The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7238 p316
1 March 2003

Shaw On 16 February, Arthur George Shaw, OBE, FRPharmS, of 15 Jennings Road, St Albans, Hertfordshire AL1 4NU. Mr Shaw registered in 1938. He was a former secretary and deputy director of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry.

Mr Shaw undertook a community pharmacy apprenticeship in Bradford and went on to study pharmacy at Bradford Technical College (now the University of Bradford). He registered with the Society as a chemist and druggist in 1938 and as a pharmaceutical chemist the next year, when he began a career in hospital pharmacy. He worked in Edmonton and Edgware, Middlesex, before moving to Kingston-upon-Thames, where he was appointed chief pharmacist to Kingston Hospital in 1948.

From the start of his hospital service Mr Shaw was active in the work of the Guild of Public Pharmacists (now the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists). He was a member of its council from 1942 to 1953 and was president in 1952–53. He represented the guild on the Pharmaceutical Whitley Council from 1948 to 1953 and served as staff side secretary of committee "C" of the Whitley Council from 1951 to 1953. During his hospital pharmacy career he obtained the diploma in biochemical analysis in 1943.

At the beginning of 1954, Mr Shaw left the hospital service to join the staff of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry as assistant secretary. He was called to the bar of the Middle Temple in 1959 and elected a fellow of the Corporation of Secretaries in the following year. He was appointed secretary of the ABPI in 1967 and took on the additional role of deputy director in 1977. He retired from the association in 1982, and was made OBE in the Queen's New Year honours list that year.

He served on a number of committees during his career, including the Joint Formulary Committee of the British National Formulary. He was also active in the industrial pharmacy section of the International Pharmaceutical Federation and served as the section's president. He also served on the court of the University of Bradford and was a past president of the Thames Valley Pharmacists Association. (Tribute).

Funeral: Friday 28 February, 12.40pm, Garston Crematorium, High Elms Lane, Garston, near Watford. Donations to Yorkshire Vascular and Surgical Research Fund, 1 Manor Park, Arkendale, Knaresborough, North Yorkshire HG5 0QH.

Tribute

Shaw In a tribute to the late Arthur George Shaw, JANE NICHOLSON writes:

I met Arthur Shaw at the Regent Street offices of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry when he was secretary of the association and I was a member of its regulatory committee, chaired by John Spink. Arthur's solid background in hospital pharmacy, coupled with his legal training assisted enormously with the committee's rambling discussions around the early days of the Medicines Act.

Arthur was proud to have been the president of the industrial pharmacy section of the International Pharmaceutical Federation and had a number of life-long pharmacy friends from various parts of the world, and particularly from Scandinavia and Switzerland, as a result of attending international pharmacy congresses.

Arthur shared a passion for opera with Christopher (my late husband) and me, and he introduced me to some wonderful performances at Garsington and Holland Park as well as at the better known venues of Glyndebourne and the Coliseum.

As well as maintaining an interest in the developments in his profession of pharmacy, he was very much at home among members of his other profession, the law. In later years, he used the Middle Temple as his lunch or dinner "dining club." An intelligent and well read Yorkshireman, he will be sadly missed by family and friends.

Hunterman In a tribute to the late Israel Hunterman (PJ, 18 January, p96), VICTOR HAMMOND writes:

When I placed a notice in the PJ Wants List in 1992 asking colleagues for details of their wartime service, Israel Hunterman provided me with some recollections from the time that he volunteered to join HM Forces. Although he had only qualified in 1937, on 3 September 1939, he wrote and confirmed his intention to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. As he wrote to me in 1993: "I was given seven days to close my pharmacy in Leeds, having ... opened it in 1938". Israel reported to the RAMC training depot within a month.

He spent most of his wartime service looking after prisoners and staff in prisoner of war camps. In less than three weeks from reporting to the training camp he was posted to the number one POW camp for officers at Grizedale Hall in the Lake District. As a pharmacist, he found that: "The medical facilities at the camp were nil. The doctor was a civilian medical practitioner, approximately 70 years of age. My job with the medical officer was a medical examination of every individual — full details regarding scars, marks, etc, were logged."

Israel was posted to Europe soon after VE Day. There he saw service in Bruges, Belgium and Brussels before a spell in a military hospital in Antwerp. At the end of the war in Europe he was in what had been a civilian internment camp, south of Hamburg.

Israel Hunterman demonstrated his devotion to his profession under difficult circumstances with a cheerful optimism.