Harold with two of his sons

This is Harold who died earlier this week. He is the only person I know who had a lecture theatre named after him while he was still alive.

Unusually for a Dublin surgeon, Harold was not one of the Dublin medical ‘masonry’. He was one of nine children born to Fred and Nellie Browne of County Longford, and earned his medical and surgical qualifications through application and skill rather than family connexions and the sense of entitlement that comes with them. He was one of the first Irish surgeons to collect a BTA qualification (‘been to America’ – in his case the prestigious Mayo Clinic), after which he had a long and distinguished career at The Richmond Hospital in Dublin. He retired from full-time surgery in 1987.

Harold’s care for his patients was exemplary and his surgical ‘nous’ second to none. Those who knew him in those days describe him as a hard taskmaster. Severe is a word that has been used. His standards were high and his expectations higher. I suspect that such demands would cause him problems in today’s more precious environment. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, there is no doubting the affection, admiration and respect in which he was, and is, held by those now eminent professionals who have been through his hands.

This is the man I met in when I arrived at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in January 1988. In retirement he had been given the job of Surgeon Prosector involving teaching anatomy to students two days a week in term time. I was told on the grapevine that he’d been appointed partly to keep the new Professor of Anatomy in line. That did not augur well for our relationship. Not only did I bridle at the prospect of a restraining hand, but also I doubted that a famous surgeon would be famous for being willing to submit to a 38-year-old pimply youth from Albion.

The country boy from Cumberland met the country boy from Longford. The sport-averse young Englishman met the Arsenal obsessed sagacious Irishman. We loved each other. Harold never once admonished or contradicted me, never once disagreed with anything I said or did. And so I confided in him. He admired my propensity to call a spade a bloody shovel. He loved, nay admired, my intolerance of gobbledygook: ‘we’re right behind you, Stanley’ he’d say grinning widely when I was fulminating about the latest manifestation of jargon-laden managerialism, and his face creased with laughter at what he called my ‘Rabelaisian wit’.

He was not without his own ‘Rabelaisian’ tendencies. In his teaching there poured from him a stream of aphorisms and mnemonics that would certainly have him up before the politically correct thought police today. There was plenty opportunity of course: hernias, breasts, the naughty bits, back passages and so on. A particularly memorable one was his likening the descent of the testis into the scrotum to the Israelites being led to the promised land. And this to a substantially Muslim student body still having wet dreams, or their female equivalent. Did they object? They did not. They regarded him with the same filial affection that he inspired in the rest of us.

I knew only the Father Christmas, teddy bear Harold. And I am so glad I did. My spirit will be at Merrion Church in Ballsbridge on Friday for his obsequies.

Four letter words often come to mind, but pleb isn’t one of them. I am without doubt a pleb. I have no connexions to the ruling classes. I am not of a landed family and have no land myself. Which reminds me: I heard a story, maybe apocryphal but still telling, of a man now a bishop who, when asked what his father did for a living responded ‘he doesn’t do, he owns’. As I say, I’m not one of them.

If pleb means someone from the lower social classes, then that’s pretty meaningless since in east Cumberland in the 1950s social classes didn’t really feature much. In the village there were farmers (Methodist) and there were people who lived in council houses (largely no religion). Within 10 miles there were landed gentry (C of E of course) such as the Vanes of Hutton, Whitelaws of Ennim, and Hasells of Dalemain. In Penrith it was rumoured that there were some very strange and exotic creatures: Catholics. Irish came in the 19th century to build the railway over Shap and Poles came in WW2. According to father, these people caused mayhem on Friday nights, and went to confession on Saturday, so it was all OK. There was a bit of forelock tugging. Father had been a policeman in Bradford in the 1930s, and through his work in later years with the Special Constabulary he was proud of his friendship with Lord Inglewood. But despite these later notions, we’re all thoroughly pleb so far.

Family history is still pleb. The Monkhouses were farmers and butchers; the Dobinsons (father’s mother) had aspirations certainly, but no land and no significant connexions. The Cranstons (mother’s father), a border reiver family, were butchers (and still are, famously so), and the Reids (mother’s mother) were Fife coalminers. So I’m still pleb.

I can’t remember having used the word in the playground to denigrate someone else. This is not because I was particularly virtuous—as a fat child I’d say I was more of a watchful performer—but because even though I did Latin it wasn’t a word that had any traction either way.

Of course, it’s the word playground that sums up this whole episode. It doesn’t speak well of Andrew wotsisname who comes across as a bit of a prat, and it doesn’t speak well of whoever objected to the word pleb: they should, as SWMBO says often enough to me, ‘grow a pair.’

I wondered what adjectives might I object to? Fat, smelly, untidy, ignorant, stuck up, insecure, stupid, degenerate, determined, stubborn, reactionary, unprincipled, pliable? They all leave me unmoved: some are accurate some are not. (Nice? Oh God, no, not nice, I will not tolerate being called nice.) I recall a party in Nottingham in the 1980s at which a woman, trying to insult me as gravely as she could, said I was a Conservative voter. She was a soggy champagne socialist and—of course—a Vicar’s wife. I think I told her to do something with a four letter word, not pleb.

For the record, I am not a Conservative voter. I am a Communist with me in charge.