Born: 
27/05/1936
Died: 
26/01/2009
Designatory Letters: 
MB St And 1960, MRCP Edin 1965, FRCP Edin 1977

(Contributed by his sister, Susannah)

Alexander Leslie Honeyman was born on 27 May 1936 at the Cottage Hospital in St Andrews, where his father was Professor of Oriental Languages. In 1949, he entered Fettes College from New Park School as a Foundation scholar.

Leslie’s interests soon gravitated from Classics to Science. At age 17, he was offered a place at Cambridge to read Biological Sciences. Deemed too young to take it up straight away, in the intervening year he decided on Medicine instead, following in his late uncle’s footsteps. In later years he remarked that he hadn’t wanted ‘to spend the rest of my life looking into test tubes’! In the VI Form at Fettes, in 1954, he gave a presentation to the Science Society, entitled ‘Lung Cancer and the Physiological Effects of Smoking’. That year he was awarded the school’s Alexander Begg Memorial Scholarship.

Leslie entered St Andrews University on a Russell Scholarship. After three lively years of student life at the Bute and beyond, his clinical studies were at Queen’s College, Dundee, with ward rounds and housemanship at Maryfield Hospital; he graduated MB ChB in 1960.

After qualifying, he took the opportunity then open to St Andrews graduates to spend six months working as a doctor with the Kuwait Oil Company. In 1961, he went out there in company with his classmate Stuart Hampton. He completed a second six-month stint with Hector Chawla and then travelled widely in the North-West Frontier and northern India, Iran and the Middle East before returning to Dundee, to a lectureship in Pharmacology under Professor R B Hunter. He passed his MRCP in 1965 and was elected FRCP (Edinburgh) in 1977.

In 1967, he went back in the Gulf with his wife Margaret and baby daughter, as Director of Medical Services in Dubai. At that time the emirate was a British Protectorate, one of the Trucial States. He was based initially at the colonial-style Al-Maktoum Hospital. (Poignantly, it closed in early January and is to become a museum of local health services.)

In the early 1970s, as Dubai burgeoned into a modern city, Leslie oversaw, from blueprint to staffing, the planning and development of the new Rashid Hospital. They moved to New Zealand in 1978, where Leslie held the post of Medical Superintendent of Auckland Hospital Board. He returned to Scotland in 1989 as Medical Director, Greater Glasgow Health Board retiring in 2001.

His piping skills, learned at school and then honed in the TA Pipe Band at university, faded in time. Classical music, history, and political debate were constants. Whilst living overseas, he and the family took up sailing.

Leslie died in Glasgow on 26 January 2009. He is survived by daughter Katherine (Mrs Gerard Winter) in New Zealand and son James in London, and three grandchildren. His surviving sister Susannah lives in Edinburgh.