Stanley Williams was a paediatrician who did great deal for children but also did a great deal for parents, for people and for his peers. If a visit from Stanley didn't cure, at least it always made you feel better and cheered you up. He came from a large and very united family. All the brothers and sisters in his generation got on well together. All his children got on well together and, of course, Stanley got on well with almost everyone. Stanley started life at Essendon High School, attended Scots College in Sydney briefly and spent the last four years of his school life at Scotch College in Melbourne. He rowed in the first eight, played in the first eighteen, was a probationer and a class captain. Much cherished in the family archives is his school report (signed by Dr Littlejohn) for his second last year which was rotten; and the report applying to last year at school, which is really quite good. Dr Littlejohn's relief is palpable from the pages of this document.

He went on to Melbourne University where he played football for the university blues during one of their good periods in the A-grade, and in two successive years (1924 and 1925) was given a half blue by the university. He was to comment to his family that it was a great pity that this pair of halves didn't add up to a whole. He nevertheless remembered and enjoyed his days as a university footballer and was both secretary and treasurer of the Melbourne University Football Club - clear evidence that he was both an honest man and one destined for higher things.

He graduated in medicine in 1929 with third class honours in medicine and in obstetrics and gynaecology. He was awarded the MD by the Melbourne University in 1933 and became a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1948. During his medical life, which was long, he had associations with a very large number of important medical organisations. He spent all his working life at the Children's Hospital until retirement in 1970. His association as a field medical officer with Commonwealth Serum Laboratories lasted from 1938 to 1965 and he maintained an ongoing link with CSL as an adviser both to Val Bazeley and to others who succeeded him. In 1962 he was president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association which, in 1968, made him one of their honoured bank of fellows. It was a well known secret that Stanley was one of those members of the AMA Council who always got lots and lots and lots of votes. He represented the AMA on the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria for many years, frequently providing that vital quorum at annual meetings. He was a censor for the RACP - his presence changed the format of some of their examinations and raised the laughter level of an otherwise sombre occasion for many a candidate. He was president of the Australian Paediatric Association in 1969, another organisation he was devoted to, whose meetings were livened up by his lack of respect for decorum and his refusal to take things too seriously. Later in life he had a long-term association with Allambie, one of the most difficult paediatric jobs in town, and one which Stanley enjoyed. He also spent much of his time as a consultant to the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind and the Victorian School for the Deaf and he could speak the language of the deaf. Other associations which Stanley had and cherished were that with the Royal Humane Society and, in particular, those with the Melbourne Scots and Essendon Football Club.

Now what sort of person was Stanley Williams? He certainly wasn't like anybody else. He grew up in a cohort of distinguished people - high achievers in diverse fields - but he wasn't like any of them. His diversity of interest was very special to Stanley Williams. His interest in the deaf, the blind and the kids of Allambie tells you how he felt about those who had disabilities, whether physical or social. His compassion was monumental and could be taken for granted and usually was. His humour was likewise - persistent, amicable, never sarcastic and never to be suppressed despite the importance of the occasion. Pomposity was one of his few enemies. What sort of paediatrician was he? He was caring, communicative, and unique. Perhaps Claire McKinnon gave the best description of Stanley as a paediatrician in the hospital about twenty years ago. "Stanley's a good paediatrician because he's just a big kid himself."

Stanley knew his trade enormously well and we should remember just what his trade was - it was that of clinical medicine and paediatrics. He practised humanitarian and pragmatic medicine all his life and maintained a balanced view in the face of all the inroads made into humanitarianism by science. He liked to give antibiotics early and comprehensively and the individual patients' needs and rights always got priority. There are some important components of Stanley's life and it would be good to spend a little time on each of them. The first was his friendship with Bill Keogh (qv 1), who was ultimately medical adviser to the Anti-Cancer Council but was one of Australia's most distinguished scientists.

The next focal point of interest is his long association with Fairfield Hospital. As a well-trained paediatrician just before the War he, together with Mick Powell, and a very small number of others notably Sandy McLorinan (qv 1) were right in the middle of the big polio epidemics which were such a strange phenomenon at that time. He and Mick acted as admitting officers for Fairfield Hospital by visiting patients at home on behalf of the Health Department and making decisions about which ones were likely to paralyse and which ones were likely to need respiratory assistance. It was a good setup, established to meet an urgent need, and it worked very well. He loved his association with Fairfield and loved the time he spent there with Sandy McLorinan, Allen Ferris, Bill Keogh, John Forbes (qv) and others. He was disappointed when times changed and when it ceased to be the club it had been. However, in his peripatetic practice he continued to provide early swabs from the various sources of infection which he saw out in the paediatric community. Often he found the first virus for the season.

Stanley wasn't a chap who went around getting into fights and, for that reason, many people failed to realise just how resiliently tough he was when things of importance were being decided. He was known for saying his piece, but abrasion was not his hallmark. During the late sixties and seventies he used to say his piece at Fairfield Hospital about its developing narrow-mindedness. Once when threatened with loss of the various jobs he held, subject to the whim of the Health Department, unless he stopped saying his piece, his clear statement of personal policy indicated that he thought he'd keep on saying what he thought and the hell with it. He did lose a few jobs, which were quite important to him at the time because he hadn't been retired that long and he wasn't exactly wealthy.

His life at the Children's Hospital of course was the centrepiece of both his career and his existence. He was appointed there as medical superintendent in 1935 and, apart from a break during the war, was on the staff until he retired. He ran right up the ladder and finished as a senior outpatient physician before being cut off at the socks by retirement, as paediatricians were in those days. However, he found plenty of other things to do. Stanley didn't pretend to be a great scientist. He knew science pretty well and he knew what it could do; but he wanted to be, and was, a clinical paediatrician. He worked next door to some very good scientists, was astute at picking events of topical interest, particularly in relation to infectious disease. He stood in this sort of relationship to Bill Keogh and, for a period, to MacFarlan Burnet (qv), in his early years. Stanley records that in the late thirties when whooping cough germs could only be grown in monkeys that a better experimental animal was needed. MacFarlane Burnet thought that it ought to be possible to infect the mouse. He said the research could be done if £500 could be raised. Stanley raised it, the research was done by Macfarlane Burnet, it was possible to infect the mouse with whooping cough, and thereafter this became the test animal for that particular bug. The names of the people from whom he raised £100 each were; Mr Wallace Smith, a stockbroker, Mr Theodore, a federal politician, Mr Cody, the licensee of Young & Jacksons and Mr John Wren, well known as a Collingwood supporter.

He joined the Army Reserve in 1931 and enlisted as captain in 1939 as VX165. He finished as a lieutenant colonel having been mentioned in dispatches twice and served overseas in Palestine, Egypt and Syria plus later periods in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. Kingsley Norris records a typical incident which deserves a quote:

Our Divisional Commander, who did not possess a sparkling sense of humour, could not at first make Stanley Williams out. Every member of the army had to be immunized against those diseases that had decimated armies in the past. The responsibility for these injections fell to my deputy and when General Lavarack came for his issue he found Stanley Williams sharpening a needle on the sole of his boot. "What on earth are you doing?", growled JDL. "Sir, I always like to have a sharp needle for Generals, it doesn't hurt so much.

Of course, the actual syringe and needle to be used had been sterilized
and were waiting in a bowl of spirit. Again, his clinical abilities were
outstanding particularly in relation to the work. The Queen was pleased to award him the CBE in 1982. Stanley was pleased too but probably not as pleased as his friends were. At this point it's perhaps important to move away from his career, even it's been treated a bit summarily, and towards the interests which occupied his later years. One of these was the Essendon Football Club. Stanley indulged himself in the Essendon Football Club, became a dedicated and vociferous supporter and stuck with them through the years when they failed to flourish. He was amiably contemptuous of his associates whose interest appeared to flag when the Club was down the ladder. The Melbourne Scots was another interest. It was a suitable, noisy background for his own personal brand of hilarity. He contended to the end that he liked haggis and Atholbrose.
Finally, we should say a little bit about the manner of his going. It really was just right. He'd had Christmas lunch with his family and took umpteen of them around to Nigel Gray's house to have a drink in the evening. He was standing on the back terrace when he lost his ability to speak; sat down, and, he was found to be a bit hypertensive, fibrillating and had obviously had had a partial stroke, had lost his ability to speak and lost the power of his right side. Within five minutes of the onset he was laughing with half of his face, writing with his left hand, and talking to Jan in deaf and dumb language. He was met in casualty at the Alfred by Bernard Gilligan, by which time his speech had returned and by next morning had made a substantial recovery of all functions, although he still had a facial palsy and some speech impairment. At no point did he lose his intellectual abilities. He had recovered most of his faculties by the following Monday where then was a sudden extension of symptoms and it was clear that he'd had a major stroke. Progress was rapidly downhill thereafter and he suffered no discomfort, eventually dying eight days after Christmas, possessed of all his grace and dignity if not of his hilarity.