Another Ten Years in Education

Opening remarks by the President, Sir John Walton: The Lloyd Roberts Lecture is one of the major events of the Society year. It is given in rotation at the invitation of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Medical Society of London and the Royal Society of Medicine, and this year it is our turn. For those of you who do not know who Lloyd Roberts was — he died in 1920, at which time he was the Consulting Obstetric Physician, a very modern term indeed, to Manchester Royal Infirmary because, although he practised throughout his professional life as an obstetrician and gynaecologist, he was also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and was particularly interested in medical aspects of obstetrics and gynaecology. He was one of that long line of medical polymaths who distinguished British medical affairs in the last century and in the early part of this century in that he had a major interest in literary matters. Quite apart from publishing his very well known Students' Guide to the Practice of Midwifery, he also published a revised edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, and was responsible for writing a major work on The Scientific Knowledge of Dante. A great collector of art treasures, including a specially fine collection of mezzotints, glass and books, he was in many, many ways a man of outstanding breadth of interest and culture. One of the most interesting things that was said about Lloyd Roberts in a very long obituary after he died was that, even if he had died thirty years earlier, his biography would have had a very large sale. Hospital work done, he was to be found by midday standing, always standing, compact, alert, close cropped, by his consulting room fire with a glass of milk warming in the fender and, amongst the instruments on the mantelpiece, there were walnuts, which he cracked at intervals with explosive violence. These served for lunch. One of his most famous quotes, which apparently has always been remembered, was that he used to say he was not a consultant but ‘a general specialist, with a leaning towards women’, and his definition of gynaecology was ‘anything either curable or lucrative’. But everyone said that he was a born healer and it did people good merely to see him, so that he was clearly one of the most notable members of our profession of the day. Now, who could we have chosen better than Baroness Warnock to deliver this year's Lloyd Roberts Lecture? Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, subsequently Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at St Hugh's College and then later Headmistress of Oxford High School for six years, she has chaired many special enquiries of particular interest to this profession, such as the Committee of Enquiry into Special Education. She served on the Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments as Chairman until recently and we know very well of her work in chairing the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology. She has also found the time to write widely on Existentialism, Imagination and Education, and other topics. Now, if there has been an occasion when simultaneously a husband and wife have been respectively Head of House, one in Oxford and the other in Cambridge, then as a very new boy at Oxford it is not something which I personally have been aware. Interest in education makes it particularly fitting that she should have chosen tonight, following upon the lecture given in this series some fifteen years ago by Lord James of Rusholme, to talk about ‘Another ten years in education’.