His parents, ‘just honest, simple folk’, could not afford him a higher education.
It was his work as a technician in the public health department of Birmingham, for which he had trained the hard way in technical schools and evening classes, which attracted the attention of his chief.
Sir John Robertson encouraged him to enter the Birmingham Medical School in 1918 when he was already aged thirty and had given distinguished service for four years as an army radiographer in the First World War.
[1]He studied with Sir John Robertson, the Medical Officer of Health of Birmingham.
As a radiologist and a demonstrator in living anatomy, he published 1934 his famous textbook The Radiology of Joints and Bones and thereby was acknowledged as one of the world's authorities on skeletal diseases.