Interview with Malcolm Gough MS FRCS, Consultant Paediatric and General Surgeon Oxford 1966-1991 David Cranston
(Wolfson College, 1983) Emeritus Associate Professor of Surgery, University of Oxford, and Consultant Urological Surgeon Oxford University Hospitals Trust
Malcolm Gough was born in 1927 but in 1937 the family moved to Sydney where General Electric of America, had sent his father to develop an Australian branch, based in Sydney. Initially the secondment was for three years but in 1940 it was neither sensible nor permitted for the family to return to England, so Malcolm’s secondary education was at Knox Grammar School in North Sydney where he became involved in rugby, swimming and lifesaving representing the school in all three. From the age of 12 at the weekends and holidays, he and his friends often went off with sandwiches for lunch on their bicycles in the morning, only to return in time for an evening meal. Similarly at other weekends he would go away with the Boy Scouts orienteering, having been provided with a sharp knife and potassium permanganate to incise and treat any snake bites. Fortunately, they were never needed, which was just as well as in later years they were shown to be useless! Spared the trauma of bombing, rationing or evacuation which affected his future wife, Sheila, the family returned to the UK in 1945 at 24 hours notice on SS Orantes which had returned Australian troops home from Europe and the Middle East. News of the atomic bombs came while on board in the Indian Ocean, and the Japanese surrender was announced on the 2nd September, the day they arrived in Bombay. The harbour was crowded with 20 to 30 ships full of troops initially prepared to sail to Burma to join the 14th Army Division, but two days later, on the now overcrowded ship they left for Southampton. Back in England, having already decided on a career in medicine, Malcolm set out to visit all the London medical schools and after several rejections he arrived unannounced at St Thomas’s hospital at midday, a critical time as Miss Robinson, the strict admissions secretary, was at lunch and the young assistant was most helpful. Colonel Thompson, the Dean, happened to have his door open, heard the exchange, and invited this fit suntanned 18-year-old in. When Miss Robinson appeared 20 minutes later her protestations were overruled and three weeks later, on 2nd October 1945 Malcolm joined the preclinical school where 40% of the intake were ex-servicemen. One, who had been in the Navy in a destroyer escorting ships in the Arctic convoys to northern Russia, became a great friend and was later best man at their wedding. He became a General Practitioner in the West Country.
26 Oxford Medicine | Spring/Summer 2022
At the end of the first year Malcolm won the Natural Science scholarship for £150 which covered the annual fee of 52 guineas for the next three years. He became a clinical student in 1948 at the inception of the NHS, and the initial female students from Cambridge joined them. For the next three years he played rugby in the front row of the scrum, and he always felt that was good training for becoming consultant surgeon! He was in the winning team of 1950, the first win for Thomas’s since 1926, and as part of the celebrations they were taken to Simpson’s in the Strand for dinner by the 1926 team, most of whom had survived the war years. His only ailment during this time was recurrent tonsillitis which led to a tonsillectomy in 1949, an uncomfortable experience relieved somewhat at the time by the secretary of the medical school, Brigadier Crockford, congratulating him for winning a British Medical Association prize essay for medical students and saying that the medical school would be pleased to pay his expenses to go to the BMA meeting in Harrogate. He qualified in May 1951 and a six month Casualty Office post was followed by six months as a house surgeon where, with some apprehension, he was responsible as an anaesthetist for a children’s tonsil list at the nearby Waterloo hospital using, (as he describes it) ‘open ether and hope!’ Saturday after lunch to Sunday evening on alternate weekends was the only time off, and at the end of his year at Thomas’s he married Sheila – unusual at the time for it was then expected that marriage should following training not accompany it. A short service commission in the RAF followed, first to RAF Scampton, the home of the 617 Dambusters Squadron, and then Berlin where their first child Ian was born. In a latter attachment to a flying station in West Germany he persuaded one of the fighter pilots to take him up for his first experience of high-speed flight. He ended up with the rank of Squadron Leader and frequently used the facilities of the RAF club in Piccadilly, often with Sheila, when home from Germany. Back in England, a Pott’s fracture put an end to his rugby career for St Thomas’s Hospital medical School, but at the same time he learned that he had passed the FRCS after lining up in a queue in the late afternoon outside the examination hall, giving his number to one of the college staff and just being told “pass”, as opposed to “fail”! Quite an introduction to the Royal College of Surgeons. A one year locum at St Thomas’s and Great Ormond Street gave him the privilege of working for Sir Denis Browne in the seven months before his retirement. In 1960 he was awarded a Fulbright Grant which took him to Harvard for a year as a research fellow in Boston, taking the family out on the Queen Mary and returning home on the Queen Elizabeth.
