Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

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OBITUARIES
Exhibition to King’s.As John was only 16, he had to defer his entry for a year,
a year he spent happily teaching chemistry at Sevenoaks.
At Cambridge, John came into contact with teachers such as Kendal Dixon and
Donald Cater, who inspired him to undertake research in pathology.
Conversations with fellow students and life at King’s also made John interested
in an eclectic range of other subjects ranging from maths and physics
to literature and music. John published his first of over 250 academic papers,
but more importantly it was also at Cambridge that he met his future wife,
student Kate Tombs, whom he married in 1972. John continued to achieve
excellent academic results and received awards, among them the Barcroft
Physiology Prize.
After graduating, John and Kate pursued clinical studies at the Middlesex
Hospital, and then went on to houseman posts in Hull. In 1975, the couple
moved to Birmingham where John took up a post as Senior House Officer at the
East Birmingham Hospital.The following year he was appointed Registrar (later
Lecturer) at the Birmingham University Medical School at Queen Elizabeth
Hospital. Here he worked with Robert Curran, with whom he was to publish a
number of scientific works. In 1983 John gained his MD from Cambridge for
work on the enzyme histochemistry of lymphomas. Despite the heavy
workload, he continued his academic research even after he had moved back to
East Birmingham Hospital in 1983 to work as a Consultant Histopathologist.
The contributions of John to the field of pathology were many and much
appreciated by his colleagues. In 1998 he was awarded not only an Honorary
Chair in Pathology at the University of Birmingham but also a Membership
without examination of the Royal College of Physicians. In 2004 the Royal
College of Pathologists also appointed John as an Examiner.
Despite the substantial contribution that John made in his professional life he
still had time left to develop a broad range of interests.The more flamboyant
ones included pyrotechnics and the construction of model rockets, but he also
cultivated humbler hobbies such as perusing National Trust gardens and
gleefully educating friends and family in the correct usage of the semicolon.