Richard Gordon
Best-selling novelist whose comic Doctor books shone a light on medicine’s pompous hierarchies
RICHARD GORDON, who has died aged 95, was one of Britain’s most popular novelists in the 1950s and 1960s, creating the light-hearted Doctor books, beginning with Doctor in the House, that spawned several classic film comedies of the era.
The spectacular success of the series made Gordon one of the best-known non-practising doctors in Britain, a kind of court jester to the medical profession.
Impish and twinkling, he considered himself an entertainer rather than a writer (“writers are chaps who turn out books that mean something”), but he was an astute one, the first to spot the comic potential of mocking the mystique of medicine, its pompous hierarchies and the po-faced solemnity of its practitioners. One critic ventured to label him “the first deviationist, the insider spilling the secrets of the citadel”.
Gordon trained as an anaesthetist, but realised he wanted to give up medicine as soon as he qualified. “I wasn’t a very good doctor,” he once explained. “I always thought my contribution to the welfare of humanity was giving it up.”
He became a journalist instead, working as an assistant editor of the British Medical Journal in Bloomsbury, an experience that taught him the craft of authorship. “There’s no better way of learning to write,” he insisted, “than preparing articles on the diencephalon or haemodynamics under a sub-editor with the fiercest eye in London for a hanging participle.”
Gordon was put in charge of the journal’s obituaries’ column, where, as he recalled, “I learnt to write convincing fiction”.
Two years later, he returned to medicine, putting to sea in New Zealand as a ship’s surgeon, but quitting again after a year, fearing the permanent psychological damage that might ensue from drinking too much gin with the chief engineer. His experiences afloat later furnished material for Doctor at Sea and The Captain’s Table.
His debut book, Doctor in the House in 1952, concerned the antics of four medical students at the fictional St Swithin’s Teaching Hospital. Partly autobiographical, the novel’s hero is Simon Sparrow, earnestly anxious to qualify, who falls in with a group of trainee medics more interested in women and sport. It was an instant success, eventually translated into some 16 languages; in Japan it was used to teach colloquial English.
The film version, starring Dirk Bogarde as Sparrow, was the top British money-maker of 1954; it also featured James Robertson Justice as Gordon’s most memorable comic creation, the imperious and irascible consultant Sir Lancelot Spratt.
Six further Doctor films followed : Doctor at Sea (starring Brigitte Bardot), Doctor at Large, Doctor in Love, Doctor in Distress, Doctor in Clover and Doctor in Trouble.
Book sales of Doctor in the House topped three million; these and the 16 sequels – along with film rights – earned Gordon a fortune. In retirement, he acknowledged his success with characteristic selfeffacement. “I’ve done as well as if I was a consultant,” he conceded, “and I haven’t killed anybody.”
Richard Gordon was the pseudonym of Gordon Stanley Ostlere, born in Maida Vale on September 15 1921. He read Medicine at Selwyn College, Cambridge, during the Second World War and trained at St Bartholomew’s Hospital medical school, where as a student he bicycled around the East End of London, dodging V2 rockets and delivering babies; he worked at Barts as an anaesthetist, and also at the Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics in Oxford.
During a stint at the city’s John Radcliffe Hospital, his junior anaesthetist was Mary Patten (known as Jo), whom he married in 1951. The couple rented a furnished flat in Oxford, living on Dr Mary Ostlere’s salary while Gordon bought himself a two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary and took up full-time writing.
With the success of the Doctor books, Gordon’s wife gave up her work and the couple moved to a large Edwardian house on the outskirts of Bromley, where he sat at his typewriter tapping out a steady 1,000 words a day.
Gordon established a writerly routine of working in his study until 2.10pm, lunching on half a tin of soup and an apple before walking his dog in nearby woods while dictating into a small portable tape recorder his ideas for plots, snatches of dialogue and fragments of articles for Punch, to which he was a prolific contributor. On his return, he would write for another two hours.
Between books, Gordon and his wife travelled in Europe and brought up a family, assisted by a domestic retinue of a maid, gardener and secretary. He was one of only two celebrities to refuse to appear on the television programme This Is Your Life, greeting the approach of the host Eamonn Andrews and his big red book with a ripe expletive. Unlike the footballer Danny Blanchflower, who could not be persuaded, Gordon did relent, and agreed to take part after a 10-minute delay.
In the 1970s he found the medium more congenial as a writer for television, creating spin-offs of his Doctor books for a series of ITV sitcoms starring Barry Evans as the earnest Michael Upton, led astray by the laddish Duncan Waring (Robin Nedwell) and the smooth waster Dick Stuart-clark, played by Geoffrey Davies.
The driving force behind the television show was Frank Muir who, as head of comedy at the new London ITV franchise LWT, was determined to get Gordon’s Doctor saga on to the small screen for the first time. His efforts were boosted by a BBC Radio adaptation of Doctor In The House, broadcast in 1968, in which Richard Briers starred as Simon Sparrow.
In 1980, Gordon turned his attention to a slice of medical history in The Private Life of Jack the Ripper, a novel in which he suggested that not only was the Victorian serial killer a doctor but almost certainly, like him, an anaesthetist. As a young doctor, Gordon co-authored Anaesthetics for Medical Students, a slim volume aimed at the last-minute crammer (the index included such entries as “BLUE, patient turning, what to do”).
He also published several other non-fiction titles, including The Alarming History of Medicine (1993) followed by The Alarming History of Sex (1996), and wrote on a number of his pet subjects including gardening, fishing and cricket.
Richard Gordon’s last Doctor book, Doctor in the Soup, appeared in 1986 and flopped. The later Doctor titles included more sexual innuendo and farce: by the mid-1970s, he was turning out the likes of Doctor in the Nude and Doctor on the Job. The early, gentler novels enjoyed a revival when they were republished in paperback during the 1960s and 1970s, but although they are still in print, their popularity has waned.
In 1993 Richard Gordon edited The Literary Companion to Medicine, a Rabelaisian anthology which revealed that Boswell caught gonorrhea 19 times, Dickens suffered from piles, and that the flatulent entertainer Le Petomane (the “Maria Callas of the wrong end”) could not only mimic the double-bass, trombone and violin, but could also produce “chords, arpeggios, familiar tunes and drawn-out notes lasting 15 seconds”.
Gordon was a genial member of the Garrick, the Beefsteak, the MCC (he was a lifelong cricket enthusiast) and the Blackheath Rugby Club. In 1988 he wrote a television series called A Gentlemen’s Club.
Richard Gordon was cynical about his achievements. “I still think of myself as a doctor who writes,” he once told an interviewer, “and sometimes I wish I’d gone on being a doctor.
“Writing my sort of stuff is a pretty trivial occupation. I’ve been very selfish and had a jolly easy life doing nothing because writing is nothing really, it’s dead easy.
“I settled for an easy life. I always wanted to be a writer like PG Wodehouse, but I wasn’t.”
He is survived by his wife Mary and four children; one of his two sons is a radiologist and one of his two daughters a dermatologist.
Richard Gordon, born September 15 1921, died August 11 2017