Obituary

Hugh Faulkner

Unlikely heroes are the most inspiring. Hugh Faulkner, the left wing general practitioner who died on April 18th, was one of these. In the twenty years that I knew him he was a revolutionary with a soft style - rotund and mostly affable, sometimes positively jolly, occasionally tired and resigned, always working steadily to promote his two hobby horses: NHS general practice and medical trade unionism.

The young Hugh Faulkner joined the blackshirts to spy on them for the Communist Party. In the Second World War his contact with Italy and the Communist partisans launched him further into postwar left politics and trade unionism, and in later life allowed him to treat Italy as ‘home’. He remained in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and later the Italian Communist Party, and outlived them both. When Communist politics died of exhaustion, Hugh did what he always did — made the best of a bad job, salvaged what he could and joined Democratic Left.

As a leading member of the Medical Practitioners Union, a small craft union mainly based in general practice, Hugh steered the organisation through an anti-Communist phase at the start of the Cold War, lead it into the mainstream of industrial unionism through merger with the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) and promoted it as a left wing think tank that pressurised the then stolidly reactionary BMA — a role that it retains today.

Unlike some contemporaries, Hugh did not make a fetish of medical science, nor did he become sectarian and evangelical. His medicine was both parochial and deeply political, and he retained an ability to accommodate the mundane and the odd in an unruffled way. Strange events and stories in his North London practice that would shock the inexperienced might provoke a wry smile from Hugh. Visitors to his remote home in Italy were instructed to ‘turn right at the burnt-out Volkswagen and keep away from the goats’, as if everyone always navigated this way.

When he developed cancer and was told of his poor prognosis, he took up a macrobiotic diet with all the scepticism of an allopath, and seemed surprised about the remission of the malignancy. His life was ‘business as usual’ until soon before his death — plans were made for trips to scientific conferences and for research plans in Italy, and new projects for promoting healthy exercise amongst retired people, and for creating telephone help-lines providing medical and welfare advice for rural areas, were discussed with enthusiasm. I can imagine him now, telling me off gently for being surprised at his death and still having naive expectations after all these years, before muttering something about making haste slowly, and adding almost as an afterthought a suggestion along the lines, ‘don’t mourn, organise’. May a little of his patience and his persistence rub off on all of us.