James Hamilton Doggart
James Hamilton Doggart (22 January 1900 – 15 October 1989) was a leading ophthalmologist,[1] lecturer, writer, cricketer,[2] and a member of the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group.
Remembering his childhood, he wrote: Motor cars were rare, slow and often out of action, so that we had plenty of scope for spinning-tops, games with marbles and cherry-stones, tipcat, and a bowler and hoop… Riding on a milk cart was a special treat.
(Reflections in a Family Mirror, Red House, 2002) [1] Doggart's first year at King's College, Cambridge was spent in the shadow of war, helped him to learn that lesson.
There were only ten undergraduates at King's that year, including a seriously wounded soldier, two choral scholars, and two visiting students from India and China.
His literary abilities were exploited with the job of keeping code systems and other confidential books up to date, and with the unenviable task of censoring letters.
[citation needed] If he was lucky to escape a German submarine attack in the Channel, he was even more fortunate to survive influenza, contracted while on leave in Cambridge.
Thanks to a kindly nurse who gave him extra quantities of castor oil, Jimmy recovered within a month, just in time to celebrate the Armistice declaration.
A few had gone up in 1913, joining the Forces at the outbreak of the War… John Maynard Keynes resigned from the Treasury, violently disapproving of Lloyd George's policies at the Versailles Peace Conference, and got back to King’s for the May term of 1919… The Fox-trot, the One-step and the Waltz dominated the dancing world, and the girls of Girton and Newnham, duly chaperoned in those conventional times, were ardently courted… There were the Pitt Club, the Hawks, the Footlights and a host of friends at King’s and in other colleges, and games of rugger.
[4](ibid, 2002) It was in Keynes' rooms at King's where friend and writer Peter Lucas introduced Jimmy to a secret society known as the Apostles.
[5] Archived 10 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine Founded in 1829, this elite group of intellectual Jedis boasted Alfred Tennyson and Rupert Brooke amongst its past members.
During Jimmy's association, fellow Apostles included philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, writer Lytton Strachey, Soviet spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, novelist E.M. Forster and future Provosts of King's Jack Sheppard and Noel Annan.
Jimmy forged some of his closest friendships among the Apostles, who brought him into contact with leading lights of the Bloomsbury group, such as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington.
[7] [8](ibid, 2002) Jimmy's intellectual and personal adventures deepened his love for Cambridge and, specifically, King's College—the evening light on the Cam; the naked opening note of Once in Royal David's City; January snow on the crown of Henry VI's statue.
His commitment to medicine was strengthened by a six-month stint as a casualty officer at the Royal Northern Hospital: There were all manner of injuries, ranging from people brought in dead from a motor crash, down to the cuts and bruises.
The formal words of welcome were pronounced by Sir Cuthbert Wallace who, as Dean of the Medical School of St. Thomas', had rebuked me a few years earlier for being so frivolous as to go off to South America before I had qualified.
The adventure came about when the eminent scientist Joseph Barcroft invited him to join an Anglo-American expedition to Peru to study the physiology of mountain sickness.
In Peru, they spent the entire winter, huddled in a converted railway baggage car at Cerro de Pasco, 14,000 feet above sea level.
Jimmy's love of travel started with childhood seaside holidays in the north of England, the pierrot troupe on Saltburn beach remembered with particular pleasure.
He loved Scotland, where his daughter Sonia would spend much of her life: An enchanting land, offering hills to climb, burns to cross, glorious scones, cookies and cinnamon balls and of course boats, especially the kinds that you could propel standing up, by means of a single oar resting on a concave notch in the stern.
He played cricket for Cambridge University [10] and for St Thomas's Hospital, where his fast right arm led the team to two successive victories in the inter-hospital Cup Final.
At age five, while attending Westholm School for Girls: I felt the first pangs of love, especially for the three fascinating Errington sisters, one word from any of whom would produce an ecstasy of tongue-tied blushes.
(The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2 1920–24, Penguin, 1981, p. 8) [11] In 1919, Jimmy became romantically involved with a girl at Newnham, but the engagement was short-lived: the attractions of a single life were still too great.
He ran between consultancy appointments at Moorfields, St George's and Great Ormond Street hospitals, and still managed to find time to serve a growing private practice.
At conferences, through exchange programs, by written correspondence, and as a member of the Order of the Knights of St. John, Jimmy forged links between doctors and eye specialists around the world – from the Soviet Union to Australia, Argentina to the United States.
Leo gave birth to her and Jimmy's only child, Anthony Hamilton Doggart, in 1940, and moved to a cottage near Marlborough, safely tucked away from German bombs.
Leo loved laughing and gossiping with her friends, the closest of whom were Nora David, who later spoke for Labour on education in the House of Lords, and Joyce Carey, the actress at the centre of Noël Coward's circle.
It was a magically timeless place, with palatial gravel paths and rose gardens, a Saxon chapel, and a terrace designed in the 17th century by John Evelyn.
The classics provided an escape from the realities of the Second World War: I was spending two and a half hours in the train six days a week, practically all that time reading Homer and other Greek authors.
(ibid, 2002) Jimmy and Leo shared many literary 'friends', including Jane Austen, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling and the Brontë sisters.
His listeners, attached to the charity Calibre, rewarded him with a steady stream of fan mail, appreciative of his performances as Mr. Darcy or Charles Strickland.
