From India to St Mary’s (via St Stephen’s)
David Milford who joined St Mary’s sixth form in 1974 from St Stephen’s RC secondary modern and went on to enjoy a successful medical career. Here he is pictured on an expedition in 2014
I’ve recently had the pleasure of being contacted by David Milford who joined St Mary’s sixth form in 1974. His story, both before and after St Mary’s, is a fascinating one:
“My family arrived in the UK (from India) in September 1966 with little knowledge of the education system. In my final year of primary school in Essex I was taken to the headmistress's office and presented with an exam paper which later I discovered was the 11+.
Evidently I scraped through so my parents were advised to send me to a secondary modern school where it was felt I would cope better than in a grammar school. As we had by then moved to Dartford, I was enrolled in St Stephen's RC Secondary Modern School in Welling in 1969. Later, the fourth years and above moved to a new build in Bexleyheath called St Columba's School and in due course the lower years moved across. Well after my time there was an alliance with St Catherine's Girls’ School.
I had long held an ambition to do medicine and as St Columba's did not offer O or A level chemistry I moved to St Mary's sixth form in 1974 and started A level physics and biology. I was hugely surprised to find a fellow St Columba's student, Shaun Thorogood, in the sixth form on my first day!
In that first year I took night classes in O-level chemistry at Dartford College and after passing started A-level chemistry, but this meant at the end of upper sixth I had finished A-level biology and physics but had only completed the first year of A-level chemistry. My second upper sixth year was spent just doing chemistry A-level - luckily St Mary’s agreed I could just attend chemistry classes.
The move from secondary modern to grammar was interesting. There was a noticeably greater acceptance of academic endeavour and academic achievement was not seen as something to keep quiet about. There was also a pleasant sense of security at St Mary's, without the underlying tension that a fight could break out at any time during the breaks (or even moving between classes!).
Although some teachers at St Stephen's tried to give the more senior students a bit of leeway, there was never the same sense of being young adults as I encountered at St Mary's, and the sixth form common room with its clusters of bridge or Mahjong players, groups discussing the horse racing or nascent computers or politics was an eye opener to me.
After St Mary's I went to Southampton Medical School and qualified in 1982. Brian Clarkstone, another St Mary's alumnus, was in my hall in the first year but as he did engineering we rarely met. I undertook jobs at various hospitals in the south and quickly decided to specialise in paediatrics; after passing MRCP(Paeds) I went to Sheffield as a registrar and then Birmingham Children's Hospital to undertake a research project looking at a pretty rare cause of acute kidney failure.
I was awarded a higher degree and continued in the field of children's kidney diseases, becoming a consultant paediatric nephrologist at Birmingham Children's Hospital in 1992 and head of department for a number of years. The department provided the complete range of treatments including short and long term dialysis for infants and children as well as transplantation, the latter becoming a major area of interest for me.
I retired on 30th June 2021 having had a wonderful and rewarding career that allowed me to travel to many countries abroad to teach or present research papers, and to meet amazing people in the same specialty, some of whom came to spend time training with me in Birmingham. In retirement I am a Trustee of a charity that helps renal units in low/middle income countries to develop their own kidney transplant programme www.transplantlinks.org
My wife and I celebrated 43 years of marriage in 2023, during this time we had five children and now have four grandchildren. It is perhaps an ominous sign that none of my children decided on a career in medicine....I'm sure it is less fun than in my days and it is hard to see a way of reversing this, but I wish those entering medicine well and hope they will be there for me when I eventually need them!
Thank you to David for sharing his fascinating story.