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BIOGRAPHY: An abstract from "Journal of the Dental Association of South Africa" Volume 39, No. 1 January 1984;
Practitioners Corner - A personal record of dentistry, Clifford Edward Pedley
When the Wright brothers built their flimsy biplane with its petrol engine and recorded the first power driven flight in November 1903, I was just four months old.
Four score years have passed since then. Now millions of people travel by air each year, all over the globe. Man has also travelled in outer space and visited the moon a number of times. Numerous man-made satellites circle our world, performing important functions. Unmanned spacecraft visit other planets, reporting their findings by amazing means. Space laboratories have been established. Recently a craft carried men into outer space and returned to be used again with complete success. Today we live in the fast moving, instant-communication world of advanced technology and scientific discovery. Now the marvels of the microchip are with us to herald who knows-what wonders for the future.
In 1846, 57 years before that first powered flight and my birth, a boy of 16 -my grandfather, George Pedley walked to London from the family farm in Cheshire. He was to found a line of dental surgeons to the present fourth generation. The purpose of this article is to relate the history and development of the science and art of dentistry as I know it from the record of my grandfather and his four dental surgeon sons, from whom came five more dental surgeon sons, three of whom were my brothers; and my personal memories of 43 years of dental practise in three countries. I was the third son of Samuel Edward Pedley, who was the seventh son of George Pedley.
It was the beginning of the Victorian era. At the end of that long walk from Cheshire in 1846 my grandfather, George, apprenticed himself to a pharmacist in Fleet Street, London, just above Ludgate Circus. How well I remember as a very small boy, with my father at my side, that chemist shop viewed from the top of a horse bus, behind the coachman; the traditional display of two very large bottles -one filled with red, the other with green fluid. In bold gilt lettering on the glass door were the words CHEMIST AND DENTIST. After the 1914-18 War it disappeared to give place to a "modern building" occupied by the "Daily Express". At the time my grandfather served his pharmaceutical apprenticeship there were no qualifications or degrees in dentistry. Anyone could practise; chemists rendered an emergency service. Dental conservation became George Pedley's special interest.
Before his twenty-first birthday, rooms were rented in Newington Causeway and "GEORGE PEDLEY DENTIST" appeared in polished brass plate on the door. Soon this courageous step was followed by the renting of extensive premises at Railway Approach, London Bridge, where he practised for the rest of his life. When he was 21 he had married Rachel Franklin, who was proud of her descent from America's famous son, Benjamin Franklin. She was only four feet six inches tall and bore George 14 children, three of whom died in infancy. George Pedley died in his sleep in his 80th year, having attended patients only the day before. Rachel died 10 years later in her 90th year.
Five of George's six sons went to London University and all of them became doctors and/or dentists. My father, Sam, obtained the MRCS, LRCP, London qualification at Guy's Hospital and the LDS, RCS, Eng. at Charing Cross Hospital. The Royal College of Surgeons had instituted their diploma in dentistry, which could be acquired at the Charing Cross Hospital. Two years' study at Charing Cross were required of a man holding a medical qualification before, following examination, he cold be granted the dental diploma.
Tom Pedley, the eldest son of George, obtained his MD at Charing Cross and was among the earliest to obtain the RCS diploma in dentistry. Tom started his career as a ship's doctor on the popular and busy P & 0 LINE of steamships plying to India. One day, when approaching the Port of Burma, Uncle Tom was stabbed in the neck by one of the passengers with delirium tremens. He recovered in hospital in Rangoon and stayed there to practise medicine for 44 years. He became Colonel-in-Chief of the Indian Medical Corps and was awarded the Kaiser-I-Hind medal. In 1925, at age 73, he died while having an after-lunch nap on his surgery couch. When I came to Johannesburg in 1936, I was invited to call on a local medical practitioner, Dr Peacock. When he had satisfied himself that I was indeed a nephew of the late Colonel Tom Pedley, he showed me a set of dental forceps Tom had given him when Dr Peacock served under him in the I.M. Corps. I happened to know that this was a gesture my uncle liked to make to young MO's who had pleased him. There were six or more forceps housed in a black leather folder.
George's second son, Richard Denison Pedley, like my father qualified in medicine at Guy's and dentistry at Charing Cross. He went on to obtain the FRCS of Edinburgh.
At Guy's at the same time was Newland Pedley, a distant relative, who some years later founded the Guy's Hospital Dental School and Hospital. Newland never married and left his substantial Estate to Guy's. The Newland Pedley gold medal for operative dentistry is an award much valued and sought after at Guy's. Professor Julius Staz, past Dean of the Oral and Dental Hospital of the University of the Witwatersrand and my contemporary, says that this award is one of his most prized possessions.
Denison Pedley joined his father George at Railway Approach, where he practised for the rest of his days. He died, aged 73, in 1931. In the 1890's he wrote a book which he illustrated himself and which was published in England and America, titled THE HYGIENE OF THE MOUTH -A guide to the prevention and control of Dental Diseases. Full of wisdom and sound advice, the book also exposed the appalling state of "the lower orders" of society of those days. I have donated a copy of the book to the Library of the University of the Witwatersrand's School of Dentistry.
After qualifying in medicine at Guy's, George's third son, also George, joined his brother Tom in medical practice in Rangoon. Later he returned to obtain his LDS at Guy's and set up dental practice in Winchester. He died aged 52. His son Kenneth's education was sponsored by Denison Pedley, who sent him to Guy's, where he was my contemporary in studies, although not in age. He had seen war service as a pilot in the RAF. I had been too young for military service (I "did my bit" working on the land in Lincolnshire in my school holidays). I lost touch with Kenneth but, ten years later when I emigrated to South Africa in 1936, he took over my London practice, dying in 1950 aged 58.
At the age of 35 my father Sam, George's fifth son, had a well-established dental practice in his fine home at 18 Peckham Road, Camberwell, London, SE. This was a fashionable neighbourhood in those horse and carriage days. In 1898 Sam married Ada Wolsey, the lovely daughter of the owner of an even finer house and garden -No. 15, immediately opposite. Ada, my mother, had been to finishing school in Belgium and on her return became one of the first students of the now famous Camberwell Art School. Mother was an accomplished pianist and artist She was also, through the example of her own gentle mother, well trained in the domestic arts. One day, on her way to Art School, her upper right central tooth became the victim of a stone thrown at random by a street urchin. This led to a professional visit, and later marriage, to my father.
A posted crown was fitted which was still there when she died aged 87. The method used was: gold post; platinum foil overstamped; crown cast gold to platinum pin porcelain facing.
At this time father had started a "West End" connection and was renting a suite of rooms on the top floor of Regent House, then a new and imposing building in Regent Street near Oxford Circus.
The building -some five storeys high -was completely lit by electricity and had a manually operated lift which could be seen going up and down in the well of the spiral staircase It carried three or four people, including the operator who was not always there Passing vertically through the far right-hand corner of the lift was a steel cable. With gloved hand the operator pulled the cable, causing the lift to move, braking it to a standstill at the desired floor.
This was a delight to adventurous youth, but I have always suspected that this was the main reason for my father's move to 43 Welbeck Street in 1917.
Getting back to the Camberwell home and dental practice: By 1907 father had acquired five sons of his own. He let his house (eventually dividing it into flats) and moved us all out to a two-acre property on top of a hill in the country, "The Maples", in Orpington, Kent There, by 1911, two daughters were added to the family. In top hat and tails (black in winter, grey in summer) with umbrella on arm, father always walked the mile and a half downhill to the Orpington railway station but, coming home tired at night, he would take one of the hansom cabs that were always lined up for hire at the station entrance.
On 1 April 1914 we moved to Bromley, Kent, only eight miles from London. There, in a large manor house on 5 acres of ground with surrounding farmlands, we lived for the next 11 years through overflying Zeppelins and Gotha bombers of the great World War. I recall that that idyllic home, with its abundant orchards and kitchen garden, was leased to my father for £85 per annum.
My eldest brother Eric, having qualified at the Royal Dental Hospital, joined father at 43 Welbeck Street in 1923. He set up as a dental radiologist and did well, since few dentists had acquired X-ray apparatus. In any case the machine was large and expensive and necessitated installing a transformer which was both costly and noisy. A few more years had to pass before the West End's direct current electricity was changed to the now universally used alternating supply.
Eric also performed a valuable service to my father as anaesthetist. It was at the end of operating for the removal of impacted teeth that Sam collapsed with a "stroke". Although he made a good recovery he did not practise again. He relapsed some 18 months later and died in 1935 in his 73rd year.
My career at one of England's famous public schools, Dulwich College, was undistinguished but enlivened by air raid warnings and bomb attacks. The bombs, which at first were hand-held and dropped over the sides of the planes, developed into huge lethal affairs, one of which, in the dawn hours in May 1918, blew the imposing wrought-iron gates of the entrance to nearby Dulwich Park sky-high, leaving a crater big enough (to me at the time) to bury a double storey bus.
Armed with an honours certificate of the Royal College of Preceptors examining board (this was the initial requirement for medicine and dentistry in those days), I left Dulwich College to join my father as a dental mechanic apprentice.
This was the requirement of the Dental Board at that time. 1 was in fact one of the last trained under this regulation; thereafter, dental mechanics instruction became the prerogative of the dental schools only.
Of this period of introduction to my chosen profession I have many happy and interesting memories. The "war to end all wars" was over. Business was booming and the "newly rich" were also around. Gold work in the laboratory abounded and Mr Tappin, a deaf-mute and unique personality, was an excellent teacher. I soon acquired skills in gold suaging, soldering and casting, although my artistic nature rebelled at the use of vulcanite (plastics were unknown) and false-looking teeth made of opaque porcelain.
One of my earliest laboratory duties was to make a stock of amalgam filings. The correct and measured ingredients were melted in a crucible; father would then be called to contribute clippings from a gold sovereign (these were still in use but not for long). When cold, I secured the almost fist-sized ingot under several thicknesses of newspaper in a vice. Then, with a file (which was considered almost sacred as it had been kept for years only for this express purpose) I would, at convenient intervals over the following days, produce the required filings.
These would be spread out on a shelf to "age" before being bottled for use. Habit dies hard, but after this lot had been used up father was persuaded to buy his amalgam from the dental depots.
Another laboratory task I had to perform was the breaking up of father's considerable stock of porcelain platinum pin teeth. Not only had the "Steels Facing", with its gold removable backing, been recently introduced, but also gold-clad pinned porcelain teeth were generally in use. What really prompted the exercise was the post-war price of platinum, which had soared to a dizzy £25 an ounce. I seem to remember that gold was less than £3 an ounce.
The laboratory was in the extensive basement of the three-storey building with surgeries on the first and second floors. Next to my workbench was a speaking tube, a common feature in old London town houses from the days before the telephone. Its whistle-plug would usually be blasted from its socket when my father was at the other end upstairs. This could mean I was needed in the surgery for "a gas case". Father administered the anaesthetic himself as well as operating, which was permitted in those days. Between the face mask and the gasbag was a metal device containing ether, which he regulated to prolong the anaesthesia. I was required to hold the whole apparatus in position on the face while father manipulated the valves to his satisfaction and the patient's stupefaction. Then, poised with forceps at the ready, the signal would be given; I would drop the contraption, grab the patient's head and watch an unfailing and fascinating exhibition of high-speed extraction of teeth. Lower forceps, just used, with tooth attached, would literally be dropped to the floor en route to grabbing upper forceps from the bracket table. Father was a most dextrous operator. I rather took his bold and skilful use of the dental elevator for granted then, but later my own experience and practise brought me to appreciate it to the full.
Concurrently, I attended lectures in chemistry and physics at the Royal Dental Hospital. Soon I was involved in a motor accident with injury to my right leg which laid me up for six months. With the money I received in compensation, I decided to take medicine as well. This meant going to the Middlesex Hospital to study biology. Having passed the first Conjoint Examination and my mechanical apprenticeship completed, I entered Guy's Hospital.
Guy's Hospital Dental School and Hospital was founded by Newland Pedley in 1902 after he had returned from South Africa. The British Government had commissioned him to investigate conditions of troops in the field. He brought equipment with him and rendered a dental service. I have failed to discover any record of this episode.
By today's standards things were primitive. Although the electric dental drill, driven by cable in casing, was around, the chair-side pedestal unit had not yet arrived on the scene. Each student provided his own foot drill and portable cabinet containing essential instruments and certain materials (e.g. GP points) for conservative dentistry. We operated mostly by daylight. The conservation room had a glass roof that was cooled by water on hot summer days. The rear wall was lined with lockers. Each student kept his equipment, white coat, books, raincoat, sports gear and other paraphernalia in his own locker. A spittoon and wooden table were alongside each dental chair. We grabbed the best-lit chair available, taking our patient to it and setting out our equipment. This was the order of the day, for in no circumstances were we allowed to reserve a chair or leave our equipment about; everything had to be put back in our lockers when not in use.
Local anaesthetics were administered by infiltration: 2% Novocain tablets and adrenaline were issued together with Ringers isotonic solution. These were mixed and boiled in a small crucible over a spirit lamp and then drawn up into an injection syringe with a plunger that rarely worked smoothly, with consequent discomfort to the patient. Needles were two or three times as thick as the yet-to-come stainless steel ones and were liable to break. The theory of nerve block anaesthesia was taught but avoided in practice because of these risks and drawbacks. Although nasal administration of nitrous oxide was being introduced, regular sessions in the "gas room" were usually exciting experiences involving "straight" administration and the extraction of as many teeth as possible before the patient came round.
This brings to mind my memories, as a very small boy, of the "gasometer" for making nitrous oxide gas, which stood in the corner of my grandfather's surgery. Painted white and less than a cubic metre in size, it went up and down in vertical guides and appeared, to my infant eyes, to be a miniature of the enormous gasometers to be seen near towns all over England in those days.
By (I think) 1907, it was giving way to the pure bottled N20 in use today. In 1846 -the year my grandfather George Pedley started dental practice in London -the recent American discovery, nitrous oxide, crossed the Atlantic to England. Only when it could be made absolutely pure did its description, "laughing gas", disappear.
To return to Guy's, where there were many South Africans, for Wits Dental School had not yet come into being, the filling materials we used were limited. I cannot remember the considerable number of cohesive gold fillings we had to literally hammer into place; there was also a limited number of gold inlays which we had to place and cast ourselves. Tremendous emphasis was placed on the relatively new concept of extension for prevention in cavity preparation. The value of amalgam as a filling when properly prepared and inserted was gaining ground. We did the occasional porcelain inlay, but the new silicate porcelain from De Trey of Switzerland boded well for the future, although only later did I learn how to handle it correctly.
Sound principles in crown and bridge work were taught, though few opportunities came the way of the student to practise them. Suaged gold (not cast) was used in partial denture work. German silver alloy (nickel silver) was used entirely as a "practice material" and one became expert in the technique of suaging metal plate and soldering it to the required wires or bands (also of NSA) with silver solder. Vulcanite came in red, pink and black. All porcelain "gum sections", which came in blocks of three for the front teeth and two for the premolars, had the merit of being less artificial in appearance, but had many limitations.
The worst deficiency in the training and teaching of those days, and for years to come, was disregard for the preservation of the facial contour in edentulous or near edentulous cases or restoration of the facial contour in longstanding full denture wearers. We were taught to be good manipulators and technicians. Any artistic sense that any of the teaching staff possessed was not apparent.
However, just before I sat for my finals, I saw full dentures in the mouth of a Salvation Army officer in a material similar in appearance to today's acrylic. Named "Walkerite" after the scientist who invented it, it was to be the forerunner of similar initially good looking but short-lived denture materials until the arrival of acrylic plastic in 1938. "Vidon", "Resavin", "Palladon", the celluloids "Heckolite" (German) and "Oralite", were all to become the subject of investigation and practical application with initial pleasure and ultimate grief.
I knew "Oralite" best and used it most. Arriving in Johannesburg in 1936, with the special equipment needed, I processed my own Oralite dentures for two years. One day Mr Home of Taylor and Home Dental Suppliers, brought me a sample of material which had been sent to him from Belgium. I tried this out and knew with little doubt that in my hands lay, at last, the end of the long search for a suitable denture material. It was acrylic resin.
When I qualified LDS in February 1926, I received a telegram which read: "Join me immediately, passage paid for". Not unexpected, the message was from Rowland Campion, who had the only British dental practice in Egypt, whom I had met at the end of the 1914-18 War eight years before when he was Captain Campion, RAMC Dental Corps, then in uniform, on leave.
He had been posted to the maxillo-facial unit at Alexandria's Mustafa Hospital for the War and had decided to set up private practice in Alexandria at the end of hostilities. He had kept in close touch with me ever since. An added excitement for me was the fact that while I was at Guy's (in 1922), Tutankhamen's tomb had been discovered. I had avidly followed every report on the excavations and was "hooked" on the study of Egyptology.
From London, crossing the English Channel, Europe and the Mediterranean, it took me four and a half days to reach Alexandria. Next day I treated 10 patients, communicating with two of them in bad schoolboy French.
As subsequent events were to prove my experience unique, I may perhaps be forgiven for including those aspects of my personal experience in Egypt over nearly two years, which may be of interest in tracing the history and development of dentistry to its advanced state in this year of 1983. I was to receive a quick succession of shocks and disillusionments that I soon determined to regard as lessons learnt and experience gained. It was to prove a classic example of lasting benefit gained from the mismanagement and even stupidity and malpractice of others. What not to do can sometimes be the guide to what best to do.
The consulting-rooms were a second floor suite in the American Mission Building in the heart of the city. There were three surgeries, an X-ray room, a waiting room, a spare room and a passage where there was a single gas ring on which instruments were sterilised in a saucepan and upon which Thompson, ex-army Sergeant, medical corps nurse and our general factotum, cooked our midday meal ("I'm afraid we'll have to fall back on an omelette again today!"). The passage led through to the roomy and well-lit laboratory.
My bare-floored, uncurtained, unadorned surgery had a washbasin fitted by an incompetent Arab workman the day before I started. There was an ancient, plush upholstered dental chair with bracket table, a spittoon and (oh dear!) a foot engine. A multi-drawered, shabby dental cabinet stood in the corner against the wall. Next to it, on the floor, lay a one metre long nitrous oxide gas bottle with gas mask bag and tube attached. A desk table and chair completed the depressing scene. The other assistant's surgery was better equipped for a rather ordinary but likeable little man. He had been a war-time dental mechanic at Mustafa Hospital, who had qualified LDS Liverpool with the help of a post-war army grant.
The main surgery had the latest invention, a Ritter pedestal unit. The rest was a shambles, betraying a reluctance to spend money in the interest of efficiency and appearance. The X-ray room, leading directly by partition doors off the main surgery, housed, in magnificent isolation, a recently installed Ritter X-ray machine. There was a wash-basin and a contraption of black curtains in one corner which served as a "dark room".
We opened at 8 a.m. and never left before Campion had finished, which could be any time up to 6 p.m. Campion's clientele was almost exclusively among the well-to-do cosmopolitan community of Alexandria. Their oral cavities became loaded with "gold work". For those with "amalgam incomes" and/or resistance to his sales talk, his assistants were available. However, he was always overbooked and behind schedule. My reputation for strict punctuality overcame my youthful appearance and soon gained for me a valued cosmopolitan and Egyptian clientele.
We all took Saturday and Thursday afternoons off. I forgot to mention the shower room that often provided welcome relief in a climate more hot and humid than Durban!
My varied duties kept me constantly busy. The mechanic was soon dismissed for another hardly more competent. I spent hours in the laboratory daily processing and casting gold inlays and designing and processing and casting skeletal gold dentures. Taking, developing and reporting on X-rays was my responsibility. When the temperature of my solutions and wash exceeded 85 Fahrenheit which it did for a few months of the year -the surface of the film would lift, distort and even float off. I soon worked out that by adding alum to developer, fixer and washing water, I was safe for another five degrees or more.
While working in the X-ray room I could hear Campion's conversations next door. I soon picked up a working French dental vocabulary. I took lessons in Arabic because Campion had ideas of my opening a practice in the native town of Tanta -a pipe dream. The language was only useful to me outside the practice.
English, in those days of British prestige and the British mandate, was widely spoken -certainly by all educated people. The children of the cosmopolitan families who were patients of the practice all seemed to have (often attractive) English governesses and spoke English as well as their parents.
My most adventurous role was in the field of general anaesthetics. I was expected to administer nitrous oxide or ethyl chloride when needed. That long and heavy gas cylinder in my surgery was the only one we had. I did not know when it would empty; there was no spare.
Pulling it across the floor to within reach of the patient, down on one knee with gas mask over my own face, I would turn on the supply with a spanner, regulating it to what I hoped was a satisfactory flow. Rising to my feet, I would apply the mask to the patient and while regulating the valves, I would hope, even pray, for the best.
A month after my arrival I had to go before an examining board in Cairo. I was treated with courtesy and cordiality mixed with curiosity about nerve-block anaesthesia and 'the latest teachings and techniques.
In due course my diploma was returned to me duly endorsed in Arabic. Also from the Administration of Public Hygiene, a beautifully inscribed "AUTHORISATION D'Excerser la Profession de Dentiste".
This was written, stamped and signed, with sundry endorsements, in both Arabic and French. I prize it among my possessions, a document which could be of interest to future generations of dentists. A decade later foreign dentists were forbidden and/or expelled from Egypt, the Cairo Dental School having been founded in 1929.
Our local anaesthetic was available in 4 oz bottles with a thick rubber cover stretched tightly over the bottle mouth. One punctured it with the syringe needle and withdrew the required amount. It was potent stuff. Campion would draw a certain amount up into his syringe and then a similar amount from the hot water in the electric saucepan in his surgery, which served for sterilising the business end of his hand instruments (i.e. scalers, probes, etc). I could never summon the courage to tell him that the swelling and pain he warned his patients to expect after an extraction was due to his cheerful disregard for (and probable ignorance of) the principles of osmosis.
Campion knew that I saved the teeth I extracted for the purpose of histological research in the future. One day he entered my surgery, found an upper first premolar, broke off one of the roots and hastily departed without comment, for I was attending a patient. Later I was informed he had to do this because he had left a root behind in the jaw when extracting. The patient had then asked to see the tooth, and he wished to satisfy her that the tooth had been completely removed. My scandalised objection was met with contempt and finally an expression of hope and a prayer (he was a "holy man") that God would guide me to understand.
On another occasion I had been requested by an Italian woman (was she one of the many "ladies of the town"?) to make and fit an almost full upper denture over the many root stumps she flatly refused to have extracted. She had no English and her French was little better than mine. I called Campion to persuade her and he sent me to the laboratory. Soon he came to tell me that it was pointless talking to her and that I must accede to her request. His reaction to my shocked refusal, as a matter of principle, was "Very well, then I had better get on with it myself", and he returned to the woman in my surgery. I neither heard more of the matter nor saw the patient again.
Thompson was our sole staff except for the erratic services of a 16-year-old Arab boy who performed the odd small chore, including the transport to the sterilisation point (the gas ring and saucepan in the passage), and later return, of the instruments we had used. Campion went to England on leave and my co-assistant was taking a short holiday. I had become increasingly conscious of the listlessness and pallor of the Arab boy and one day caught him with his trousers down and handling a mysterious bottle of fluid; he had gonorrhoea. I learnt later that this was his second attack of the disease.
Which reminds me that when Campion was again on leave in 1927 I experienced an earthquake. It was Saturday midday lunch hour. Thompson and I were eating our meal in the spare room (in which I was actually living at the time), when the whole place began to shake, the floor heaving up and down and my long white coat swinging like a pendulum on its peg on the door. We rushed onto the small railed balcony, keeping close to the wall. The tram cables in the street below were whipping against the poles. A strange sultry quiet prevailed, broken at last by Thompson's voice with its broad Scottish accent: "It's aboot time the Lord visited this wicked city". The longest two minutes of my life had passed and we went off to inspect the building for (thankfully not too serious) cracks.
When I had three weeks leave I stayed with friends in Palestine, journeying through the night to Jerusalem on the war-time-built railway across the Sinai Desert; roads were primitive. With Bible in pocket, I did a great deal of walking around. Jerusalem and Bethlehem were mostly under snow. In Jericho, some 1,200 feet below sea level, I was in my shirtsleeves.
An old school and medical friend in Haifa did his rounds on horseback. In token of a long friendship and appreciation for some dental service I rendered in his clinic in the then harbourless town, he gave me a violin (much better than my own) which a patient had willed to him.
Only recently freed from centuries of Turkish domination, Palestine in 1927 seemed to me to breathe relief under the British Mandate. How different things would be on my next visit 34 years later.
Near the end of my stay in Egypt, I teamed up with a fluent-in-Arabic friend and motored in my little Citroen along the canal-side dirt roads to Cairo for a last fling. On returning to Alexandria I left wonderful, mysterious, sunny Egypt with mixed feelings of regret and relief.
However, one more aspect of my Egyptian experience had to be faced when I had arrived back in London. I received flattering requests and offers of influential backing to persuade me to return and open a practice in Cairo. Any plans I may have had to take advantage of these offers were thwarted by the inadvisability of contesting the fact that my contract of assistantship with Campion had bound me out of all Egypt for ten years.
There followed a search from London to Bristol for a suitable and permanent place in which to settle. It was to be in a home-based practice in Streatham, London, SW, with a branch practice at 51 Welbeck Street Wl. It was owned by Harold Harrison, whose ill-health was apparent when he engaged me as his sole assistant. Two weeks later he collapsed in his surgery at Welbeck Street and it was to be six months before he could return to work, when he took me into partnership. This was to be my life and work for the next eight years until, married to a South African girl, I would emigrate to her country.
The West End practice was run in association with that of Mr Nixon, a leading dentist of Edinburgh. His elite clients had London bases and regularly "came down for the London Season" I found myself treating the well known, the aristocratic and titled society. One of my favourites was lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. I learnt a great deal from her great charm of manner and speech. Her eloquence was so erudite and delightful that I used to jot down unaccustomed words she might use for later study at home.
Another I have cause to remember, although for different reasons, was an imposing, florid Major General- ex Indian Army -who I was reluctantly obliged to render edentulous in the course of four administrations of gas. I used on him a valuable trick I had learnt in Egypt and employed regularly. Often heavy drinkers go rigid and arch their backs as anaesthesia becomes effective. For suspected drinkers, I kept a harness strap handy and at the right moment of induction would pass it round the patient's middle and buckle it firmly underneath the chair. Having operated, I would release the strap and hide it away. Some time later, when the General had become an accustomed denture-wearer, said he: "Each time you took out teeth for me, I think, young man, you slipped something round my middle and pinned me down?" "Yes Sir," I replied, "I did." "Could it have been a harness strap?" he asked. "Yes Sir, it was." "Ha! I thought so. I wasn't in the cavalry all those years for nothing!"
Harrison's recovery did not last long. The West End connection was disposed of and in due course, in 1931, I bought Harrison out and moved the busy Streatham practice to my own house at 14 Becmead Avenue.
Meanwhile I had obtained part-time appointments to three London Hospitals. One was the Magdalen Hospital for Destitute Women. This was an emergency service in that it entailed eliminating obvious sepsis and sending the patients for employment in Australia or far from their origins. Most of them were under 17 and had been born to prostitutes operating in mid and northern cities of Britain.
Another was the British Home and Hospital for Incurables, mostly advanced rheumatoid arthritis cases. I found the mouths in a sorely neglected state and worked to effect a clean-up and thereby general improvement and arrest of the disease. I was disappointed. One very old edentulous lady there was put out by the late appearance of an upper right wisdom tooth. After I had removed it under a slight whiff of gas, she examined the tooth closely, remarking that my name was an unusual one and asked could I be connected with a dentist she knew long, long ago -a certain George Pedley? When I replied in the affirmative, she embraced me saying "Your grandfather was a dear, dear man; under gas which he administered, he took out my first bad baby teeth. I wanted to be sure you had really managed to get that wretched buried tooth (I hope my last one) out before I told you."
The third hospital appointment that I instigated was one morning a week at the London Country Councils' Hospital at Dulwich. There were fourteen hundred beds. Also attached was an antenatal clinic as well as a home for epileptics. I was given a room to equip and was welcomed by the medical staff with relief.
In, I think 1934, I was invited by the doctor on duty to try the "latest discovery" on my hospital patient who was due for a full mouth clearance. It was the first intravenous anaesthetic "EVIPIAN". This was spectacular and alarming. After two or more cases I decided that it was not to be risked on my private patients. I was first asked how long I expected to be operating. The syringe would then be filled with the specific amount for the period required. The whole of the contents would be injected in the vein AND THE SYRINGE WITHDRAWN. The patient went out in a few seconds, as happens today, but tended to rigidity and violence. Trismus was a problem and usually created real difficulties. On recovery there could be alarming violence.
A decade and the War was to pass before I encountered the intravenous method again. Johannesburg had to wait a few more years before PENTATHOL and "drip" became routine with our anaesthetists.
After five years at Dulwich Hospital treating everything that came my way within or beyond my capacity, including fractures, I was involved in a case which led to Parliamentary Questions and debate and the final re-organisation of the dental services in all the hospitals of the London County Council. I had cleaned up a unilateral mandibular osteomyelitis with the usual collapse of the affected side, persuaded the patient to discharge himself and had him admitted to Guy's Hospital for the restorative operation by Sir William Kelsey-Fry. This was deemed irregular, but the rectitude of my behaviour was obvious. I was asked to report fully on other cases I had encountered in the course of my duties at Dulwich. I told of how I had often used my private dental laboratory, for
instance for constructing splints in fracture cases. The result was that a dental laboratory was created near London's centre, fully equipped and with adequate, well trained staff. I then retired from the scene with a by no means unappreciative testimonial.
Having a dental practice with dental laboratory in one's home is not conducive to domestic tranquillity. Friction between family, domestic and professional staff is usually not far from the surface. Then there is the weather, which the English endure because they are born to it, and don't know any better. Those long, cold, grey, wet months with so relatively short a respite. Little wonder that with Egypt and South Africa nostalgically in mind, we decided to "pull up our roots" and exchange security in dreary London for uncertainty in a sunny land full of promise for the future.
Our intention had to be kept a close-guarded secret. Fifteen months and 44 interviews later (all conducted with time-consuming patience on Sundays only), the practice was sold. By July 1936 my car, furniture, family, white nanny and I were on board the Windsor Castle along with the many who were fleeing Hitler's impending wrath. I had my 33rd birthday on board. Cape Town was bathed in glorious sunshine as I put my family on the train for Krugersdorp. I joined them there four days later, having negotiated 900 miles of dirt roads and opened and closed (it seemed) a 100 farm gates.
While waiting for my new Emda Equipment to arrive from Germany, and in order to gain essential local experience, for a few weeks I worked for Drs Bengis and Lewis in Brakpan. This was a most valuable exercise. They were advanced in ideas and techniques, using nerve block anaesthesia in conservation and employing the new fine stainless steel needles and carpule syringes. This experience firmly entrenched my determination to promote this trend. I discovered that Johannesburg dentists were being seduced by the special gas and oxygen anaelgesia apparatus on the market.
At Guy's, five years before, I had attended a demonstration of the method being used in cavity preparation. It was being given, experimentally and tentatively in the dental field, by Dr Minute, who had pioneered and used it extensively and successfully to relieve the pangs of childbirth. It was obvious to me that in the dental field it would have a limited application and that the ideal of completely painless dentistry could not lie in that direction.
Establishing a new dental practice from scratch in Johannesburg was a slow business. I did all my own dental mechanics for five years. My perseverance in rejecting and diverting casual treatment and insisting on a properly structured treatment plan in all cases brought its ultimate reward. In 1944 and 1945 I paid war-time excess profit duty of fifteen shillings in the pound.
In 1940, Dicky Bird, then Colonel Bird, Director of Army Dental Services, asked me to come to Pretoria for an interview. He made me a tempting offer but as matrimonial problems are not resolved by running away, I refused and saw the matter through to ultimate divorce.
From 1952 to my retirement in 1969 I employed assistants and freed myself from general dental practice in order to pursue exclusively my own unique speciality of facial restorations. This involved restructuring the original contours of the face and profile of patients suffering the ravages of multiple or total loss of the natural dentition. It also involved a sensitive awareness of the need to cater for those changes which Nature's hand places on all in course of time. I have restored full denture wearers of 40 years and more. I did my own set-ups and alterations to set-ups in my own small, private laboratory. The patient took home the near final try-in for personal and family appraisal. The clay bust created by the sculptor must never be altered in the slightest by the bronze founder. In the same way my technician processed my work exactly in the form in which I had given it to him.
On arrival in Johannesburg, I joined the Dental Association of South Africa (then the SADA), as well as the recently founded Odontological Society of South Africa. I came to hold high office in both, the Odontological Society awarding me their Fellowship in 1951 and their first Honorary Life Membership in 1967.
I represented the Dental Association of South Africa on the Governing Body of the Oral and Dental Hospital for twelve successive years from 1940, witnessing and influencing the hospital's removal from its site now occupied by South African Airways Rotunda Terminal building to its present location which necessitated blasting away a rock koppie on the corner of the Witwatersrand University Campus. My part in the founding of the Professional Provident Society has been recorded elsewhere. I was a member of the original Committee of Management in 1940.
To put my personal and specialised practice on the market would have proved a futile exercise. The equipment, however, was sold and in April 1969 I closed the door and walked away to a contented retirement, lasting to date almost 15 years, in my mountain home "MOUNTHAVEN" at Kosmos, the village I helped develop on the Hartebeespoort Dam.
This is the end of a dental saga which I hope will be of interest to those who follow me in the profession. The Pedley name continues into the fourth generation; my nephew, Eric's son Timothy, is in settled dental practice in England.
EPILOGUE
At Xmas time in 1947 I married Peggy, for four years a teacher of physical education at the Teachers Training College at Graaf Reinet. I had known Peggy, fifteen years younger than I, for years as a person of sterling character and worth, always dependable and reliable. Her attractive appearance was an added, and to me important, bonus.
After five years Peggy presented me with a daughter, Diana, a welcome addition, in my fiftieth year, to my earlier brood of two sons and a daughter, then in their 'teens and twenties.
After 35 years of shared interests, endeavour and understanding, with our quota of pain and pleasure, we enjoy the good life to the full in our "Mounthaven".
With study and constant application we have developed our love of scenic painting and Peggy her (by now well known) gift for flower painting. From my collection of gemstones I also create jewellery, which I make at my old dental workbench, set up, together with polishing lathe and tools, in my workshop at home. We display and sell our work in our Art Gallery which is the focus of frequent visitors from near and far.
Mounthaven is full of books, treasured possessions and some fifty pieces of furniture I have made over the years. Good music, mostly piano, from our record collection lends joyful sound to the atmosphere of contentment and peace of mind. The stimulation of good conversation with friends, old and new, adds much to the quality of our life.
Soon will come the end of the road and an agnostic's calm acceptance of what may or may not lie beyond. After all, BELIEF IS A MATTER OF CONVICTION AND NOT NECESSARILY THE TRUTH.
221. Gordon Ewart Pedley
Dentist, practices in 35 Cambell Road, Ealing Broadway
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© PedleyOnline Transmitted : Friday, July 04th, 2008 'Last Modified: Sunday, December 31st, 2006 |
