A Protcus Amongst Doctors
Doctor Himself. By Winifred Stamp. (Hamish Hamilton. 10s. 6d.)
THIS is the biography, supplemented by tributes from V. S. Pritchett, Sidney Dark, H. M. Tomlinson, Charles Marriott, Gerald Bullett and Lord Horder, of Dr. Harry Roberts. He was perhaps equally known, outside the very large circle of his friends and acquaintances, as an East End doctor and a journalist and more particularly as the author of various books about gardening. But he must, to judge from these pages, have been one of the most versatile doctors that ever lived, and they contain an almost bewildering list of activities. ..lie was born in 1871 at Bishop's Lydeard in Somerset to parents who had retired from the goldfields of Australia with a modest income of £300 a year. When he came up to London, at the age of seventeen, as a medical student, he was, we are told, an atheist of the Bradlaugh type, an ardent Socialist, and almost his first London friends were a small group of Russian nihilists. After a year of study he gave up medicine, his father withdrew his allow- ance, and he became a schoolmaster in Staffordshire. Here he organised a local Socialist party, held provocative card-parties in his front garden on Sundays, got married, was expelled from his job, and then resumed his studies in London on a restored allowance. In 1895, having become a member of the Fabian Socitty—later deemed by him to be not sufficiently militant—he began practice in Cornwall and wrote books for the Bodley Head and articles for various journals, his local friends including Havelock Ellis and his wife. In 1904 he sold his practice, took up the cause of Tariff Reform, edited a Tory paper at Falmouth, and even toyed with the idea of taking Holy Orders. He then; for a brief time, became the editor of London Opinion, collecting. the Chestertons, Hilaire Belloc, Neil Lyons and various others as contributors, and, when his uneasy tenure of this office came to an end, started a paper called Topics which expired after three numbers.
It was in 1906 that he -established himself as a doctor in Stepney, whither his wife refused to follow him, and he was soon the most sought-after doctor in the district. Meanwhile he had acquired thirty acres of land in Hampshire, upon which he later built a country home ; he became an Independent Labour member of the Mile End Board of Guardians and he could no doubt have become a Labour Member of Parliament. But in spite of his Socialism, he was evidently an individualist to a very marked degree ; and his relations with the officialdom of the Labour Party were not much smoother than those with the newly created Ministry of Health. He then abandoned politics, divided his life between his large and, in its way, model practice in Stepney, and his Hampshire home, and later started a shop in Petersfield for books, china, glass and textiles. He lived to be seventy-five. Such is the briefest catalogue, with many omissions, of his enterprises. But how difficult is the art of biography. Behind the able and restless actor of so many roles, was there a man who was not an actor ? Was there any one permanent guiding star amongst all that seem to have attracted his attention ? For one reader, at any rate, the questions remain unanswered. The title of the book is "Doctor Himself." But it is just that "himself " which seems to have eluded the pen of the biographer.
H. H. BASHFORD.
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