Cyril Geoffrey Arthur Thomas

Cyril Geoffrey Arthur Thomas was born in 1924 in Clapham, south London, the oldest son of two talented doctors, Cyril and Dorothy Thomas. For the next 20 years the family lived in homes belonging to various mental hospitals (Lancaster, Whittington, Wakefield, and Knowle), where his father was a psychiatrist. He was educated at Wakefield and Portsmouth grammar schools and as a wartime evacuee at Charterhouse.

In 1942, Geoffrey became a medical student at Balliol College, Oxford. Most of the students were there for only a few months before being drafted into the armed forces, and the remainder were mainly engaged in secret wartime activities. His own career at Oxford included exploring the roofs of Oxford with Tom Bourdillon (who, according to plan, should have been the first man to conquer Mount Everest), to making up a four man Balliol crew to take a full sized Oxford punt through the Carfax drain, the tunnel that runs under the centre of the city. …