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

142
OBITUARIES
It may have been the Choir School that instilled in Larry the love of music that
was to remain with him throughout his life. In later years, he and his wife Esca
were stalwart members of the Dartington Community Choir, many of whom
made up the throng who sang at his funeral.
Larry’s enjoyment of his education should be understood in the context of his
never-failing optimism – friends speculate that had he been sent to a borstal,
he would have found a way to be positive about it. But after finishing his
education at Westminster School, Laurence returned to King’s where he spent
some of his happiest years. On leaving the College, he was stationed in
Germany with the Royal Artillery on his National Service, where he learned to
swear. He resumed his medical training on return to civilian life, and
completed his degree at the Middlesex Hospital. First Larry became a GP, but
then moved back to London to specialise in microbiology. It was this field to
which he devoted his intellectual passion, spending 25 years as a consultant
microbiologist at Torbay Hospital. Larry was the hospital’s first full-time
microbiologist, and had a hand in pioneering research as a council member
of the Association of Clinical Pathologists and a member of the editorial board
of Clinical Pathology.
Foremost amongst Larry’s interests outside the hospital were his loving wife
Esca (née Drury) and his three children Anne, Catherine and Crispin. Aside
from the campanology in which he and Esca delighted, Larry was a parish
councillor, loved sailing and old cars and went skiing each January. Between
Larry’s enthusiastic pursuit of these activities, he found time to tour far and
wide responding to the continuing interest in his father’s work. Even towards
the end of Friedrich Hayek’s life, his son had begun to take on certain duties
for him; for example it was Larry who accepted the Presidential Medal of
Freedom from George Bush in 1991. Larry transported a weighty gold Nobel
Prize past bemused customs officials the world over, alongside manuscripts
including that of The Road to Serfdom. Larry died on the morning of his 70th
birthday, 15 July 2004, having recently returned from a visit to meet Austrian
dignitaries at the Hayek Institute in Vienna.