Brian Wolstan Dixie Crawford

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My father, Brian Wolstan Dixie Crawford, was born in Washington, County Durham, the son of a history teacher. He attended King’s College (Newcastle Medical School) at Durham University. After house officer posts in the infectious diseases ward at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, where he remembered administering intrathecal streptomycin to patients with tuberculous meningitis, he did national service in Hong Kong. He married Mary Dixon, a fellow graduate, in 1952, and they started medical life as assistants in general practice in the village of Stamfordham in rural Northumberland. During his rounds, Brian remembered an icy encounter with the former MP Sir Charles Trevelyan, when his practice Austin Seven slid uncontrollably down a steep snowy slope into the Rolls Royce driven by Sir Charles’s chauffeur.

He then joined an inner city practice in Bensham, Gateshead, and over the next 35 years he became senior partner.

He was a traditional, popular, and highly competent family doctor. He was still carrying out his own night visits into his mid-60s. His family background and working environment in a deprived area of north east England gave him an innate sense of fairness and dislike of pomposity and posturing. He was a Labour voter for most of his life.

Brian sailed dinghies on Derwent Reservoir, crewed by all three sons; caravanned; and played bridge. In retirement, Mary and he travelled extensively (ostensibly to play bridge), exploring many parts of Europe, and beyond. In his later years he increasingly became a carer for Mary, and in 2015 they moved together into a residential nursing home. He continued to devotedly look after Mary till his own health started to fail.

He leaves Mary and two sons: Roger, a software engineer, and myself, David, an anaesthetist. His youngest son, Ian, died from a brain tumour in 1992.