JOHN WILFRED PICKARD

[Stanley]

JOHN WILFRED PICKARD

Written 6 April 2004

I first met John Pickard while I was running the engine at Bancroft. I knew about Dr Pickard of course but he wasn’t my doctor and so our paths never crossed until one day he walked in the engine house and asked me if he could look at the engine. We walked round and I answered his questions and then I brewed up for him and he sat in my armchair in the corner and started talking.

Now they tell me I can talk but boy, did I ever meet my match! I triggered him off and sat back listening to pure gold. I made my mind up right away that he was a candidate for the club. That first visit was the start of a strange and disjointed friendship that, as far as he was concerned, was dictated entirely by his needs. I never initiated a meeting, he just turned up, either at the engine house or at Hey Farm. This was in the late 1970s, he was retired and apart from when he wanted his vehicle servicing, I got the feeling he was using the engine house and the Hey as a bolt-hole.

John Wilfred never came across to me as a warm personality, not surprising because I never got really close to him, however, he was precise, always polite, had a wide range of interests and was always willing to expose his own ignorance and ask for information. All qualities that I admire. He was also wide open if you asked him a question, he would give you an honest answer. But he was totally self-centred, I think this is why he was so forgetful, it wasn’t bad memory, he had a good memory, it was just that what he wanted at the time took precedence and everything else went out of the window!

I suppose the first thing to do is get some of the stories out of the way. I reckon that one of the ways you can assess a doctor is by the stories that circulate round them. John wasn’t unique, there are plenty of tales about Arthur Morrison, John Love, Dr Jagoe……. But those are for another time.

The stories I heard from other people included:

When on his rounds, John used to set off in his car and take short cuts through terraced houses into the next street. He even did this when he was on his little motor bike. One woman told me he wheeled it through her house one day. His problem came at the end of his rounds, he often forgot which street he had started in and had to ring the police to ask them to look for his car.

There was a complaint one day about him and his wife sunbathing naked in their garden. It turned out that the only way they could be seen was for the woman who made the complaint to go into the attic, stand on a stool and look through the skylight.

One day in the 1960s when Asian Flu’ was rampaging round the district he went into his surgery waiting room which was bitterly cold, handed a hot water bottle to the first person in the queue and told them to warm their hands and then pass it on. After a while he came out and announced that he had no doubt that they were all there because they had the flu’. He said that he had it as well. He was going to go home, take two aspirins and go to bed and he recommended that the rest of them did the same. With that he left.
My favourite story about him is when he was called out one night to a baby on Coates Estate that wouldn’t stop crying. He went down and examined the infant and then he straightened up, turned to the woman and put his hand down her blouse to feel her breast. “It’s quite obvious why the child is crying Madam. It’s hungry and you have no milk!” The woman said “It’d be a bloody miracle if I had, I’m its aunty and I’m only baby-sitting!”

I did ask him about these stories and he just smiled, but he allowed that there might be more truth in the last one than some of the others.

I noticed that when John came in the engine house he always took my pulse and his own as well. I just put it down to force of habit and never questioned him about it beyond asking him whether I was still alive. One day he launched into an explanation. He’d noticed that when he sat in the engine house something had a calming influence on him. He came to the conclusion that there was a correlation between the rhythm of the engine and our heartbeats. He noticed that mine was always exactly the same as the engine, 69 beats a minute and that his own, which normally ran at about 73 a minute settled down to the same speed after about ten minutes with me. His theory was that it was like being a baby in the womb and that the mother’s heart beat (the engine) had a controlling effect on ours. I like that one and reckon that there was more than a bit of sense in it. If music can affect us, why not a smoothly running engine?

He was very interested in the engine and asked lots of questions. One of the things that fascinated him was the sixth sense I had developed whereby I often detected possible problems before they happened. He had seen me suddenly break off a conversation and go and have a look at a lubricator or adjust the governor. We came to the conclusion that I was so used to listening to the engine that the slightest change in note triggered me off. He brought his old stethoscope in one day and we had a great time listening to the valves and the piston rings clicking in the bore. He gave it to me and I used it a lot. It hangs in the front room still, a reminder of John Wilfred.

I was in my workshop at home one day and he came in for a chat. As we stood there he raised one leg, put it on the workbench and stood there like a stork on the other leg. I didn’t comment until after a couple of minutes he changed legs so I asked him what he was doing. He said that he was giving his heart a rest. If he was standing normally on two legs his heart had to pump blood up from both feet. If he put one leg up on the bench it relieved the work a bit as the blood supply to that leg hadn’t to be pumped against gravity! Being an engineer and used to pumps I saw the sense in this so if anyone had come in they would have found two blokes having a conversation but only standing on one leg! This was the sort of common sense approach I like and ever since then I put my feet up if I have the chance when I’m in my favourite rocking chair.

Another little quirk was how he dealt with the sugar in his tea. I noticed that he always insisted on putting his own in and was very precise in his measurement. Once the sugar was in the tea he stirred it for what seemed like a couple of minutes before he drank it. Being a nosy bugger I asked him why he did it. He told me that he believed that sugar was bad for you so the less you had the better. He had noticed that if you put one teaspoonful in a half pint mug and stirred it for a lot longer than normal it tasted as though there was twice as much sugar in. I don’t like sugar in tea or coffee so I never tried this one out but knowing John I bet there was something in it.

One of his favourite subjects was alternative medicine. He was still going to courses on homeopathy even though he was retired. He reckoned that herbs and natural remedies still had a place in treating ailments. He recognised the value of modern drugs but didn’t discount the old remedies. I asked him whether it was true that whisky in moderation could lower blood pressure and he said that in the days when he started practicing it was about the only weapon they had if people had high blood pressure.

He warned me against salt and encouraged me to drink lots of water. He told me that a good habit to get into was that when you felt you wanted to pass water you should always drink a glassful before going. He said that way nature was reminding you to drink. I know from my own experience that this is very valuable advice. I have had a bad back for 45 years and if I slack off with the water intake I will have much more pain. It stands to reason when you think about it, you are encouraging your body to flush out poisons and keeping your blood at the right consistency. John said that when you felt thirsty your body was making up the loss by extracting water from your blood and this thickened it and raised your blood pressure.

One thing that always struck me as a lad was that if you went in a public toilet there was a big poster on the wall saying ‘BEWARE OF VD!’ I asked him about this and he said that during WW2 he helped with the Venereal Disease Clinic at Burnley. He told me terrible stories about what we now call Sexually Transmitted Diseases and made my hair curl! (Look in the LTP 78/AC/04 for Ernie Roberts on Syphilis) I asked him whether it was true you could catch VD off a lavatory seat and he said that of course you could, but it was very unlikely. He said that if contaminated blood was present on any surface and a small wound on your skin touched it the infection could pass. He said he always put his hand in his jacket pocket before touching a door handle in a toilet. He also told me that many surgeons got infections like syphilis in the old days because of bad or non-existent protection for their hands.

I noticed one day in summer that he had a lot of string round his neck. Thinking this was some obscure cure for something I asked him about it and it turned out that he had all his keys strung round his neck because if he didn’t he lost them. I used to service his little Ford Escort camper van and he always had to fish the key out of his shirt for me.

We got talking one day about pain and he said that what always distressed him was infants teething. His problem was that he knew there was an instant cure, you simply cut the skin above the tooth with a scalpel and relieved the pressure. He did this for all his children but couldn’t do it for his patients as it was frowned on by the profession because of the risk of infection. I think this illustrates exactly how John’s mind worked. If there was a problem you looked for the cause. Once you had identified the cause the next question was ‘what can I do about it’. Answer, relieve the pressure on the gum.

Mind you, he wasn’t always as well focussed. He was late one day coming to the Hey with his van and when I asked him why he said it was because he’d run his wife over! It turned out that she was directing him out of the garage and he reversed into her and broke her leg. It was the only time I ever saw him upset.

My biggest regret was that I never did a full series of structured interviews with him. He was a gold-mine of information about Barlick and disease. He had practiced before the revolution that came with antibiotics and even then he told me one day that too many were being prescribed. He said that the germs always won and that one day we would find that they were losing their effect. How right he was!

The one thing that stands out about John Wilfred Pickard is that he was a bloody good general practitioner who really cared about his patients. The other thing is that, due to his manner, you either loved him or hated him! There were many more in the first camp than the second and even though he was never my doctor I have to say I am with them. I can still see him in the deckchair on the lawn at the Hey with his panama hat over his eyes, reading the paper while I changed his oil or did some small repair for him. It was a joy talking to him, always a new subject of enquiry. The world is short of men like that and I still miss him.

SCG/06 April 2004