The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7483 p727
22/29 December 2007

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Recollections of 70 years in pharmacy

This year, A. G. Hopkins celebrated 70 years on the Register of Pharmaceutical Chemists. He describes how pharmacy has changed

Christmas miscellany 2007 index

Seventy years ago, I knew nothing about pharmacy — few people did. I had just left school and was unemployed for several months. Fortunately my ex-headmaster found me a job in a local chemist and mineral water manufacturer.

I was offered a four-year apprenticeship (cheap labour), which I gladly accepted because in those days of mass unemployment it was a godsend to be employed for four years. I was to receive the sum of five shillings a week. To my surprise I enjoyed the work that came my way.

My home was in the garrison town of Aldershot. We were rather privileged because the facilities arranged for the young soldiers, such as tennis courts, swimming baths, sports fields, etc, were made available to us young fellows.

The army was still reliant on horses (it is almost unbelievable that five years before the 1939–45 war the army was still not mechanised) and, as a result, most of our business was veterinary.

Most officers also had a couple of horses of their own and the instruction “take one pound of brucine, one pound of strychnine, one hundred weight of corn meal and mix with a shovel”, still sticks in the mind.

When I qualified in 1937 there were few jobs and a pharmacist earned about £3 a week. The good old PJ did its bit by refusing to take advertisements for posts at less than £4 a week. Eventually I got a job in management at Gravesend in Kent (soon to be bomb alley for the Germans on their way to Tilbury just across the river).

I was conscripted to the Royal Air Force. It was not keen on pharmacy and I was put on general duties, a sort of labouring job. I was posted to Sierra Leone, where I encountered various tropical diseases I did not know about (leprosy, malaria, yellow fever, bilharzia — “Bill Harris” to the squaddies) and I succumbed to malaria of a particularly nasty type (malignant tertiary malaria).

After much lobbying, I got posted to the Gambia, a place romantically named Half Die, then to Dakar in Senegal (where I found a lion under my desk) and later, to my good fortune, north to a French foreign legion fort in the Sahara desert.

When I returned to England I managed to get remustered as a sergeant dispenser. Each RAF hospital was ruled by King’s Regulations, which laid down the number of staff employed. I first started in a tuberculosis hospital, in which we had two dispensers and negligible work, then I was posted to the skin hospital with the same number of staff, but a heavy workload.

Later on, I went to Wycombe, where a new hospital was to be built. I investigated the plans, looked for the pharmacy and found it was to be a small room in the basement. On taking up the post of chief pharmacist of the new hospital I was determined to alter this and the result was a fully equipped modern pharmacy of some 2,000 square feet in the most favoured position, opposite the main entrance by the lifts. I got the consultant dermatologist to approve a scheme where a pharmacist would help on the ward and be allowed on his rounds to give advice.

Pharmacists became part of his team and attended consultation meetings and this was so successful that the results were published in the PJ (28 December 1968, p659). I extended the experiment to the psychiatric ward, where pharmacists also attended discussions on individual patients. The success I had with these consultants got our various abilities known to a wider audience.

The status of pharmacy has changed enormously. Seventy years ago it was little regarded, poorly paid, with few jobs. It is due to the work of many dedicated pharmacists that we are now at a point where we can claim professional recognition on all sides.

Pharmacy ought to push itself.