biographies

Robertson, Allen William David (c. 1866 - 1954)

M.D. (Melb.), F.R.A.C.S.

Born
c. 1866
Deniliquin, New South Wales, Australia
Died
8 November 1954
Occupation
Gynaecologist, Medical practitioner, Obstetrician, Pharmacist and Surgeon

Details

Written by Dr Colin Macdonald and published in "The Book of Remembrance", The Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne, 1956.

Transcription


ALLEN WILLIAM DAVID ROBERTSON
(1910 - 1931)

Few Victorian medical men can have had such varied interest over a long life as Allen Robertson, who died on November 9, 1954, in his eighty-eighth year. Press notices following his death recalled Dr. Robertson’s effective chairmanship of the Australian Board of Cricket Control during the bitter bodyline controversy, with the hallowed Marylebone Cricket Club’s tradition of sportsmanship thrown into critical question by the Australian Board. In other fields, his qualities of tenacity, patience and firmness of will stood him in equally good stead.

Allen William David Robertson had to work hard for everything he achieved. Born in the Riverina town of Deniliquin, where his father was manager of a local general store, he was early left an orphan. An aunt brought him to Melbourne, and until the age of thirteen years he attended King’s College, a small private school in the suburb of Fitzroy, long since defunct. For the next seven years he worked in a Flinders Lane warehouse.

Young Robertson had by then determined to become a doctor, but, being without funds, decided that the best route to medicine was by way of pharmacy. To this end becoming apprenticed to H.C. Armstrong, a Melbourne chemist with branches in a number of large New South Wales country towns, Robertson served a term in each of those branches and thus acquired a wide knowledge of the countryside. This peripatetic existence did not affect his studies, for in 1895 he won the pharmacy gold medal, and matriculated in the University of Melbourne for entrance to medicine. He never told the full story of his pecuniary struggles to complete the course, but they must have been great, for towards the end of it finances became so straitened that he was forced to accept, for twelve months, a position as relieving pharmacist in an lonely outback town in Western Australia. Robertson had reached the age of thirty-six years on graduating M.B. in 1903, being placed ninth in a good year which included suck well-known names as Douglas Stephens, B.T. Zwar and Harvey Sutton. In the latter part of the course he was resident in Queen’s College, for whose distinguished master, Dr. E.H. Sugden, he always retained a high regard. Sugden of Queen’s, MacFarland of Ormond, and Leeper of Trinity were the three great men who, in their several ways, brought to Melbourne the best traditions of British university life and laid the foundations of that residential collegiate system of which Melbourne is rightly proud. Sugden, a lovable Yorkshireman of wide humanity and culture, and world famous as a Shakespearean scholar, exercised a profound influence on resident undergraduates at Queen’s during his long mastership.

Robertson served terms as resident medical officer at Saint Vincent’s and the Women’s Hospitals, and then was for two years superintendent of the Austin Hospital at Heidelberg, in those years a semi-rural suburb of much beauty. It was here, on the banks of the Yarra River, that Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder had first painted the real Australian sunlight and shadow. Afterwards, Robertson bought the general practice of Dr. Walter Mc Gibbon, in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, remaining there for fifteen years, when he became a Collins Street consultant in diseases of women. During the Brunswick period he was a demonstrator in anatomy, and held for three years a research scholarship in anthropology, under Richard J.A. Berry, who had come from Edinburgh a few years before to the chair of anatomy. Berry had an especial interest in the skull and brain, and it was he who directed Robertson’s attention to the craniometry of Australian, Tasmanian and New Guinea aborigines, for a thesis on which subject he was awarded the M.D. in 1910. He became a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1928. Robertson wrote a paper on the anatomy of the sinu-ventricular system of the heart, and made occasional contributions on diseases of women, but claimed little distinction to spoken or written artistry, and developed no outstanding reputation as a clinical teacher. As a gynaecologist he was regarded as sound and sure, and innate caution forswearing risks of any kind. In 1910 Robertson was one of two honorary midwifery surgeons elected to the Women’s Hospital; the other was the late J.H. Nattrass. They were the first appointees under the electoral college system generally adopted in Melbourne teaching hospitals today; previously, all appointments had been made on the votes of the hospital subscribers, a system possessing obvious demerit, and the cause of much heart-burning in unsuccessful applicants. At that time the senior surgeons of the Women’s Hospital included M.U. O’Sullivan, Rothwell Adam and Felix Meyer, all impressive personalities long to be remembered in Melbourne. Robertson advanced to the chairmanship of the staff in 1928, held until his retirement in 1931. But over the succeeding twenty-three years he remained sincerely attached to the Women’s Hospital and was present at its annual meeting only a few weeks before his death, keenly attentive to the proceedings. Friends realized then that his life was drawing to a close, although few understood that he was approaching ninety years of age.

Convinced that a medical man’s first loyalty should be in the British Medical Association, Robertson gave devoted service as a councillor of the Victorian Branch, which he had represented at the International Medical Congress in London in 1911. This was the great meeting presided over by Sir Thomas Barlow, and Robertson was profoundly impressed by that Nestor of British medicine who died ten years ago, just a few months before his one hundredth birthday. As a senior vice-president, only ill health prevented Robertson from attaining the highest position in the Victorian Branch, his place as President in 1935 being taken by the late Major-General Rupert Downes. He was for nearly thirty years a representative of the graduates in medicine on the Standing Committee of Convocation of the University of Melbourne.

Robertson’s interests ranged widely beyond the purely professional, not the least being cricket and its administration. An enthusiast for the game from childhood, he became president of the Melbourne University Cricket Club in 1914, and, also in that year, the club’s delegate to the Victorian Cricket Association. Five years later he was appointed one of the three Victorian representatives on the Board of Control, taking the place or Dr. Ramsay Mailer; so greatly did he value this association with international cricket, that he remained thereon until three months before his end.

In 1930 Robertson was elected Chairman of the Board, succeeding R.A. Oxlade, little suspecting then that two years later the combined efforts of a young Nottingham miner and an inflexible Wykhamist and Oxonian would light a fiery cross from Leeuwin to Cape York because of their grim determination to wrest the ashes from Australia. Robertson could not bring himself to accept any particular malignity in the fast bowler – of whose accuracy and beautiful rhythm he was an admirer – the dour captain of other members of the M.C.C. team. Many believe that it was in considerable part his wise and tempered counsel which resolved the unhappy conflict of ideas in a way considered the most satisfactory possible.

Possibly it was in the Wallaby Club that Allen Robertson obtained his greatest contentment. Here was a haven free from professional and business stresses, and he knew how very highly he was esteemed by all the members of this famous walking club, which for more than sixty years has included some of the leading doctors of Melbourne. It was, indeed, founded by a doctor, Louis Henry, who was also the founder of the British Medical Association in Victoria. Henry and Robertson shared a friendship broken only by the former’s death in 1924. Robertson became secretary of the Wallaby Club in 1909, and his services were so highly regarded that he continued in the office for forty-five years, in that time doing much to build the club’s fine tradition of friendliness, and to maintain its happy and simple character. Its very existence is said to be a monument to Allen Robertson.

Allen’s early training in warehouse and pharmacy made his a good man of business. He acquired pastoral interests, first in eastern Riverina, then nearer to Melbourne. He was one of the doctors’ partnership which built Lister House in Collins Street.

Throughout his long life, Allen Robertson remained a good figure of a man, with keen blue eyes, a fresh complexion and invariably a well-groomed appearance that until just before his death belied his age. During a lifetime varied in experience and interest, he was a well-respected figure in Melbourne.

In 1906 Allen Robertson married Miss Lydia Terry. She survived him for only a few weeks. There were no children.

Archival/Heritage Resources

Royal Women's Hospital Archives

  • Book of Remembrance, 1956 - 1975; Royal Women's Hospital Archives [ Details... ].

Prepared by: Robyn Waymouth

Created: 19 September 2006, Last modified: 22 September 2006