Charles Halliley Kellaway was a great Australian scientist and a pioneer in very valuable medical research in this country, especially when he was director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute from 1923 to 1943. His memory must always be honoured by our profession. Kellaway was born in Melbourne in 1889, the son of the Reverend AC Kellaway, curate of the Saint James Cathedral in West Melbourne, and Ann Carrick Roberts of Longford, Tasmania, whose grandfather was a Welsh clergyman. Charles was educated at Caulfied Grammar School, Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, and University of Melbourne. He had a distinguished academic record, heading each year’s honours list. Within a few years of graduation he obtained the MD and the MS. He married Ethel, the daughter of Dr GJ Scantlebury, and they had three sons.

He became regimental medical officer of 13 Australian Battalion during World War I and prior to that, when in Egypt, worked with CJ Martin on bacillary dysentery. He was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty during the Battle of Zonnebeke on 26 September 1917.

In 1918 he worked on problems of military aviation, especially anoxaemia and its effect on the adrenal glands. He then worked with Sir Henry Dale in a classic study of anaphylaxis and realised that he had found his career as an experimental physiologist. In 1919 he was acting professor of physiology in Adelaide for a short period. In 1920 he was again in London as Foulerton student of the Royal Society at the National Institute. In 1923 he was appointed director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute which at that time was little more than a set of clinical laboratories attached to the Melbourne Hospital. When Kellaway left the Institute after twenty-one years of service he had brought it to adult stature. It occupied new buildings and was well known throughout the scientific world. Kellaway’s personal qualities were a potent stimulus to other centres in Australia, both in the universities and the teaching hospitals, to develop research. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1929. Kellaway worked hard to obtain money for the Institute, and the benefactors were more than happy to become his friends. He was liked by everybody.

Many papers appeared from the Institute and Kellaway himself found a fertile field in the study of the pharmacology of snake venoms which led him into his best scientific work on the nature of tissue damage by toxic agents. Hydatid disease was a special interest in his research, and Kellaway inspired Harold Dew and Neil Hamilton Fairley in this and other areas of clinical investigation. Of particular importance was his work with Trethewie on ‘slow reacting substance’. Charles Kellaway was a very humane person, and readily gave credit to his assistants, including Miss FE Williams and Tom Eades (‘Pambo’). I recall the time Pambo was rushed to a ward at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, where I was the resident, for Kellaway to direct resuscitation procedures on Pambo who had been bitten by a tiger snake. He recovered from that episode but perished from a later snake bite. Kellaway was a heavy cigarette smoker which no doubt contributed to his final illness.

He was very interested in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, accepting happily his responsibilities in these directions. He was an elected councillor of the newly formed Royal Australasian College of Physicians from 1938 to 1942, a foundation Fellow, vice-president from 1942 to 1944, a member of the Victorian state committee and a censor from 1938 to 1944. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1940. Soon after the outbreak of World War II his personal research career ended but he immediately was active as Director of Pathology at Army Headquarters with the rank of colonel. He was deeply involved in the development of transfusion services and the blood typing of all service personnel, and when war moved to the Pacific theatre, with physiological problems of tank crews in tropical war zones. He was promoted to brigadier.

At the end of 1943 the Wellcome Foundation in London asked Kellaway to join them as scientific director on the invitation of Sir Henry Dale, and from then on Charles Kellaway applied his scientific wisdom to directing the successful activities of the commercial and research enterprises of that great organisation. As elsewhere, Kellaway had the affection and respect of all those with whom he had contact. He travelled a lot in Europe and the United States of America and made many friends.

Outside the laboratory he had his hobbies - in the nineteen twenties, bird photography; in the thirties, fishing - and his family. On a visit to Melbourne in 1951 he became ill, and it was realised he had a malignancy from which he died in 1952. Kellaway’s medical bibliography includes one hundred and fourteen papers and an excellent tribute by his successor and former colleague at the Hall Institute, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, in the Medical Journal of Australia.