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| Winston Churchill aged 6 |
I received this inspiring Churchill - Fleming tale from an old friend who is a trusted chronicler - but decided to check it before sending it on. It seems to fall into the category of Urban Legends - and is interesting from several viewpoints.
What Goes Around, Comes Around
His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to eke out a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog. There, mired to his waist in black mulch, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.
The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved. "I want to repay you," said the nobleman. "You saved my son's life."
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| Stalin - Roosevelt - Churchill - 1943 |
"No, I can't accept payment for what I did," the Scottish farmer replied, waving off the offer. At that moment, the farmer's own son came to the door of the family hovel. "Is that your son?" the nobleman asked. "Yes," the farmer replied proudly.
"I'll make you a deal. Let me take him and give him a good education. If the lad is anything like his father, he'll grow to a man you can be proud of."
And that he did. In time, Farmer Fleming's son graduated from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, and went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.
Years afterward, the nobleman's son was stricken with pneumonia. What saved him? Penicillin.
The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill. His son's name? Sir Winston Churchill.
Someone once said, "What goes around, comes around."
I'm all for
the luck of the Irish and have several tales of magic
/coincidence /synchronicity of my own to tell - but checking the
Fleming-Churchill story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
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Sir Alexander Fleming - 1881 - 1955
Discoverer of Penicillin. |
The popular story
[19] of
Winston Churchill's
father paying
for Fleming's education after Fleming's father saved young
Winston from death is false.
According to the biography,
Penicillin
Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution by
Kevin Brown, Alexander
Fleming, in a letter
[20] to his friend and
colleague Andre Gratia,
[21] described this as
"A wondrous fable." Nor did he save Winston
Churchill himself during
World War II. Churchill was saved by
Lord Moran, using
sulphonamides,
since he had no experience with penicillin, when Churchill fell
ill in
Carthage in
Tunisia in 1943. The
Daily Telegraph and the
Morning Post on 21 December 1943
wrote that he had been saved by penicillin. He was saved by the
new sulphonamide drug,
Sulphapyridine, known
at the time under the research code M&B 693, discovered and
produced by
May & Baker Ltd,
Dagenham,
Essex – a subsidiary of the
French group
Rhône-Poulenc. In a
subsequent
radio broadcast, Churchill referred to
the new drug as
"This
admirable M&B."[22] It is highly probable
that the correct information about the
sulphonamide did not reach the
newspapers because, since the original sulphonamide
antibacterial,
Prontosil, had been a
discovery by the German laboratory
Bayer, and as Britain was at war with
Germany at the time, it was
thought better to raise British morale by associating
Churchill's cure with the British discovery, penicillin.
***************
The story first appeared in the December 1944 issue of Coronet magazine, in an article titled “Dr. Lifesaver” by Arthur Keeney. The tale gained some credibility from the fact that Churchill had been stricken with pneumonia in the prior year. Kay Halle’s book
Irrepressible Churchill (1966) notes that Sir Winston was treated for this condition not with penicillin, but with sulfadiazine produced by May and Baker Pharmaceuticals (no connection with Fleming).
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It seems HM Gov was as good at spinning in 1943 as they are good
at re-writing history in Wikipedia today. The Truth will Out -
perhaps - if we are vigilant.
Noel
PS - Aged 6 in 1948 - my life was saved by the new
NHS (national health service) with
massive doses of Penicillin at, of all unlikely places, Stockport
Infirmary, where I was treated for a galloping, potentially fatal
infection of the mastoid bone - just behind the ear.
http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/nhshistory/Pages/NHShistory1948.aspx
Hands off our NHS. Here is another miracle of saving a child's
life, with Fleming's Penicillin - which is entirely true:
Extract from The Haunting of a Favourite Son - Year 1948 -
The
mastoid, miraculously as ever, announced its sinister
presence when I was just
six. School dinners,
provided by
Stockport Town Council in huge aluminium vacuum flasks just
to ensure an
advantageous early start into Alzheimer’s, at St. Winifred's
Primary were,
apart from being inedible and stinking strangely, served in
a large neglected
conservatory, dripping with condensation, at patterned
oilcloth covered trestle
tables. As a course was finished children were detailed off
to help the
truculent Dinner Ladies clear the tables. When the dank
atmosphere and stolid
Northern inertia even defeated these combined forces, one or
more teachers
would leap briskly into the fray and whisk and wipe
energetically to keep
things moving. It
was the homely and
kindly Mrs Jarvis who taught the seven year olds, who
standing over our table
with a pile of used plates and utensils, dropped a knife
that clunked hard
behind my right ear as it fell to the damp concrete floor.
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| Noel aged 6 - 1948 |
That
afternoon I was sent home early crying with pain. I trudged
the mile or so of
streets in gentle rain, legs chaffed and reddened by the rim
of my wet grey
flannel shorts, a consequence of throwing away my raincoat,
and eventually
arrived during Mother's afternoon rest, her time for sitting
by the fire, under
the standard-lamp in the Morning Room reading, knitting,
sewing or whatever she
was inclined to do after housework and before making the
main meal of the day,
our Tea.
In pain I
found some small comfort sitting on the cold tiles by the
old metal-framed
kitchen fire and pressing my ear against its warm
extremities. The newly loaded
clothes rack high above dripped in interesting ways,
occasionally hissing and
spitting when they struck the coals. But despite the warmth
and the
unpredictable droplets, I wept continuously. After three
days Mother had had
enough. We caught the number nine bus to the doctor's
surgery on Wellington
Road, where we were still registered from our previous
address in Derby Road,
Heaton Moor before we had moved in an upwardly mobile
direction to Birch House,
in tree lined Mauldeth Road, in the more refined if shabbier
and overgrown
district of Heaton Mersey.
The
doctor acted immediately and I was whisked by ambulance,
silver, shiny bell ringing
gloriously and satisfactorily, to Stockport Infirmary where
they decided the
mastoid was too advanced to operate on. I understood with
some glee and
fascination that the offending mastoid was a mass of
concealed pus and
infection eating its way along the mastoid bone, above the
ear, and eventually
into the brain where it would kill me. But as an immortal
six-year-old this
medical intelligence did not frighten but only intrigued me.
It's
important to understand here that Stepping Hill Hospital,
Stockport, whose main
entrance is still (2014) flanked by two undertakers’ offices (this
is the literal
truth) and where newly trained abattoir attendants are
suddenly and uniquely
recognised as fine medical surgeons and set to work on the
patients; where
Mother died in disgraceful conditions; was quite a different
place from
Stockport Infirmary, the white, late Victorian building
opposite Stockport Town
Hall, set on the hill climbing up out of Mersey Square in
the direction of
Buxton. Even though
both medical establishments
were on the same roadway and separated by only a few miles,
they were
distinguished by the latter having been a place of
resuscitation and repair and
the former, Stepping Hill, being an ante-room to medical
incompetence at its
worst and an unpleasant and unnecessary death.
My
Guardian Angel, as Mother told it, was definitely taking
care of me. Not only
did it steer the ambulance away from Stepping Hill, but it
took me to the
Infirmary. The Infirmary doctors knew what they did not know
and sent to London
for a specialist
surgeon. All free in 1948 on the National Health. The
specialist decided not to
operate and to try the new Penicillin that had saved so many
wounded during the
war. The good news was there would be no operation, two
pieces of bad news
followed. First, and foremost in my mind, there were no
empty beds in the
children's wards - only cots. I suffered the huge indignity
at six of being
confined in a large cot. Second, the penicillin dosage was
massive. I suffered
an injection for every year of my age, six, in the buttocks,
every few hours.
In those days, parents were not allowed to stay and visits
were strongly
discouraged so I faced, or rather backed into, this ordeal
alone.
I dimly
remember only a high, long room in pale green, with my cot
last in a row of
beds. Other children
were dotted around,
some playing on the floor on the far side. The pain of the
continual injections
has receded leaving a residual phobia about needles. But I
know even now that
it hurt a lot. Miracles are not always painless.
