Alan Thackray was professor of morbid histology at the Middlesex Hospital and a notable authority on breast, salivary and renal tumours. He was educated at Cambridge University, from which he won the senior university scholarship to the Middlesex Hospital. After house jobs he specialised in pathol

William St Clair Symmers held the Chair of Pathology at Charing Cross. He was born on 16 August 1917 in Belfast, where his father, William St Clair Symmers, an American who had been born in South Carolina and trained at the University of Aberdeen, was Professor of Pathology and Bacteriology, having