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| 31 Mar 2017 | |
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| SMITH, Martin Graham Milner, Dr Died on 22 March, aged 75. The following obituary was published in The Times: Martin Smith’s steadying presence as the medical director of Royal Surrey Country Hospital in Guildford belied his ferocious competitiveness. He played numerous sports as an amateur masquerading as a professional and always refused to leave the court, pitch or course through injury. Not only would he slow down a round of golf by hanging on the branch of a tree to straighten his troublesome back, but he would also issue challenges to contest a game of squash at 3am. He even once ordered Colin Cowdrey to run on the cricket field, a quite unthinkable command. Smith’s intellect was such that he found simple bridge conventions too restricting – to the extent that his friends had to invent terminology to keep him entertained. This included an illegal and pointless convention whereby the sole purpose was to hope a mistake was made and money forfeited to each of the other three players. Other additions to the customarily well constricted rules of bridge included saying: “Have you been on a cruise recently?” This meant that his opponents were getting too close to look at his cards. This ruse was never identified. He won squash and rackets half blues at Cambridge and, at the advanced age of 38, became captain of Guildford and Godalming Rugby Club. Sport provided an outlet away from his medical work, which included management of liver failure and research into immunology when transplantation began in the early 1970’s. He then founded the first hepatitis C clinic in Surrey, having become one of the youngest hospital consultants in Britain, with a particular interest in gastroenterology and liver disease, when he was 33. King’s College London, where Smith was based after qualifying as a doctor, was the focal point of liver transplants. “Martin was a senior registrar and lecturer and was selecting patients from all over the world. It was very technically demanding work and set his career up well,” said Mike Bailey, his first houseman. Not the least of the difficulties Smith faced was in coping with the number of patients who suffered rejection of organs. “Martin was a rounded, multitalented person, observant of people and events, happy in his own skin. Everything came easily to him, including sport and playing the piano. If people were being pushy or above themselves, he would make a comment through his cynical sense of humour, which set others laughing. He did not suffer fools at all and could see through pretence,” Professor Bailey said. “Even when he was dying, he was humorous about not wanting to go into intensive care. ‘You don’t want to go in there,’ he said ‘you might not come out.’ Shortly after admission to hospital he had a fall and bruised his forehead, promoting him to ping a texted photograph captioned ‘Gorbachev.’ He knew how ill he was and ended his own treatment,” Bailey said. Martin Graham Milner Smith was born a son of a lawyer who became town clerk of Lewisham. He was educated at Tonbridge School, where he excelled at all sports, and at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied medicine and was a contemporary and friend of Mike Brearley, a future England cricket captain. “He was a very attractive man, racy, with a quick intelligence and a disarming chuckle,” recalled Brearley. “Martin came to my family home in Ealing more than once and pointed out to me how small it was, how close-knit we were; I remember how asthmatic he was and I think he found it hard to breathe there.” Nevertheless, Smith’s sport was unaffected. He and Richard Gracey, his rackets partner, won the British amateur doubles championship five times, while Smith won the British amateur singles in 1970 and 1971. They also played for their old boys’ cricket XI, winning the Cricketer Cup in 1984 and celebrating raucously on a day out given by the sponsors, Moët & Chandon, at their chateau in Épernay. He and Gracey, finding that the portentous cricket writer EW “Jim” Swanton had left his brown hat on a peg outside the dining room, filled it with urine. Smith liked nothing more than pricking pomposity. “I remember Martin drank a gallon of champagne on the private plane going over – and was so drunk he could not make his speech as captain,” David Frith, the cricket historian, said, “Not that the hosts noticed as his brother took his place. He was two people in one: this highly regarded physician whom everybody spoke well of at Guildford – and then this wicketkeeper shouting every time a ball was bowled in club cricket and who seemed to think it was his job to inflict migraines on the batsmen. It was verbal clatter. I can only assume his work left him with a lot of pressure that he needed to release.” Nor were eminent cricketers spared. Cowdrey, a revered figure at Tonbridge School, was never the slimmest of sportsmen. He would field in the slips and leave running to the boundary to others, but Smith, who was leading the Tonbridgians, was having none of that. “In this form of cricket, Colin, we chase after the ball,” he told the former England captain. Even Fred Trueman had not addressed him so robustly. “Martin was larger than life: difficult, cantankerous, argumentative, irreverent, childish, endearing, compassionate, caring and extremely talented. He loved life and lived at three times the normal speed of mere mortals,” said Dr Charles Godden. He was certainly not inhibited by sensitivity, and his sense of competitiveness could extend even to his family. Smith was playing beach cricket on the Isle of Wight with some of his children and grandchildren, a year after his diagnosis of the lung disease from which he eventually died, and had to be transported by helicopter to hospital with breathing problems after attempting to run out a grandson with a pick-up and diving throw. His explanation was, “Well, the little devil tried to take a short run to me at cover, I wasn’t going to have that!” When on a cricket tour of Sri Lanka, Smith – who was never averse to a challenge – took a flying leap into what, unknown to him, was the shallow end of a swimming pool, and broke his leg. He declined any treatment in Sri Lanka and, after hobbling around for the final days of the tour, returned home in some considerable pain and discomfort. He wanted the leg to be re-set only by his trusted and known colleagues at the Royal Surrey County Hospital. As medical director at Guildford he developed a good working relationship with management, despite his somewhat irreverent perspective on career pathways. He would challenge the chief executive to a game of squash in the early hours: the next day neither could remember who had won. Smith met his wife, Judy Haslam, when she was a trainee nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital and he was a junior doctor at Lambeth Hospital. They were married in 1967 and had three children: Jake, who is an insurance executive; Thomas, a finance director; and Peter, who works in the financial services industry. He was fiercely loyal to his friends and fellow sportsmen. On one occasion, he took a day off to give a character reference for a member of his cricket club near Guildford who had been caught burgling a local property by the police. Smith’s concern was not only for the waywardness of a team-mate but, he privately admitted, his motivation was also to keep him out of prison because he was a decent off-spin bowler. (MH 54-60) |
