BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

DAWSON

The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close. Press notice released at Sandringham, January 20, 1936.

This blandly eloquent statement was written (on a menu) by George V’s physician Bertrand Dawson, who’d been raised to the peerage by the king himself, first as Baron and then as Viscount Dawson of Penn. Fifty years on, in 1986, the release of Dawson’s diary made plain that he had ensured a peaceful death by injecting the king (at “about” 11 PM) with a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine. So George V died “peacefully” or, as in Dawson’s diary. “comporting with that dignity and serenity which he so richly merited.” Dawson also felt that the timing was right, too late for London’s ‘gutter’ evening papers but just right for a notice in the morning London Times. By 1986 this was an open secret, but still it made headlines and raised a flurry of debate about euthanasia. Viscount Dawson was an interesting figure in his own right. He was born Bertrand Dawson on March 9, 1864, an architect’s son. He went to St. Paul’s School and then University College London, graduating MD in 1893. He rose quickly in the profession and established a fashionable practice in 1903. He maintained that private practice into his 70s, but meanwhile (1907) entered public service as physician to King Edward VII, then was promoted to physician-in-ordinary to George V. But what really made Dawson’s reputation was his war service, which convinced him that the public health was a public problem that required a purposeful public solution. His ‘Dawson Report’, published in 1920 as “An Interim Report on the Future Provision of Medical and Allied Services” is regarded today as a foundation document for Britain’s National Health Service, finally passed into law in 1947. But Dawson himself (he died in 1945) would have spun in his grave over that, for he’d come to oppose any notion of a universal, compulsory, publicly administered health service. This owed partly to his view of the medical profession as an elevated elite. In 1936 he opposed euthanasia legislation on grounds that such decisions should be left to the wisdom and ethical understanding of a qualified attendant physician. More importantly, Dawson shared the elite’s ambiguous views on modernization. While he wanted to liberalize marital law and also to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer, he came to fear any hint of collectivization and thought Soviet communism the most dangerous threat to the ‘British way of life.’ In 1936 he accompanied David Lloyd George on the former prime minister’s visit to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and shared Lloyd George’s view of Hitler as a great German patriot. So Viscount Dawson was not universally popular. As a contemporary jingle had it, ©