Kenneth Robert Lown

The outbreak of war in 1939 had disrupted a teenager’s schooling and his chosen career path. In 1946, as the fleet sailed homeward from the Far East via South Africa, Kenneth Robert Lown (“Ken”)—2nd Lt(A), Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve—made good use of the idle shipboard hours to renew his studies, gain a place at the London Hospital medical school, and resume the plans he had been forced to shelve five years earlier.

In 1948 Ken married Monica Johnson, a science student at QMC. In the early 1950s, after graduating, Ken and Monica left London to move to Thanet, where he …