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10

11

I was privileged to have a clinic next to the

pioneers of pacemaking in heart surgery.

Armed with a decent undergraduate

education from two of the great London

hospitals, I went on to house surgeons’

posts at Charing Cross in Ear, Nose

& Throat, Plastic Surgery and then

Radiotherapy, before progressing to

Registrar in Oral Surgery at St George’s,

before taking on the same role at The Royal

Marsden and The Royal Dental Hospitals.

That step was leading towards being a

Consultant in Oral Surgery, but I had been

fortunate to meet a colleague who was

the President of the Student Union at the

Royal, one Michael Furness, and our careers

were to come together and take a different

path. He had a similar training and we had

met at King’s in the Strand doing our 2nd

MB. We decided to practice dentistry in the

evenings at No 6 Lower Sloane Street to

fund our medical studentship. He and two

other students then joined me in a flat in

Sloane Square. My dear mother had given

me £2500 to buy somewhere to live when

my father tragically died in Guy’s Hospital

on the very day I qualified. It was a tough

time. We ran an emergency dental service

at night linked to all the London casualty

departments who had no such cover and

took home £10 per treatment usually from

patients who had been in extreme pain.

Our flat at No 12 Eaton Mansions

became well known for its dinner parties

where we even entertained the hospital

consultants and one night even invited

dancers from The Eve Club to do a cabaret

for them. After that dinner I walked one of

the consultants, Terry Blennerhassett, back

home across Belgravia to No 31 Wilton

Place, where he also practised. He too had

both qualifications. I had already done

a locum consultancy for him at Charing

Cross and I think I must have impressed

him because out of the blue he offered me

the opportunity to buy his dental practice

because he had decided to retire early.

It was a golden opportunity to run my

own private clinic, actually a very serious

business involving huge overheads, and

at that time of course all on borrowed

money. But I would be able to do all the

dentistry and oral surgery I wanted to, to

the very best degree of excellence, with no

restrictions fromNHS bureaucracy and

committees - this was right up my street

and I invited Michael Furness to join me

there as a professional partner.

I managed to raise the money to buy

the practice for the princely sum of

£15,000 - exactly the sum I had managed

to sell my flat for. I guess 31 Wilton

Place is now probably worth more like

£15 million but I have long since sold,

after 38 years in practice, and changed

career which I did when I was just 70.

The practice is still there of course and

is one of the oldest dental practices

in London having started out at No 1

Hanover Square in 1842 and moved to

Belgravia in 1954.

Summer

2015

Margaret Thatcher and Neil in her office