the times | Friday July 31 2020 1GM 49
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Comic actor known for
playing loveable bores
Fred Willard
Page 51
Roger Williams liked to keep active; below, speaking to the press when George Best (with his wife, Alex) was a patient
One morning in 2000, Roger Williams
was working through his daily clinic
when the receptionist came in and an-
nounced: “I’ve got George Best waiting
to see you.” Williams’s face went blank:
“Who’s George Best?” he replied.
Williams, who in May 1968 had been
on the team that carried out the first
successful liver transplant in Europe at
Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge,
later explained that he was more of a
tennis man than a soccer fan. “Of
course I knew who he was, but when
you’re in the consulting room you don’t
realise the link,” he told The Times.
“The penny did not immediately drop.”
He was not alone: on one occasion
Williams was treating a four-star
general in the same hospital as Best. As
he prepared to be discharged, this
former commander-in-chief of the
British Army of the Rhine noticed the
world’s press gathering outside and
assumed that word had got out that he
was in peril, only to discover that Fleet
Street’s finest did not regard him as the
star attraction.
Shortly after that first meeting with
Best, Williams made a public appeal to
the nation’s bar staff to avoid serving his
famous patient. In 2002 he gave the
footballer a lifesaving liver transplant at
the Cromwell Hospital, waiving his fees
for the bankrupt player, but the benefits
were short-lived. “We tried very hard
with George and he did very well,” Will-
iams later explained, but admitted that
Best (obituary, November 26, 2005)
had not always followed his advice.
Williams spent his career at the fore-
front of hepatology, developing new
treatments and procedures and pub-
lishing more than 2,500 scientific pa-
pers, review articles and book chapters.
“I’ve always wanted to be expert and
top, I suppose, being a bit presumptu-
ous,” he told The Lancet in 2013. “I’ve
always wanted to be in medicine doing
the best, as it were, and not having to re-
fer to somebody else to do something
special; I’m never happier than when
I’m working on and trying out new
advances.”
Many of the modern hepatologist’s
weapons were, to some extent, honed
by Williams, a devoted clinician. Nev-
ertheless, with more than 7,700 deaths
from alcoholic liver disease each year in
the UK according to the British Liver
Trust, he and his colleagues in the field
had their work cut out. “With alcohol,
obesity and smoking it’s a really terrible
scenario,” said Williams, who in 2013
was appointed to lead a Lancet commis-
sion on liver disease. During lockdown
he contributed to its seventh annual
report.
He spoke out against excessive drink-
ing, calling on politicians to restrict the
availability of alcohol. When he felt
they were not listening he produced a
cirrhotic liver to illustrate his point, but
to his dismay the impact remained neg-
ligible. “It’s ironic that we worry about
the toxicity of synthetic chemicals but
have few qualms about swallowing the
poison known as alcohol,” he said,
describing liver disease as “a public
health crisis that has been unfolding
before our eyes for a number of years”.
Although Williams rarely treated
children, he was alarmed at the number
who were suffering from cirrhosis,
which is normally the last stage of liver
preneur. In 1959 he was recruited by
Dame Sheila Sherlock, the pioneer of
hepatology as a specialist field, to join
her team at the Royal Free Hospital in
north London, spending a year in 1962
on a Rockefeller fellowship in New
York. He left in 1966 to set up the
Institute of Liver Studies at King’s
College Hospital, London, where two
years later he and Sir Roy Calne started
the country’s first liver transplant
programme. Over the years he main-
tained a friendly rivalry with Sherlock,
who remained at the Royal Free. “If I
hadn’t had the Royal Free to compete
with, maybe King’s wouldn’t have been
so good,” he mused of the competitive
spirit that drove him.
Despite the demands of his patients,
Williams often found himself raising
money to fund his team’s research. “I
spend some time every day looking for
fresh sources of income,” he told The
Times in frustration in 1975, adding that
he feared his best young medical gradu-
ates were being lured overseas.His first marriage was dissolved in
1977 and the following year he married
Stephanie de Laszlo, a former nun
turned solicitor. They had met when
she was working for Lord Goodman,
who had been raising funds for
Williams’s research unit at King’s and
she had been asked to stand in for the
honorary secretary of the Liver
Research Trust. “He was an unlikely
Cupid, but nevertheless liked to re-
count his role,” Williams wrote after
Goodman’s death in 1995. Williams and
de Laszlo had three children:
Clemency, a meteorologist and physics
teacher; Aidan, a film producer; and
Octavia, a social housing director.
Williams was chairman of Conserva-
tive Health, contributing to the party’s
health and social care policies, and
enjoyed dining at the Athenaeum Club.
He was a man of no faith but with
plenty of passions, including visitingGrange Park Opera and sailing in the
Solent, both for pleasure and competi-
tively during Cowes Week. Sometimes
he combined the two by singing snatch-
es of his favourite arias into the wind as
he tore across the water.
His mother had helped him to buy his
first yacht, which like all those he subse-
quently sailed was named Jos of Ham-
ble, in honour of the city where she had
married and the town where she
worked. He was a proud member of the
Royal Yacht Squadron and the Royal
Ocean Racing Club, and often took his
grandchildren, medical students and
junior doctors on the water. “It is
important to have a life outside [work]
and I am someone who likes to do
things rather than spectate, which is
why I did not immediately realise who
George Best was when he first came to
me,” he explained.
Williams also acquired a farm near
Salisbury, in Wiltshire, which he took to
with enthusiasm. Until recently he was
riding around the grounds on his trac-
tor. He was a huge tennis fan, playing
with a professional player on the pri-
vate court at his home, and was a regu-
lar visitor to Wimbledon. He rarely
drank because he was usually on call.
After retiring from King’s in 1996,
Williams established a new liver dis-
ease institute at University College
London and two years later initiated
the first programme of adult-to-adult
living donor liver transplantation in the
country. Well into his eighties, he
remained immersed in his work. “I still
do my 12 hours a day,” he said in 2013,
three years before returning to King’s to
continue his research at a new facility
there. “I’ve never done anything differ-
ent, and I hope I keep on doing it until
I keel over backwards.” He got his wish:
four weeks ago he suffered a heart
attack while playing tennis at home and
was taken to hospital by air ambulance,
but never recovered.Professor Roger Williams, CBE,
hepatologist, was born on August 28,- He died from the effects of a heart
attack on July 26, 2020, aged 88
‘I did not realise who
George Best was when
he first came to me’
Obituaries
Professor Roger Williams
Leading liver specialist who worked on Europe’s first transplant and found himself in the spotlight when George Best was his patient
NEWS GROUP, ROGER WILLIAMS/WENNdisease before death. “It’s an awful
thought that children are running this
kind of risk, but some now no longer
seem to exercise or even walk to
school,” he said in 2005.
Despite never having seen Best per-
form on the field, he and Best became
close, with the tall, slim and well-spo-
ken Williams becoming the compas-
sionate face describing for the cameras
the slow demise of Britain’s first
soccer superstar. He took
part in an edition of This
Is Your Life in 2003
with Michael Aspel
when Best was the
subject, describing
the footballer as a
model patient who
“never com-
plained even dur-
ing the most diffi-
cult circumstances”.
Williams added: “He
is such a nice man,
always calling me Doc.”
Roger Stanley Williams
was born in Southampton in
1931, the only child of Stanley Williams,
an estate agent, and his wife Doris (née
Clatworthy), who ran JR Williams,
sailmakers, in nearby Hamble. They
had married in Jos, a city in Nigeria,
later settling on the south coast of
Britain. Young Roger enjoyed growing
up surrounded by naval operations,
notably the vast preparations for the
D-Day landings of June 1944.
He was educated at St Mary’s
College, Southampton, but as a child
suffered from diphtheria and while
being treated in hospital became so
fascinated by the doctors’ work that hevowed to pursue a
career in medi-
cine. He studied
at London Hospi-
tal Medical Col-
lege (now known
as Barts) and after
National Service with
the Royal Army Medi-
cal Corps, where his inter-
est in liver disease was fired by
treating soldiers at the Queen Alexan-
dra Military Hospital at Millbank, he
joined the Royal Postgraduate Medical
School at Hammersmith before taking
up house appointments in London hos-
pitals.
While a student he had met Lindsay
Elliott and they were married in 1954.
They had five children: Bob, a journal-
ist; Anne, an artist; Fiona, a costume
designer with the Manhattan Transfer
and the Rolling Stones, who died from
a rare heart complaint 14 years ago;
Debbie, an HIV consultant with the
NHS in Brighton; and Andy, an entre-ritains first
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