Dr Malcom Arthurton
RAF medical officer who tended to the Dambusters and helped crews overcome their airsickness
DR MALCOLM ARTHURTON, who has died aged 97, was appointed as a medical officer to No 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, when it was formed in early 1943, and after the war he became a leading paediatrician.
The crews had just six weeks to hone their skills before the daring raid on the Mohne and Eder Dams in Germany, flying training sorties at very low level (at 60ft over the target) to perfect the techniques needed for Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb to be effective.
After these flights, a number of the men reported to Arthurton’s sick quarters complaining of air sickness, which was probably a side effect of low flying in unpressurised aircraft. Arthurton decided to go on some of the training flights in an effort to determine a cure and volunteered himself as a guinea pig on dummy raids to test nausea drugs, including chloretone and hyoscine.
On his first flight on April 25 1943, Arthurton recorded in his logbook: “Low flying experience. Weather bumpy. Air sickness after ½ hour.” He experimented with different crew positions in the aircraft. He was “filled with admiration” for the crew’s courage and was reported to be more sympathetic to patient requests for prescriptions after his experiences.
Arthurton flew on eight training flights, the last one two days before the raid on May 16 1943, when he flew with Squadron Leader Henry Maudslay and his crew on their final rehearsal. He noted in his flying log: “chloretone three capsules, no nausea”. The real target of the mission was still top secret and years later Arthurton recalled: “We took off at 21:50 hours and flew for four hours. I [had] not the foggiest notion where we were nor exactly what we were doing. People said very little and I did not embarrass them with difficult questions as I realised there was something in the wind.”
The raid cost the squadron dearly. Of the 133 men who took part in the raid, 53 lost their lives. It was particularly poignant for Arthurton since Maudslay and his men were among those who were lost.
Arthurton never elaborated on feelings to his family, and last Christmas politely declined his grandchildren’s request to watch the 1955 film The Dam Busters on the television with them. His flying boots now reside in the Dambuster Museum at RAF Scampton.
Malcolm William Arthurton was born in Peckham, south London, on April 27 1918. At the time of his birth his father Frederick, a 19-year-old lieutenant in the Machine Gun Corps, was in a PoW camp in Straslund, Pomerania. After a childhood spent in Egypt, where Frederick was an administrator in the RAF, Malcolm went to St Paul’s School. In 1936 he joined Westminster Hospital Medical School, where he was part of an intake of eight.
His final years at medical school, from which he qualified in 1941, were dominated by treating Blitz casualties. Arthurton later remembered having been struck by the people who arrived dead but with no apparent injuries, victims of “blast lung”. He himself had a narrow escape when returning to his room after an air raid to find that the ceiling had collapsed and the room was full of rubble. In February 1942 he joined the RAF as a medical officer.
Posted to Bari, Italy, in 1944, he worked with the Dakota Transport Squadron 627 evacuating partisans from Yugoslavia. He undertook nine flights into occupied Yugoslavia to retrieve casualties, for which he was mentioned in despatches. These were without fighter cover and in radio silence, in convoys of four aeroplanes. Arthurton later described how the first aircraft to land, and the last to leave, carried a spare wheel and jack in case of a puncture. The Yugoslavs lit straw beacons at intervals in fields to indicate make-shift runways.
Demobbed in November 1946 in the rank of squadron leader, Arthurton completed his paediatric training at Westminster Hospital, Great Ormond Street and the Hammersmith. He learnt novel techniques including cardiac catheterisation on children and exchange transfusion on babies with rhesus disease, and spent a sixmonth sabbatical in Finland learning about congenital heart disease.
He then became a consultant paediatrician in Yorkshire, first, in 1953, at Dewsbury and then from 1957 at the Bradford Group Hospitals. He was an all-round paediatrician who treated the “whole child and their family” and was a popular teacher of nurses, medical students and junior doctors. One achievement of which he was especially proud was convincing obstetricians that neonates should be cared for by paediatricians; as a result the hospital established a special-care baby unit.
Despite a heavy workload – at one time he was the only consultant paediatrician serving four different hospitals – Arthurton found time for research. He followed the outcomes of nearly 10,000 mothers and babies who between 1959 and 1965 had been discharged from the hospitals within 72 hours of birth, and drew attention to paediatric issues facing Asian populations. He found the combination of lack of sunlight (causing vitamin D deficiency) and the high phytate content of chapati flour (reducing calcium absorption) resulted in severe rickets in some children.
In his own family, however, Arthurton was notorious for being hopeless at the practicalities of child care. Once, after helping his young daughter to dress, he was stopped in the street by a woman who informed him that the child was having difficulty walking because both legs were down one opening of her shorts.
Something he never expected to encounter in Bradford was the outbreak of smallpox that occurred in January 1962. In the episode, one of the last in Britain, six people died. The presumed “index patient” was a child who had recently come from Karachi.
Retiring in 1983, Arthurton was involved in planning the Martin House Children’s Hospice in Wetherby and collected scrap metal for the charity Action Research. He could often be seen around Cartmel, the village where he settled in 1994, pulling copper piping from skips. Since 1960 he had collected three tons of iron, a ton of copper and 975 kg of aluminium.
Malcolm Arthurton married Eve Edmonds, a nurse at the Westminster Hospital, in 1950. She died in 1995 and he is survived by their two daughters, one a mathematician and the other a geriatrician.