Born: 
12/04/1933
Died: 
14/02/2006
Specialty: 
Occupational Medicine
Designatory Letters: 
MB Camb 1957,MRCP Edin 1966, MRCP Lond 1966, MRCP Glasg 1966, Fellowship 1978, MFOM 1980

(Contributed by Dr John A Mathews)

Jeff was born in Timperley, the only child of a Lancashire textile manufacturer. He boarded at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, where he excelled in a wide range of sports becoming captain of cricket. With deferment of national service he went direct from school to Jesus College, Cambridge and read Natural Sciences, a normal procedure for medical students in that era. At a time when the University was producing a number of test cricketers he was not successful in the Cambridge cricket trials. This being a six day a week activity in the season he was thus able to concentrate on other activities in his three years as an undergraduate.

He went on to do his clinical training at the (now Royal) London Hospital, where he resumed his cricketing activities captaining the Hospital eleven, and qualified in 1957. He did house officer and registrar posts at the London and West London hospitals and recognising the necessity of becoming a member of a Royal College of Physicians sat the examinations of the Edinburgh, Glasgow and London Colleges passing all three simultaneously. He was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1976.

He served as medical officer to Shell International Petroleum in Brunei twice, where he was captain of the Panaga Golf Club, Oman, and Nigeria, and became Chief Medical Officer at their London headquarters. He retired in 1988 age 55.

In retirement he continued his sporting activities as a serious cricket watcher and on the golf course. In the course of his travels he had also become a lepidopteran, though how butterflies negotiated his pipe smoke remains a mystery. He had a ready sense of humour and well balanced sense of priorities and judgment.

He was twice married, first to Ellen who died in 1990, and then to Jane, whom he had known from his student days in 1992. He leaves two sons, both medical practitioners, and a daughter by his first marriage. He died whilst swimming off the coast of Australia.