

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