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Spalding set up an Oxford fellowshipIn 1952 John Spalding and colleagues
from Oxford paid a visit to Copenhagen,
which was in the grip of Europe’s worst
polio outbreak. The city possessed only
one iron lung for its population of
1.2 million and, faced with a mounting
medical emergency, its doctors had
developed a new way of treating polio
patients who suffered from temporary
paralysis and could not breathe.
It involved pushing air directly into
the lungs of intubated patients, rather
than relying on the creation of negative
pressure to draw air into the chest, as
iron lungs did. The process was not
mechanised. Instead it relied on hun-
dreds of medical students working in re-
lays, who kept patients alive by squeez-
ing air-filled bags by hand. It was crude
but proved far more effective than en-
casing polio victims in iron lungs, which
had a mortality rate of 80 per cent.
Spalding and his colleagues Ritchie
Russell and Alex Crampton Smith, who
were dealing with a polio epidemic back
in England, lacked a ready pool of med-
ical students; together with the techni-
cian Edgar Schuster, they devised a ma-
chine to do the work. The East Radcliffe
ventilator used a bicycle gear box, com-
bined with an electric motor and a set of
weights, to mechanically pump oxygen
into a patient’s lungs via a rubber (later
plastic) tube. It also incorporated a hu-
midifier to keep the lungs moist.
The machine was, in Spalding’s
words, “absolutely basic”, but it worked
so well that it was used to treat patients
with tetanus and other forms of respira-
way through dissecting an arm when he
was called up for war service. Appointed
a medical orderly in the RAF, he was at
Liverpool docks waiting to depart for the
Far East when his unit was withdrawn
from a convoy that arrived in Singapore
just before it fell to the Japanese.
Afterwards he resumed his medical
studies in Oxford, specialising in neu-
rology. Since most doctors were serving
in the army, he and his fellow medical
students were recruited to treat soldiers
wounded during the Allied invasion of
Europe. Upon completing his training,
he took a job at Hampstead General
Hospital in London and later moved to
the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous
Diseases, where he met his wife, Eliza-
beth (née Falle), a doctor who special-
ised in family planning. They married
in 1951 and had two children, Sue and
Anne, who survive him. His wife prede-
ceased him in 2018.
Spalding returned to Oxford as a re-
search assistant, studying the impact of
head injuries sustained by soldiers in
the Second World War, the Malayan
Emergency and the Mau Mau Upris-
ing. Based on this work he published a
paper, with Oliver Zangwill, on the phe-
nomenon of “number forms, in which
people visualise numbers as shapes or
colours”. Later he became a consultant.
When polio broke out in the 1950s,
Spalding, Russell and Crampton Smith
set up the respiration unit at Churchill
Hospital to treat victims of the virus. In-
itially based in a former air raid shelter,
it moved to a specialised building builtby the Polio Fund. In 1958 Spalding ap-
peared in the first episode of the BBC
programme Your Life in Their Hands to
demonstrate how patients are ventilat-
ed. A year later he and Honor Smith,
another neurologist, went to Morocco
on behalf of the World Health Organi-
sation to investigate cases of paralysis
that had afflicted thousands and left
the local authorities stumped. The pair
established that it was caused by engine
oil from a disused American airbase
that had been bottled up and sold in
markets as cooking oil.
Spalding’s work on polio fostered his
interest in autonomic disorders, which
affect the nerves responsible for invol-
untary functions such as body temper-
ature, blood pressure and digestion,and he built a lab at Churchill Hospital to
study them, one of the first to do so. With
David Oppenheimer, he shed light on
Shy-Drager syndrome, a disease that
impairs movement and muscle co-
ordination. In 1974 he and Ralph Hud-
son Johnson published the seminal Dis-
orders of the Autonomic Nervous System.
Over the course of his career he pub-
lished more than a hundred papers
while working as a clinical neurologist at
hospitals in Oxford and Northampton.
Spalding was a reserved man with a
measured, engaging manner, whose
passions included birdwatching, gar-
dening and sailing, which he took up in
the mid-1960s. After retiring in 1977, he
and Elizabeth undertook sailing trips to
Copenhagen, the Bay of Biscay and
western Scotland. In 2011 they set up
the Spalding Fellowship at Oxford’s
Nuffield Department of Surgical Scien-
ces, helping doctors to carry out re-
search alongside their medical duties.
One of his early patients at Churchill
Hospital was a teenage girl with Guil-
lain-Barré syndrome who was para-
lysed and could communicate only
with her eyes. Those with the disorder
are prone to sharp drops in blood pres-
sure; Spalding established that these
were caused by failures in the motor
and sensory nervous systems. The girl
made a full recovery — and later be-
came a nurse at the respiration unit.John Spalding, neurologist, was born on
September 18, 1917. He died on October
6, 2020, aged 103appearance. Hooper agreed, taking a
week off work to rehearse and soaking
his fingertips in surgical spirit to harden
the skin so he could play the guitar
again. The appearance went so well
that the Strawbs were then invited to
headline the Cambridge Folk Festival.
Content that the band had returned to
its folk origins, Hooper stayed for
another decade before embarking on a
new career in publishing, working as an
editor, authoring a series of educational
titles for schoolchildren on subjects
ranging from genetics to electricity anddesigning book jackets. He made his
final appearance with the group at a
30th anniversary concert in 1998.
“One of the greatest pleasures in my
life was being involved with the music
business,” he said. “But it is very anti-
social because you are never there for
those you love.” Hooper’s marriage to
Jane Hunter, whom he met in 1972 at a
Melody Maker party, ended in divorce.
He is survived by their son, Nicholas, an
artist and musician, and daughter, Co-
lette, a TV producer. He is also survived
by a daughter, Alex Grace, from anearlier relationship, whose existence he
discovered late in life; she became a
comedy producer.
Anthony Hooper was born in Eastry,
Kent, in 1939, the eldest of three child-
ren, to Jack Hooper, a Royal Marine,
and Betty (née Hayes), who served in
the WRNS. After the war the family set-
tled in west London, and at Thames
Valley Grammar he played the lead in
school plays. A friend, Dave Cousins,
sold him a second-hand guitar and they
formed a skiffle group called the Gin
Bottle Four. Together the pair cycledtory failure. In 1963 Spalding and
Crampton Smith published a textbook
on the subject, Clinical Practice and Phys-
iology of Artificial Ventilation. These ef-
forts led to the universal use of mechani-
cal ventilation and paved the way for
modern intensive-care medicine. Some
East Radcliffe ventilators are still in use
today to treat Covid-19 patients.
John Michael Kenneth Spalding was
born in London in 1917 to Nellie and
Henry Spalding and brought up in
Lyme Regis. His father was a philan-thropist who set up the Spalding Trust
to support religious understanding, and
the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions
and Ethics at the University of Oxford.
He attended Summer Fields School in
Oxford and then Eton, where he settled
on a medical career during a meeting
with his matron, who asked him what
he wanted to do when he grew up.
“I thought up three possibilities but
the other boys got in with them first,” he
recalled. “So in desperation I said, ‘I
want to be a doctor’ and ever since I
have thought, ‘What a good idea’.”
At the insistence of his father he first
read Greats at New College, Oxford,
obtaining his degree in 1939, and went
on to do his medical training at the Rad-
cliffe Infirmary in Oxford. He was half-He was halfway through
dissecting an arm when
called up for war service
John Spalding
Neurologist who helped to develop mechanical ventilation and conducted pioneering research into nervous disorders
[email protected]Tony Hooper
Singer and guitarist for the Strawbs, the leading folk rock band that fell out over whether they should be more folk or more rock
From Bob Dylan to Marc Bolan, acous-
tic folk musicians have plugged in and
“gone electric” to become rock stars,
but the very idea was anathema to Tony
Hooper.
By 1972 he had been the angelic-
voiced singer and acoustic guitarist
with the Strawbs on half a dozen al-
bums that had established the band as
one of the finest products of the English
folk revival, rivalled only by Fairport
Convention and Steeleye Span.
Their most recent album Grave New
Wo r l d had risen to No 11 in the charts,
and a film of the same name featuring
the band was playing to enthusiastic
cinema audiences in a double bill with
Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Pictures at
an Exhibition. Under pressure to build
on this growing commercial success,
Hooper feared the rock in the Strawbs’
folk-rock was in danger of drowning
out the folk. With pop stardom beckon-
ing, he decided it was time to bale out.
Six months later he sat at home
watching the band he had co-founded
sing Part of the Union on Top of the Pops,
as the song rose to No 2 in the charts,
kept from the top spot by Sweet’s glam-
rock stomper Block Buster!
Yet he had no regrets. “The early al-
bums were successful, we were the best
at what we did and I believed there was
room to develop along those lines,” he
explained. “But there was pressure to
succeed in America, and that entailed a
move towards rock.”
He put his guitar in the attic and took
a job in the electronics industry. His old
bandmates enjoyed their flirtation with
pop fame but by 1980 their moment had
passed and the Strawbs broke up.
Three years later Hooper received a
phone call from Rick Wakeman, who
had played keyboards in the Strawbs in
the early 1970s. Wakeman was by then
presenting a music show on the newly
launched Channel 4 and wanted the
Strawbs to re-form for a one-off TV
regularly to central
London to visit Cecil
Sharp House, home of
the English Folk
Dance and Song
Society, and to buy
records from Dobell’s,
the specialist folk and
blues shop on Charing
Cross Road. Hooper’s
mother, who regarded
Cousins as a thor-
oughly bad influence,
was much relieved
when the friends went to different uni-
versities. With a degree in engineering
from Brunel, Hooper went to work for
BAC until he was made redundant
when a round of defence cuts scrapped
the project on which he was employed.
However, Cousins had stayed in
touch and persuaded him to join a new
band called the Strawberry Hill Boys,
soon to be shortened to the Strawbs.
The enterprise was almost sunk — lit-
erally — before they got off the ground.
The group’s transportation consisted of
an old Land Rover, which Hooper and
Cousins attempted to drive on to an is-
land in the Thames at low tide to win a
bet. The vehicle stuck fast in the mud
and was soon submerged. A crane was
required to retrieve it, but astonishingly
there was no lasting damage and the
Land Rover returned to duty.
He became an electronics engineer
again until he resigned in protest over a
contract from the Ministry of Defence
to work on enhancing the blast pattern
of shells. “Helping to kill people more
effectively”, as he put it, was not why he
had taken up engineering.Tony Hooper, folk musician, was born on
September 14, 1939. He died of cancer on
November 18, 2020, aged 81Members of the band in London in 1971: Dave Cousins, left, Tony Hooper, Rick Wakeman, John Ford and Richard Hudsonr L S t D S r t b C m C o wwhenthe friendswMICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES