Across the pond

To the parish church of St Marylebone, a vast building with gilt figures around the dome, right turn from the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park, and over the ever busy Marylebone Road. I am there to go to a memorial service for William Ian McDonald, described by the obituary in The Independent as ‘Ambassador for British neurology’. Maybe the headline writer had a weakness for irony, because Ian was actually a New Zealander, born in Wellington, schooled in Dunedin by the legendary Archie McIntyre. But he spent the biggest part of his life in London, and there did most of his important work as a doctor at the hospital in Queen Square and as a professor of London University.

His particular specialty became the treatment of multiple sclerosis. He devised what became known as the McDonald rules for the treatment of sufferers from that illness in hospices. But the several learned professors who spoke at the service paid tribute to his personal qualities, and particularly his capacity for friendship. This was quite as important to them as his many academic achievements. Unlike many university professors who work for hours on their research, he always found time for his students and his colleagues. He was a true pro at what the current academic jargon calls mentoring.

I can vouch for that because he was one of those rare human beings who actually listened to what I said, even when it was the late evening and I had had rather more drink than the doctors think is good for me. Much of what was said at the memorial service and much of what is written in The Independent was news to me because Ian was a modest man, who did not trumpet his own achievements. And I met him, not as part of my professional duties, but because he was a friend of a close friend of ours.

He was also quite a private man, so that it was something of a shock when I arrived at the church to find it full with several hundred people, who knew him. They were nearly all those, whom from my Stafford Road, Wolverhampton perspective, I consider posh. They wore suits and ties and talked proper English, although some of them, like Ian, were New Zealanders.

The Independent obituary will tell you of his professional achievements. But the speaker who most caught my attention was the last Professor to mount the pulpit. He told an anecdote of how Ian, after dinner with a glass of whisky in his hand, had fallen asleep in the middle of a good story. He woke up a few minutes later and picked up the story at precisely the same point.

Not a standard conformist human being.

The St Marylebone vicar, in his bidding prayer, urged us all to join with Almighty God and ‘rejoice in a live lived abundantly; in a life, like Ian’s, lived to the full. Amen.’

This is Church of England speak for saying he enjoyed sex. ‘And with his partner, Stanley’. Because Ian had realised, as one of the earlier speakers said, that his sexual orientation was different from most of the people in the agrarian town of Dunedin. When he was studying there in the 1950s homosexuality was not only not talked about in Dunedin society but it was illegal. So one of Ian’s heroes was Wolfenden of the Wolfenden report. And it took ten years, as one speaker reminded us, for the Wolfenden report to reach the British statute book.

There were no readings from Wolfenden at the service, but there were two from Proust, whose writings helped Ian to understand himself. The final one I will quote in full.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connection with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose timetable, hour by hour, has been settled in advance. One insists on one’s daily outing, so that in a month’s time one will have had the necessary ration of fresh air; one has hesitated over which coat to take, which cabman to call; one is in the cab, the whole day lies before one, short because one must be back home early, as a friend is come to see one; one hopes it will be as fine again tomorrow; and has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one on another plane, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance in a few minutes’ time…

Ian would have enjoyed that.