Peter McRorie Higgins

Peter was born in Sheffield in 1930. His father was a pharmacist and his grandfathers were a railwayman and a steel worker. He won a scholarship to King Edward VII School, Sheffield, and then studied medicine at Balliol College, Oxford, becoming the first member of his family to attend university. His clinical studies were at the London Hospital Medical College, where he qualified in 1955. After house jobs at the London Hospital, his national service in the Royal Air Force was served at St Athan in Wales, then Halton. Later he was posted to Christmas Island at the tail end of Operation Grapple, the UK nuclear bomb programme.

Peter was …