biographies

Spiers, Norman Lennox (1886 - 1960)

Born
31 May 1886
Died
1 August 1960
Surfer’s Paradise, Queensland, Australia
Occupation
Gynaecologist, Medical Practitioner and Obstetrician

Details

Transcription of item believed to have been written by Dr Colin Macdonald. Published in "The Book of Remembrance", The Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne, c.1960.


NORMAN LENNOX SPEIRS
(1914 - 1948)

In the days before Australia had developed her now flourishing textile industry, the Melbourne merchant princes were warehousemen with imposing offices and soft goods stores in Flinders Lane. Amongst these wealthy importers was the well-known firm of Paterson, Laing and Bruce, the third partner being the father of the present Viscount Bruce. To join this firm in "The Lane" in the sixties came James Speirs, a young man from Manchester. He married Miss Eliza Macallister, and the third of their sons was Norman Lennox, always known as Len. He was born on May 31, 1886, and died at Surfer’s Paradise on August 1, 1960, aged 74 years.

Lennox’s education commenced at the Caulfield Grammar School whence at the age of 15 he won a scholarship to Wesley College. This was one of Melbourne’s famous public schools, whose then headmaster was L.A. Adamson who came originally from Rugby and Lincoln College, Oxford, and who did much for Victorian education. While in no way neglecting scholarship, Adamson encouraged athletics at Wesley, and quickly set up an ideal of sportsmanship of which the keynote was that boys should win decently and lose decently. Justice ruled his work, and he became not only efficient as a headmaster, but thoroughly popular with the boys; there was no want of respect in his nickname "Dicky" - rather a real and genuine affection. He never married, the school taking the place of wife and children. In 1903 Speirs, then aged 16, was one of his prefects. At cricket Lennox was the school’s best bowler, with a remarkable average of 1.5; in the champion footballer team he showed dash and cool judgment as a halfback; and at athletics he represented Wesley in the distance races. In this same year he won first-class honours in physics and chemistry at matriculation and a major resident scholarship to Queen’s College in the University of Melbourne.

All that was best and keenest in the university life then centred on the residential colleges, and in that invigorating atmosphere Speirs gained much. The Master of Queen’s was Dr. E.H. Sugden, who in his own life reflected those wide sympathies and interests which a good residential college is most fitted to produce. Many men subsequently eminent were contemporary at Queen’s with Spiers; among the number were Sir High Devine, Sir Victor Hurley, Sir William Upjohn, Sir David Rivett, F.R.S. (to whom Lennox became triple blue); he played in the University XI for no fewer than six years, was captain in 1909, and represented Victoria against England and against South Australia. Queen’s had some very good cricketers in those days, including P.R. Le Couteur, who later as a Rhodes Scholar, achieved the all-round record in the 1910 Oxford versus Cambridge match, taking 11 wickets for 66 runs and making 160. Speirs was a sound bat, but shone as a medium-fast bowler; his best intercollegiate feats were 7 for 11 against Trinity, and 128 against Ormond on a sticky wicket facing the bowling of G.R.A. Hazlitt, a member of both the Victorian and the Australian elevens. Speirs also played inter-varsity football (Australian rules) and was captain of the university baseball team. After leaving the university he took up golf, and in a short time won three times the championship of the Yarra Yarra Club, later playing successfully at the Victoria and Royal Melbourne Clubs.

In later years he included bowls amongst his recreational accomplishments, was three times champion of Fitzroy and four times of M.C.G., and in 1933 won the coveted "Champion of Champions" of Victoria. An all-round bowler, he was adept at the draw shot and that firm "yard-on" shot which so often can completely change the complexion of a match. It is doubtful if any man from the University of Melbourne had a more varied and successful sporting record.

Graduating in 1909 as ninth in the year, Speirs became a resident medical officer, first at St. Vincent’s Hospital and then at the Melbourne Hospital; thence he went to the Women’s Hospital, where he met Dr George Horne, then the senior honorary surgeon, and a notable university lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology. Commencing practice in 1911 with Horne at an initial salary of 200 a year and keep. Speirs later became a partner. In 1914 he was appointed to the honorary staff of the Women’s Hospital. He was then aged 30 years, and was the youngest man ever to realize his ambition. At that period in the history of the Women’s Hospital, young graduates who had been reliable residents and who had attracted the favourable attention of a senior honorary stood a chance of appointment to the honorary staff without those higher surgical degrees that even then were demanded in the general hospitals. Surgical technique was learnt by assisting the seniors in the theatre. It was far from a lengthy or intensive post-graduate training, yet many became good surgeons; this is the more note-worthy when it is realized that they were without the valuable discipline of post-graduate anatomy, physiology and pathology.

Speirs soon became a reliable and deft surgeon within the compass of the restricted gynaecological surgery of that time. He was fortunate that his partner and friend George Horne, whom he had joined in general practice at the nearby suburb of Clifton Hill, only two miles from the Women’s Hospital, was one of the foremost gynaecologists in Australia. Horne proceeded overseas in early 1914, and at the outbreak of war was in England, where he was accepted for service with Royal Army Medical Corps. This prevented Speirs from at once joining the Australian Imperial Force, and it was not until Horne’s return in 1917 that Speirs finally left Australia with reinforcements for France. After the armistice he was chosen to play with the A.I.F. cricket team, but had to return quickly to Australia to take over the practice because of Horne’s failing health.

When the second World War came, Speirs, aged 54 and a colonel in the Australian Army Medical Corps, was asked to form the 2/4 Australian General Hospital; as colleagues he had C.W.B. Littlejohn, O.C. Surgical Division, and Eric Cooper, O.C. Medical Division. Embarking on December 24 in Maurentania, the unit arrived at Colombo where the magnificence of the Cunarder gave way to the austerity of a regular trooper - Nevasa. The convoy formed up outside Colombo, and on arrival at Suez entrained to Abd-el-Kader, a lonely wayside station 20 miles west of Alexandria; there lay Knight of Malta, of 1500 tons, formerly a ferry between Malta and Italian ports, now pressed into transport service, but still "an evil-smelling tub" in Speir’s words. There were no messing facilities, each man having to draw rations for 24 hours; 120 men with all gear and personal equipment were installed in the hold measuring 60 by 30 feet, approached by one vertical ladder and dimly lit by one hatchway. A very heavy Mediterranean storm drove the vessel aground between Bardia and Tobruk. All men and equipment were saved, and soon they were operating a hospital of 350 patients at Barce in place of the 2/7 Field Ambulance. Seven days later a sudden evacuation was made back to Tobruk. With Rommel’s sharp attack, the rear party at Barce just escaped to participate in the famous Benghazi handicap. Happily the equipment was saved, and this enabled the unit to perform work said to be unprecedented in military history - the carrying on of a general hospital of 1,000 patients within a fortress and without a female nurse. There remained only two male nurses (trained in the unit), 25 nursing orderlies and 20 ward orderlies. Tobruk was to be held at all costs, and as all land outlets were cut, the historic siege commenced. Finally relieved at the now famous Cyrenian port, the unit came home via Ceylon. Back in Australia, Speirs opened his unit again at Redbank in Queensland, where it acted as an overflow hospital to Greenslopes, Brisbane. Later, Speirs was appointed Deputy Director of Medical Services, Victorian Lines of Communication, and he undertook important duties associated with the demobilization o medical personnel, and presided over the Victorian Medical Co-ordination Committee. The war’s end found him in the sixtieth year of a life which had ranged through a wide gamut of human activity, and which was fitly honoured by his creation as a Companion of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1942. His retirement was spent mainly at the Melbourne cricket ground playing bowls and watching cricket and football, at the Royal Melbourne and Barwon Heads golf clubs, and at the Australian Club demonstrating the nuances of those laws which are according to Hoyle.

Speirs was a superb bridge and poker player. The writer still remembers one evening before dinner after an Army Medical Staff ride many years ago at the Macedon Golf Club - most comfortable and pleasant were those rides - being importuned by two bridge sharpers, whose anonymity must still be preserved because of their now exalted rank. All was set to pluck this pigeon whose sporran was shaking at the thought of rapidly losing bawbees. By a stroke of fortune, in sauntered Len Speirs, who was eagerly claimed by the neophyte as a partner. Len’s only admonition was not to lead from king to another; mercilessly playing with the right hand and simultaneously smoothly picking up with the left, in the space of 20 minutes he had the two "con men" disorganized. After the first lead, Len had known the position and value of every card in every hand. He eschewed all small talk, he played to win, believing that any game was not worth playing otherwise, though scorning Potter’s gamesmanship. He belonged to a generation of all-round men, forthright and trusty, who should not be forgotten in a later age of specialism and sophistication.

In 1916 Lennox Speirs married Miss Marjorie Dunn, who survives him, with a daughter and a son, Dr. Norman L. Speirs, the Melbourne gynaecologist.

Dr. Alex Sinclair writes: Lennox Speirs is best remembered by many ex-servicemen of World War II as the Commanding Officer of the Fourth Australian General Hospital. This unit numbered amongst its original officers men of the caliber of Charles Littlejohn, Eric Cooper, Douglas Thomas, Jock Chambers, "Zack" Schwartz, Marshall Renou, Tom Tyrer, Arthur Amies, Vin Rudd and Bishop Riley. It saw active service for the first time throughout the siege of Tobruk, and later served in Palestine and Australia. In the desert the Fourth Hospital lacked most of the hallmarks of an impersonal regimentally precise military hospital; but there were other qualities which lent their own distinction. The greatest and most useful of these was its record of a busy family unit bent on getting a job done with the maximum of individual effort and the minimum of frustrating regulation. Lennox Speirs set the tone for this attitude of individual responsibility with the ease of an assured playing captain and coach. The unit worked without the benefit of trained nurses with inadequate equipment, under trying living conditions in an area subjected to daily bombing attack. The tide of war was in the wrong direction, most men became anxious, and the ingredients for cracking morale were all there. It was Lennox Speirs who, by personal example, ensured that this never happened, and that the unit continued to function with distinction under these difficult conditions. He did this by personal contact and by an example of stubborn fearlessness. He usually protected his head from falling debris with a faded topee and his directions were nearly always delivered by mouth on the spot in a tone of growling criticism, encouraging banter or incisive chaffing. When other felt inclined to complain of their unhappy personal lot, he reserved his curses for his smoker’s cough, his bridge hand or the fluctuating fortunes of the chess game.

The experience of the unit in Tobruk cemented Lennox Speirs inextricably with the men who served him in a bond which was not broken till his death. Right up to this time he remained in contact with most of his old unit, and never quite relinquished the role which he fulfilled so adequately in war time, and which returned him so much personal satisfaction in the years that followed.

Archival/Heritage Resources

Royal Women's Hospital Archives

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

Prepared by: Robyn Waymouth

Created: 20 September 2006, Last modified: 26 November 2006