon, and embarked on a further round of studies.
His commitment to medicine was strengthened by a six month stint as a casualty officer at the Royal Northern Hospital:
There were all manner of injuries, ranging from people brought in dead from a motor crash, down to the cuts and bruises. On one day in February 1926 I treated seventeen people for fractures sustained in toboganing on Hampstead Heath and in Kenwood. There are few sensations more satisfactory, I think, than the slide of the head of the humerus back into its socket when one reduces a dislocated shoulder. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0954353307(ibid, 2002)
His self-belief was tested again in May 1927, when he failed his preliminary exams to qualify as an ophthalmic surgeon. He resumed preparations, took the exams, and failed again.
“This was very discouraging,” he wrote, “because I was no further on. The people teaching the course had all expected me to get through.” (ibid, 2002)
He struggled on and, in December 1928, passed the Final Fellowship exam:
I could have let out a yell of joy and relief. The formal words of welcome were pronounced by Sir Cuthbert Wallace who, as Dean of the Medical School of St. Thomas’, had rebuked me a few years earlier for being so frivolous as to go off to South America before I had qualified. (ibid, 2002)
In fact, that trip was not only Jimmy’s first journey outside Europe; it led to his first significant contribution to medical research. The adventure came about when the eminent scientist Joseph Barcroft
Joseph Barcroft
Sir Joseph Barcroft CBE, FRS was a British physiologist best known for his studies of the oxygenation of blood....
invited him to join an Anglo-American expedition to Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
to study the physiology of mountain sickness. The group sailed from Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
in November 1921, stopped off at Havana, before passing through the Panama Canal on the way to the Peruvian port of Callao
Callao
Callao is the largest and most important port in Peru. The city is coterminous with the Constitutional Province of Callao, the only province of the Callao Region. Callao is located west of Lima, the country's capital, and is part of the Lima Metropolitan Area, a large metropolis that holds almost...
. In Peru, they spent the entire winter, huddled in a converted railway baggage car at Cerro de Pasco, 14,000 feet above sea level. Jimmy was entranced by South America, where he returned to lecture on various occasions.
Jimmy’s love of travel started with childhood seaside holidays in the north of England, the pierrot
Pierrot
Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell'Arte whose origins are in the late 17th-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a hypocorism of Pierre , via the suffix -ot. His character in postmodern popular culture—in...
troupe on Saltburn beach remembered with particular pleasure. He loved Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, where his daughter Sonia would spend much of her life:
An enchanting land, offering hills to climb, burns to cross, glorious scones, cookies and cinnamon balls and of course boats, especially the kinds that you could propel standing up, by means of a single oar resting on a concave notch in the stern. (ibid, 2002)
A lecture tour to the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in 1957 with his life-long friend Patrick Trevor-Roper
Patrick Trevor-Roper
Patrick Trevor-Roper , British eye surgeon and pioneer gay rights activist, was one of the first people in the United Kingdom to "come out" as openly gay, and played a leading role in the campaign to repeal the UK's anti-gay laws....
yielded new adventures.
Throughout his life, Jimmy was an enthusiastic sportsman. During the First World War, he sought out edelweiss-rare rugger matches. Between the wars, he rock-climbed, skated, and played golf. He played cricket for Cambridge University http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/england/content/player/12211.html and for St Thomas's Hospital, where his fast right arm led the team to two successive victories in the inter-hospital Cup Final.
Personal life
Jimmy was a romantic in the field of love as well as travel. His writings refer to his impulsiveness and suggest that, like OdysseusOdysseus
Odysseus or Ulysses was a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in the Epic Cycle....
under the spell of the Siren
Siren
In Greek mythology, the Sirens were three dangerous mermaid like creatures, portrayed as seductresses who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. Roman poets placed them on an island called Sirenum scopuli...
s, he was bewitched by beautiful women – especially the dangerous ones—throughout his youth. At age five, while attending Westholm School for Girls:
I felt the first pangs of love, especially for the three fascinating Errington sisters, one word from any of whom would produce an ecstasy of tongue-tied blushes. (ibid, 2002)
At Cambridge, he attracted much female attention. Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
describes him affectionately in her diaries as a “spruce innocent young man; with eyes like brown trout streams.” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2 1920-24, Penguin, 1981, p. 8) http://www.librarything.com/work/218440
In 1919, Jimmy became romantically involved with a girl at Newnham, but the engagement was short-lived: the attractions of a single life were still too great. In Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, he wrote: “I was astonished at the glorious complexions of all the girls in that cold crisp air.” A year later, at the Downside Ball in London: “all the girls were beautiful and walked like panthers.”
In 1925, he began a flirtatious correspondence with Dora Carrington
Dora Carrington
Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey....
which lasted six years. He became engaged for the second time, to a girl whom he had met at a dance in Leicester. He temporarily abandoned his studies for her because, as he explains: “being in a hurry to get married, I did not like the prospect of examinations looming up at me.” He broke off the relationship.
Little is known about his first marriage. His writings allude only to the bare facts. In 1928, he met Doris Mennell, and married her the following year. They had one daughter, Sonia. They separated in 1931, and the marriage was formally dissolved in 1938.
Jimmy met the love of his life, Leonora Sharpley, in October 1936. They were introduced at a dinner party hosted by Sebastian and Honor Earl, the niece of one of their favourite writers, Somerset Maugham. ‘Leo’ was an elegant lady with an aquiline nose, a mellifluous voice, and a seraphic lightness of movement. She was born in Lincoln in 1904. Her father, George Sharpley, was a stern, devout man who ran a heavy engineering business and was also High Sheriff of Lincoln
Lincoln, Lincolnshire
Lincoln is a cathedral city and county town of Lincolnshire, England.The non-metropolitan district of Lincoln has a population of 85,595; the 2001 census gave the entire area of Lincoln a population of 120,779....
. Leo grew up with two sisters, to whom she was close. After leaving school, she went to art college in London. She met and married a theatre impresario, Jack Gatti, with whom she had two fiercely independent sons, John and Peter. Jack found the starlets appearing in his theatre irresistible. The marriage collapsed.
When they first met, Leo and Jimmy were both emerging from painful divorces. About a year later, Jimmy proposed to Leo, who Leo accepted. The couple were married in London on May 7, 1938. Jimmy's marriage was the bedrock on which he built his successful career. His gaze ceased wandering to pretty nurses and focused instead on using medicine to make a real difference to the world.
Second World War
His first big challenge came soon after his wedding, with the outbreak of the Second World War. He negotiated a posting as a Wing Commander in the RAF Medical Branch in Blackpool. Surrounded by some 30,000 airmen, he soon found himself testing the eyesight of up to 100 men a day. Over the next five years, the Central Medical Establishment sent him to hospitals and camps in Wales, Buckinghamshire, Hereford, Gloucester and London. He treated scores of airmen who returned from bombing raids over continental Europe with eye injuries. He saved the sight of many.Work
Near the end of the war, Jimmy began work on a pioneering book on childhood eye diseases. It was the start of the most productive period of his career. The book was published in 1947 and became a core textbook in the field. He followed it up with a companion book, Children’s eye nursing, and then, in 1949, with two other books -- Ophthalmic Medicine and Ocular Signs in Slit-Lamp Microscopy. http://www.marywardbooks.com/list15.phpThese publications turned him into a leading player in the world of ophthalmology. His workload mushroomed, and he found himself juggling all kinds of responsibilities. He ran between consultancy appointments at Moorfields
Moorfields Eye Hospital
Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is an NHS eye hospital located in London, United Kingdom. It is the oldest and largest eye hospital in the world and is internationally renowned for its comprehensive clinical and research activities...
, St George
St George's Hospital
Founded in 1733, St George’s Hospital is one of the UK's largest teaching hospitals. It shares its main hospital site in Tooting, England with the St George's, University of London which trains NHS staff and carries out advanced medical research....
's and Great Ormond Street
Great Ormond Street Hospital
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children is a children's hospital located in London, United Kingdom...
hospitals, and still managed to find time to serve a growing private practice. He presided over the Faculty of Ophthalmology and sat on a host of other medical committees. He wrote numerous papers for medical journals and became an editor on the British Journal of Ophthalmology. He was a highly sought-after lecturer on the international circuit and a patient teacher at various hospitals. He even pushed ophthalmology into the political field, lobbying parliament to outlaw boxing
Boxing
Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...
because of the eye damage it causes. http://bjsm.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/36/6/428.pdf http://books.google.com/books?id=WHKvDcGxAqUC&pg=PA282&lpg=PA282&dq=doggart+boxing&source=web&ots=7ELyoWJb2D&sig=TxE1iNqGE79uaJrBUaINQmylfk0
Jimmy’s career spanned a period of enormous advances in medical technology, from the development of antibiotics to the introduction of laser surgery. He played a part in this progress through his own teaching and research work, and by spearheading a new means of advancing medical knowledge – global networking. At conferences, through exchange programs, by written correspondence, and as a member of the Order of the Knights of St. John, Jimmy forged links between doctors and eye specialists around the world – from the Soviet Union to Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, Argentina to the United States. He created an informal World Wide Web for medical research.
Family
Leo gave birth to her and Jimmy's only child, Anthony Hamilton Doggart, in 1940, and moved to a cottage near Marlborough, safely tucked away from German bombs. Or so she thought. On her way to visit Jimmy in Blackpool, she was caught in an unexpected air raid in Cheltenham. The bomb just missed her railway carriage. Fire raged around her. She calmly picked up her bags and headed straight for the house of Drummond Currie, Jimmy’s dissecting partner from his Cambridge days. She helped Mrs Currie make tea and successfully completed her journey to Blackpool the following day.Leo missed her husband's company and found a house in Wendover, near to his airbase at RAF Halton
RAF Halton
RAF Halton is one of the largest Royal Air Force stations in the United Kingdom, located near the village of Halton near Wendover, Buckinghamshire.HRH The Duchess of Cornwall is the Honorary Air Commodore of RAF Halton.-History:...
. She made the move in a small Austin car, with a chicken-house on a trailer. In those years of scarcity, the chickens were a major asset, ensuring that Tony had a regular supply of soft-boiled eggs.
Jimmy was similarly enterprising as a parent. He once arranged an aircraft trip to St. Eval, near to where his daughter Sonia’s school had been evacuated, and paid her a surprise visit. In 1943, he cleverly purchased a large house in Cambridge called Binsted, on the site of what is now Robinson College
Robinson College, Cambridge
Robinson College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.Robinson is the newest of the Cambridge colleges, and is unique in being the only one to have been intended, from its inception, for both undergraduate and graduate students of either sex.- History :The college was founded...
. He, Leo and Tony moved in during the summer of 1946, and Binsted became their first stable home.
Leo and Jimmy’s roots became increasingly intertwined as shared friendships strengthened. Jimmy’s university friend Jack Sheppard
Jack Sheppard
Jack Sheppard was a notorious English robber, burglar and thief of early 18th-century London. Born into a poor family, he was apprenticed as a carpenter but took to theft and burglary in 1723, with little more than a year of his training to complete...
became Provost of King’s and they saw a lot of each other. Leo’s Sunday lunch parties (and her Queen's Pudding) became famous, invitations eagerly accepted. Some of their closest friends were Noel and Gaby Annan, Tim Munby, Patrick Wilkinson and the man whom Jimmy called “the best man-friend I ever had, and the wisest man I ever knew” – his brother Graham Doggart
Graham Doggart
Alexander Graham Doggart, JP was an English administrator, cricketer, footballer and magistrate.Doggart was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. He was educated at Bishop's Stortford College and Cambridge...
. Leo loved laughing and gossiping with her friends, the closest of whom were Nora David, who later spoke for Labour on education in the House of Lords, and Joyce Carey
Joyce Carey
Joyce Carey, OBE was a British actress, best known for her long professional and personal relationship with Noël Coward. Her stage career lasted from 1916 until 1984, and she was performing on television in her nineties. Though never a star, she was a familiar face both on stage and screen...
, the actress at the centre of Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
’s circle.
Jimmy’s work required him to spend weekdays in London where he spent many evenings with friends at the Garrick Club
Garrick Club
The Garrick Club is a gentlemen's club in London.-History:The Garrick Club was founded at a meeting in the Committee Room at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on Wednesday 17 August 1831...
. A painting still hangs there, depicting a trip by Garrick members to the Derby. Jimmy is portrayed rapt in conversation with a colourfully dressed gypsy woman. More interested in the mythic than the mundane, he seems unaware that a smudge-faced child, possibly the son of the gypsy, is sneaking his little hand into his pocket.
Later years
In 1962, Leo and Jimmy sold Binsted and moved to a townhouse off Kensington Church Street. In 1970, they moved to Albury Park, a stately Victorian retirement home in Surrey. It was a magically timeless place, with palatial gravel paths and rose gardens, a Saxon chapel, and a terrace designed in the 17th century by John EvelynJohn Evelyn
John Evelyn was an English writer, gardener and diarist.Evelyn's diaries or Memoirs are largely contemporaneous with those of the other noted diarist of the time, Samuel Pepys, and cast considerable light on the art, culture and politics of the time John Evelyn (31 October 1620 – 27 February...
. Here, they devoted great energies to educating and entertaining their two grandchildren, Sebastian Doggart
Sebastian Doggart
Sebastian Doggart is an English and American producer, director, writer, translator, cinematographer and human rights activist.-Education:...
and Nike Doggart
Nike Doggart
Nike Doggart is a conservationist, environmental activist, and writer.Doggart, MA, MSc, was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and at University College, London. Doggart began her career as a marine conservationist in Belize...
.
Some of Jimmy’s closest friends were writers he had never met. Perhaps his closest friend of all was Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
, in whose tales of nobility and adventure he found a kindred spirit. As an undergraduate, he read the Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
in Greek on the banks of the Cam. The classics provided an escape from the realities of the Second World War:
I was spending two and a half hours in the train six days a week, practically all that time reading Homer and other Greek authors. (ibid, 2002)
Jimmy and Leo shared many literary ‘friends’, including Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
and the Brontë sisters. Jimmy would often read these authors aloud to Leo, who listened intently as she embroidered exotic parrots on cushion covers. As in all good couples, they had their private friends. Jimmy favoured Aristophanes
Aristophanes
Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete...
, Thucydides
Thucydides
Thucydides was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC...
, and Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
; Leo had weaknesses for Barbara Cartland
Barbara Cartland
Dame Barbara Hamilton Cartland, DBE, CStJ , was an English author, one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century...
and Nigel Dempster
Nigel Dempster
Nigel Richard Patton Dempster was a British journalist, author, broadcaster and diarist. Best known for his celebrity gossip columns in newspapers, his work appeared in the Daily Express and Daily Mail and also in Private Eye magazine...
. Jimmy had rather more literary enemies, especially D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, whom he slammed as vulgar and amoral, and urged others never to read.
Jimmy had a hard time growing old. Moving from a hectic career into retirement was a tough task. He set about creating projects to fill the time. He combined his literary and charitable energies into reading books onto cassettes for the blind. He approached this as a craft, taking speaking lessons so that his recordings flowed freely. His listeners, attached to the charity Calibre, rewarded him with a steady stream of fan mail, appreciative of his performances as Mr. Darcy or Charles Strickland. http://www.calibre.org.uk/Search/show/author/2451
Deep down, old age infuriated him. He was mindful of his cherished friend Somerset Maugham’s last words that “dying is a very dull dreary affair and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.” The deterioration in his eyesight – the very gift he had devoted his life to preserving in other people—forced him to stop reading for the blind. That was a cruel sleight of fate. His depression became clearer with every passing year. His face lit up when he saw his children or grandchildren. His family was his only Prozac, and, unlike Leo, he did not have religion to lean on.
Jimmy's Christianity had been destroyed at the age of seven, when his father subjected him to Total Immersion
Total Immersion
Total Immersion is a method of swimming instruction, developed by Terry Laughlin, an American swimming coach. Its primary focus is to teach swimmers to move in a more efficient, natural way in the water...
. His rejection of his father’s Baptist beliefs became a source of inner turmoil throughout his life. On the one hand, he disagreed with what he saw as his father’s religious intolerance and blinkered piety; on the other, he was mindful of his filial duties:
My father would have swooned for joy if I had decided to be a medical missionary, but alas, it is impossible to turn these things like a tap, just to oblige another, even if that other is owed an enormous debt of gratitude. (ibid, 2002)
Although he found no truth in organized religion, he did find God’s hand in both nature and mankind. Sitting alone in a box at the Royal Festival Hall, he found God listening to Fritz Kreisler
Fritz Kreisler
Friedrich "Fritz" Kreisler was an Austrian-born violinist and composer. One of the most famous violin masters of his or any other day, he was known for his sweet tone and expressive phrasing. Like many great violinists of his generation, he produced a characteristic sound which was immediately...
playing the violin. He found Him in the first crocuses of springtime and looking through a microscope at a child’s retina. He found him in the echo of Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn.” And he found Him, infinitely, in the fanned vaulting of King’s Chapel.
Jimmy Doggart died October 15, 1989, aged 89 years, 266 days.