HMS Birkenhead & HMS Nova Scotia: connecting the highs & lows of human behaviour to Star Wars

frequent visitor to Halifax Nova Scotia ends up the victim of Allied brutality

Two British troopships, sunk a century apart, on opposite sides of South Africa, probe the very heights and depths of human morality.


When the troopship Birkenhead hit a rock not far off the rocky shore of Capetown in 1845, there wasn't enough lifeboats for the entire crew and passengers and what lifeboats there was, were in very bad repair.

So the soldiers stand to, firmly at attention, on the deck as the women and children are put safely aboard the few small boats that could float and could be launched.

Then the ship sank into the stormy depths and most of the men drowned.

The chivalrous Victorian Age loved the story of "Women and Children First" (the so called Birkenhead Drill) and paintings and prints of the men at attention as the ship goes down hung in many homes around the British Empire before WWI.

It is hard to account for the tens of thousands of incidents of incredible heroism that were almost routine on the Western front without knowing a little of the sinking of the troopship HMS Birkenhead.

Cut to the WWII, (thankfully) the world's only modernist war, a wicked evil war from beginning to end on all sides, in part because the world had come to reject chivalry as an ideal , preferring variants of Social Darwinism instead.

(Modernists, it is said often enough to be a cliche,  had come to reject chivalry as a result of the blood and the mud of the Somme and Passchendaele.)

But bits of chivalry still hung about at the beginning of WWII, even among the Nazis.

So it was in September 1942, when U-156 torpedoed the former Cunard liner Laconia, now a troop ship with 2800 people on board, off Africa, that the U-boat captain Werner Hartenstein  immediately signalled other German U-boats, Italian submarines and even the neutral Vichy French and his enemy the Allies, to come help save lives.

Hartenstein didn't know who was on board, it was enough that they were people and their lives deserved to be saved.

As a troop ship, it fell out of the rules of war, and so he didn't have to rescue anyone, legally.

He flew the Red Cross , while towing lifeboats filled with survivors and with other survivors crowded on his submarine's narrow little deck.

His decision to attempt a rescue was even backed up by the supreme U-boat commander Donitz, who ordered seven other U-boats to back off attacks and come help the rescue.

U-156 even broadcasted an open language and a English language appeal for anyone to come help in the rescue, and that he and the other U-boats would not attack rescuers.

Despite this, an American B-24 Liberator bomber flew over intend on bombing the sub, but hesitated to shot on seeing the Red Cross flags.

But eventually it was ordered to do so by a young officer back at base, Robert C Richardson III, who ordered them to sink the U-boat, Red Cross flag and survivors on board and in towed lifeboats or not.

Remember that odious name : Robert C Richardson III because he has much more evil left to do, before he died very honoured and very old, in his bed.

The B-24 returns home a hero, for claiming it had definitely sunk an enemy sub ,when in fact it only sunk a few lifeboats filled with Allied personnel and Italian POWs.

Most of the thousands of souls about to be saved by a multi-nation humanitarian effort, instead died horrible slow deaths at sea.

As a result of the Americans trying to sink a rescue operation, the German naval command said no more of these chivalrous attempts at life saving.

(The Americans had never practised chivalry in submarine warfare, but up till then , many of the British Commonwealth and Germans  sea commanders had.)

As a result of one junior officer's freelance decision, at least a hundred thousand people died needlessly at sea in the remaining years of the war, as huge shiploads of people were sunk without efforts to get rescuers to the scene by all sides.

 Often the survivors were further machine-gunned in the water, again by both sides.

The next incident off of Africa occurred just a few weeks later when the former Furness liner Nova Scotia, which had spent decades going from Liverpool to America and back, via Halifax Nova Scotia and St John's Newfoundland, was sunk as a troopship off Durban with 900 dead --- the biggest ever marine disaster in South African waters.

Again, no one was signalled to come to the survivors' rescue and the sun and sharks got most of them. Again, like the Laconia, the U-boat had sunk a ship filled with POWs from the Axis forces as well as men, woman and children from all over the British Commonwealth.

The infamous Laconia Incident wasn't enough ; Richardson then invented "Star Wars"

Richardson was unpunished then, and in fact ended up a general after a long career, all the while insisting he'd make the same decision again, regardless of who was in the water.

He was a famous cold war hawk from the earliest days, an expert on thinking about winnable nuclear wars and a consultant to many right wing /free enterprise Republican Party oriented think tanks.

So it was only consistent with his wartime brutality, that in retirement, he fathered the Star Wars pipe dream : if it had come to fruition, the deaths of the 2500 on the Laconia would be but a drop in an ocean of death.

General Richardson died a year ago, age 93.

I hope and pray he is in Hell's hottest fires this very moment, as I write.....

The battle over wartime penicillin, EUGENICALLY speaking : who makes it and who gets it ?

Eugenics dominated ALLIED war aims

Wartime America was consumed by "popular-eugenic" emotions, (as was the rest of the world of the early 1940s.)

These emotions lay just below conscious thought, but were often behind conscious deed.


But in practise, even semi-conscious eugenic emotion divided into soaring rhetoric and sagging reality.

Modernity/Eugenics/Triage/Conscription (the four terms are basically 100% interchangeable) was consumed with the thought of competition ; with the mighty and the wise usually winning out over the weak and the foolish.

War, of course, was the ultimate form of competition for survival.

In theory, only the 1As of the world went to war, to defend the 4Fs of the world who were too weak  and /or too cowardly to defend themselves.

But in practise, modernity's wars were "a competition too far" to mis-use Cornelius Ryan's phrase : modern war was too competitive, often resulting in as many deaths on the side of the winners, as on the side of the losers.

In the minds of popular eugenics , sending our 'best blood' off to defend the country, meant only the loss of our best blood while those of 'weaker blood' stayed home - safe - and multiplied their offspring even more than normal.

Too many successful wars, and soon our nation would be overrun by imbeciles and their children !

So bravery in war had to be divided into physical bravery (actually going into battle against bullets and shells with only your serge cloth uniform as your armour) and leadership bravery (inspired military leadership, from safely well behind the front lines.)

This latter definition of bravery proved a morally slippery slope.

Because soon scientific efforts and organizational planning of  production and logistics in modernity's wars became almost as important as mere generalship.

Soon, appearances to the contrary, a well educated healthy, wealthy young 1A man safe behind a desk in Washington wasn't evading the draft, he was - in fact -  'winning the war !'

And to the middle-class, middle-aged men running the local draft boards, it didn't seem fair that only their well-fed, well-educated sons met the draft requirements of a modern mechanized armed forces.

(This was all thanks to the dozen years of the Great Depression reducing the health and occupational skills of the working class and poor.)

So soon those failing the first draft calls : those illiterate, in indifferent health, in jail, black, latino and aboriginal were lifted and they were being drafted as fast as possible.

 They were to provide the physical bravery in the front lines, at the pointy end of America's big stick.

Donkeys.

But these quasi 4Fs couldn't be led (aka pushed) without inspired bravery from the 1As in the rear, the lions.

So the sons of the middle class and sons of the upper ends of the prosperous working class got exemptions from the draft ; they were needed at home to provide the skills to create the mechanical equipment that would really win the war.

(The donkeys in the infantry would merely form the occupation garrison after the real battle was won.)

The middle class has always loved mechanized war, the more high tech the better: it lowers their chances of actually having to die in the front lines to a much lower level.

Old fashioned infantry wars come down to personal bravery and this , eugenically speaking, should be found more in the middle class 1As than in the 4Fs of the poor - so as in the 19th century myth, the middle class would have had to dominate the front lines of every infantry battle.

There were just a few flies in this happy middle class ointment.

( I won't discuss the most ironic one : that the supposedly safe middle class military occupation of driving a high tech plane dropping bombs on civilians 3 miles below you, turned out to be even more dangerous than the ultimate low tech job of the poor slobs holding a bolt-action rifle in a foxhole !)

One was that there were never enough well feed well educated young white men freed up to fight America's mechanical war all around the globe.

So one way to free up more such mechanically-trained men was to
say that mom's husband , as well as her sons, should be liable for the draft.

Exempted men opposed this idea strongly, claiming that they weren't being cowardly (they were potentially 1A draft picks after all) but that it was more important that they maintained the home front: their daughters really needed a father to see they weren't off running round with 4f boys.

Or worse : getting a factory job.

Because some patriotic fools wanted to see draft-free women do many of the industrial jobs that men had always traditionally done and were still doing in wartime.

Men literally rioted over this threat to their safety, though they were careful not to put it in those terms.

Women, they exclaimed, were too physically weak, intellectually weak, above all too emotionally weak : they'd wet their pants, trying to tighten the bolts on the outside of an armoured car.

In fact the real fear was "that if women got my job, I could now be drafted and end up in that same armoured car, under enemy fire, wetting my pants !"

This reminds us to never take people's surface reasons for their actions at face value, but to probe the real, often hidden, reasons for their behaviour.

Finally, at long last, to wartime penicillin and the words of those two famous penicillin lions, Dr AN Richards and Dr Howard Florey.

The normally highly-combative Howard Florey, on his trip to the combat zone of the Middle East and Sicily, quietly knuckled under to the dictate that precious penicillin wasn't to be wasted on soldiers dying of  wounds.

(I take that to mean that his initial protests were mere pro forma and I think that even his most sycophant biographers who agree with me.)

The thinking was that these wounds were so severe, that even if they healed, they'd still be discharged and be of no further use to the army.

 and from then on , they'd just a burden to the decent middle class people at home who fund the military pension plan.

(Oh no, they'd never be so blunt as that - in public - but even a fool could follow their drift.)

Instead, the dictate read - use your precious penicillin on men who already have several alternative treatments for their non-fatal disease, the clap.

So why in earth use precious penicillin on their non-fatal wounds while letting other brave soldiers die of their combat wounds?

Because front line soldiers - like the paratroopers - by some strange coincidence - proven very likely to contract non-fatal VD (despite their free condoms) just when there were strong rumours a big push was about to begin.

(The morality of them being unfaithful to wife or girlfriend back home didn't enter into the discussion till later when the scandal went public ; for now, this was just man-to-man locker room talk.)

The treatments of VD, before penicillin, did work but involved toxic drugs and months away from the front line as careful needle followed careful needle -- by contrast, non-toxic penicillin could cure in 2 days.

Result ? The hapless paratrooper couldn't avoid possible death in the big battle , but would soon be back in the thick of it.

He mightn't be happy, but from Sicily back to Iowa, other men would sigh in silent relief : ' better him than me in the line of fire and near-certain death.'

Because if our reputed brave but clapped-out paratrooper wasn't dying for his country, who would take his place ?

Yep, chump, you would !

America's penicillin czar - the closest man to filling Dr Florey's role in the UK on penicillin - was another 'doctor' : AN Richards, part time head of the (in) famous OSRD's medical division and full time shill for Merck.

He , like Florey, cheerfully admitted that his interest in penicillin hadn't been humanitarian.

His explanation is often glossed over, so let us parse it carefully.

His interest, he wrote, wasn't in saving German or Japanese lives which is why he claimed he censored news of penicillin ( untrue - he censored only its patentable, post-war commercial aspects: in this his real enemy was his Allies' own pharmaceutical industries).

He wasn't interested in saving Allied civilians lives - which is why he never pushed for an all out effort at production of imperfect, impure, natural (again non-patentable) penicillin.

He wasn't even interested in saving Allied soldiers' lives, he wrote.

His only priority was 'getting (wounded) allied soldiers back to the front' : better your son die there, than mine, in other words.

Morally, this sort of triage: saving only those soldiers lightly wounded and thus capable of going back to the front in place of my as-yet-un-drafted son, is a very slippery moral slope.

We can beat the Nazis by being beastly, like the Nazis....

Morality, once upon this slope, ends up sliding down to a railway siding outside Oswiecim Poland , where doctors like Florey and Richards, in jackboots and whips triage the descending passengers of trains like some satanic football coach : you, to work out on the field, you, to the showers.

Doctor Henry Dawson, by way of total contrast, won his Military Cross for rebuking this heartless form of triage in WWI and from October 1940 onwards, gave up his life during WWII to rebuking it with regard to wartime penicillin ,both as to who made it and who got it.

We can only win by being as moral as the nazis are immoral...

His October 1940 war aims were not yet the Allied war aims, but that too would change - in time......

Dawson jumps the gun on Meyer's penicillin project

Henry Dawson does not deserve the credit he always gets for starting the wartime penicillin project at Columbia University.

(Honoured for taking control of it and making it into something to be universally and eternally admired, is a different story.)

Karl Meyer started it up - pure and simple. And as it happens, purity and simplicity were also the goals of his penicillin project.


Here's how it  allcame about, as I see it ,though I should say in advance that I wish to thank three other historians for discovering the important pieces needed to solve the puzzle.

(My interpretation of their findings is, of course, not something I can blame them for !)

I the order that I came across their work, let us start with David T Durack ,writing a relatively brief article detailing the history of the early work curing endocarditis with antibiotics.

"Early Experience in the Treatment of Bacterial Endocarditis"

Durack says that in August 1940, Meyer was reading the new copy of Lancet and comes across a report by Ernst Chain and others on the substance penicillin.

The Oxford team demonstrated the efficacy of semi-purified penicillin in stopping bacteria stone cold in vitro ( ho hum) and in experimentally induced massive infections in mice ( new - long overdue - and important).

( I personally think this issue wouldn't likely have arrived in New York from London ,in wartime, in less than about two weeks - so assuming it was first issued in London close to its cover date of August 24th, Chain was reading his New York copy on about September 7th.)

Durack got from Karl Meyer the frank admission ( 30 years or more after the original event) that Chain had gotten him all rilled up.

Meyer and Chain had probably met earlier in germany while both were training to be biochemists and frankly, Chain got a whole lot of people rilled up pretty easily.

In this case, Meyer who had done a lot of original work with lysozyme (along with Fleming, Florey and Chain and Leslie Epstein), felt that Chain had denied Meyer his rightful priority on some aspects of the research in Chain's own articles on lysozyme.

Clearly the August 24th article indicated Chain wanted to totally purify and then hopefully totally synthesize penicillin. But Chain was a fool - Meyer felt sure he could quickly solve the problem ahead of Chain.

Chain and Meyer were not technically enemy aliens, but as Germans and Jews and left wing (ish)  recent naturalized citizens they both felt insecure in their new homelands.

It was only natural both were hoping to do some big piece of research that would ensure they weren't discharged during some security scare.

(Remember, the only reason so many German Jewish refugee scientists ended up doing atomic bomb research was because they weren't trusted to do the real important research --- on radar and asdic !)

This background made the story plausible to me when I came across it seven years ago --- besides, it hardly flattered Meyer so why tell it unless it was true ?

Next up is Ronald Bentley recounting the story of young Leslie Epstein ( later Leslie Falk), an American Jewish - left wing - Rhodes Scholar who is in Oxford working with Ernst Chain in Florey's lab.

Florey didn't have much time for more than about three dozen people on the whole Earth --- so him not much liking left wing American Jews was par for him - but he was willing to work with them ---- if they brought badly needed money and pairs of hands into his hard-pressed institute.

Falk had done large scale biological work with Chain (highly unusual for biochemists) growing massive amounts of the bacteria that lysozyme consumed, in a successful efforts to find the exact substrate that this enzyme broke up - and how it did so.

They had tried the same method, beginning in early 1938, to grow large amounts of penicillin - with less than no luck.

This penicillin work had only been done in fits and starts, because lysozyme was more important.

But once lysozyme was solved and the war arrived, along with a large grant for penicillin work, Epstein carried on with lysozyme for his thesis while Chain and Heatley set to growing penicillin.

So Epstein was a second hand witness to all the key events of the oxford team , up to about June 1940 where he was orderd home after the Fall of France.

Home turned out to be Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, via New York.

While in New York ( and perhaps on summer return trips), Epstein spent time with another Jewish , mildly left wing, biochemist interested in lysozyme : Karl Meyer , Chain's rival !

Kudos to Bentley for noting Epstein thanking both Chain and Meyer in his final published October 1940 article and chasing down Epstein's biography for the full story.

I believe Epstein told Meyer of what his supervisor, Chain, wanted him to say about Meyer's role in lysozyme ( ie to be dismissive) and that Chain was having success with penicillin and an articles was due soon in one of the three or four important British medical cum scientific journals.

That is why, I believe, Meyer both found the article so quickly and was so quick to react to it in an organized manner.

To purify penicillin, Meyer did not need clinical work stealing the penicillin he needed for his destructive chemical studies.

But he did need Dawson to grow the stuff and test it against bacteria in vitro  and in artificially infected mice and to compare the potency level of each new purified sample.

dawson had great skill and experience in all these areas - [articularly in his pioneering work on recombinant DNA (aka bacterial transformation) .

Meyer might need to do a few limited clinical trials to justify his wages as purifying penicillin was hardly a big concern of an eye institute.

But he could use expect to only use tiny amounts ( a few units per treatment - ie about the amount grown in a single one litre flask ) of very crude penicillin to successfully treat simple eye infections topically.

(From Cecil Paine's unpublished work, we know this amount would have given clinical successes.)

But find the purity and the amount needed to cure - by needle - multiple cases of adults with invariable fatal SBE ; that was like racing up and down Everest before you could even crawl !

No , I believe Meyer made a bargain with Dawson and then Hobby : help me purify penicillin ( I expect success in about four months) and i will give you more pure penicillin than you can use for whatever clinical cases you want.

But for now, let me stall my bosses by helping me work with Phillips Thygeson on some cases of chronic eye infections.

I believe the original agreement was that from October to December, the best purified penicillin went to chemical studies, any crude left over was for Thygeson to trst against minor eye infections.

Come January, Dawson was to get clinical priority , with more and more refined penicillin, suitable for safe injection.

But Dawson jumped the gun, largely for symbolic reasons, by injecting tiny amounts over a brief two day period into two SBEs before they began their normal treatment with massive daily amounts of sulfa drugs sustained for months on end.

After this, from mid october to mid december, what little clinical penicillin was available went to Thygeson's eye infections.

I had long accepted that Meyer not Dawson started the project but that Dawson didn't know why it had been started --- because othrwise Dawson's letters to Chain made no sense.

But i had followed all  theother writers' lead that SBE was the original clinical goal and eye infections only added at the end when the supply was too small to really cure SBE.

But the timeline never made any logical sense (not to a PK {Philosopher's Kid} anyway !)

So when I read Mary Ellen Bowden explaining that the move to treat SBEs in October was months ahead of schedule, it all made sense.

For the normally very circumspect Gladys Hobby had fairly broadly hinted that Dawson was very impatient to get started.

And just five weeks from drug discovery to clinical use is certainly
among the most unusual medical processes ever recorded in modern times in a research-oriented hospital.

But I doubt even Hobby really knew what lay behind Dawson's haste: in my next post, let me offer up my explanation....

Did Phillips Thygeson fumble Penicillin in 1940?

Of course he did - but he was hardly alone.

Between 1930 and 1940 a series of unbroken successes with semi-purified penicillin in the treatment of very serious eye infections were unreported by the eye doctors who performed them.

If these striking successes with serious eye infections had been reported, penicillin would have gone into commercial production before the war and saved millions of lives world wide.


Dr Fred Ridley, future eye specialist, was the first to semi-purify penicillin in 1929 while working for Alexander Fleming and he witnessed most of the beginnings of penicillin , including its earliest (unsuccessful) clinical uses.

So he also probably knew of Fleming's only clinical success with his penicillin.

It involved a severe case of pneumococcal conjunctivitis and happened in 1932, according to the patient (Dr Keith Bernard Rogers) or in 1929, according to Fleming's biographer Gwyn MacFarlane.)

I think 1932 more likely by far.

There is a good explanation why Fleming chose not to published this great success : it revealed far too much of his own character.

Though Fleming was the director of a large medical cum commercial enterprise, in many ways he displayed the work ethos of a classic 'lifer'.

 He gave a rigid, dutiful, 9-5, Monday to Friday output, but nothing more. No 'heroic medicine' for Fleming.

What he really lived for was in playing - and winning   -competitive games ---- after work hours.

He is perhaps the best example we have (outside perhaps of president George W Bush and Mayor Rob Ford) of the dangers society faces when sports-obscessed teenage boys fail to grow up and mature.

When it seemed his all-important rifle team might lose a critical match because its star shot had an eye infection, Fleming dropped everything to cure him with his penicillin and win the match.

(Perhaps if Fleming's brother John, dying of pneumonia, had been about to be involved in an important game, Fleming might have worked equally hard to save his life with penicillin.)

Now, as is well known, Fleming loved messing about and 'playing soldier' with real war rifles; it was equally well known that he  disliked the thought of being a real soldier.

This fact was well enough known to be a source of minor comedy to his colleagues.

The outer medical world, reading a published article, might not connect Dr Rogers' marvelous cure with 'Flem' winning his all important rifle shot.

But, soon, potentially all 10,000 or so doctors and nurses in the greater London area would, as the local medical gossip mill ground into overtime, having another joke at Flem's expense.

Earlier,beginning in 1930,just after Fleming's only major penicillin paper was released, another student of his, Dr Cecil G Paine, had a series of successes with his own hospital-made (totally unpurified) penicillin in eye inflections.

Together with eye doctor Albert Nutt, he saved seven newborns from going blind from gnorreal inflections in the eye.

 His eighth case involved an almost certain lose of an eyeball (or possible death from general infection) -- a coal mine manager with a fragment of rock having penetrated the eye, allowed colonies of bacteria to form at the site.

(This is a situation very similar to SBE : like eyeballs, heart valves are smooth and bacteria free, unless roughed up by physical damage.)

The pneumococcal bacteria were cleared up by crude penicillin filtrate washes and the foreign object removed. The eye was basically unscarred in healing.

It should have been - to experienced eye doctors anyway- an obvious miracle.

To other doctors, Rogers and the mine manger cures of pneumococcal infections would have suggested that perhaps injected penicillin might cure lobar pneumonia.

In the 1930s, lobar pneumonia was a leading cause of death in people of relatively young age and otherwise good health : the equivalent contemporary emotional effect of such deaths today might be the loss to breast cancer of young mothers in their thirties leaving behind very young children.

In the 1930s, it was the loss of middle aged fathers in one income families, leaving behind teenage children.

Pneumonia deaths were often devastating and totally unexpected.

But neither Fleming or Paine or Nutt published their successes.

Paine told of his success to both Howard Florey and to Leonard Coldbrook no long afterwards, both both men, neither of them shrinking violets to put it mildly, did not seize this particular nettle.

I suggest a reason why when I try to account for Thygeson's similar reluctant to get into penicillin at the ground floor.

We are left then with Henry Dawson, who proved far more willing to publish his relative failures with penicillin than many others were willing to publish their clearcut successes !

It might be that people like Rodley and Nutt who choose to become eye specialists are retiring types and not likely to stick their necks out.

Above all, unlikely to admit in print that they un-dignified the medical profession by daring to use "home made bread" rather than drug "store bought bread" to cure a patient.

But Phillips Thygeson hardly seemed this type of eye doctor : he had a long career in advanced eye research and his own biographers admit he had a fearsome , explosive temper when crossed.

He, too, had early success with penicillin - treating eight cases of
chronic staphylococcal blepharitis "satisfactory" with  natural penicillin semi-purified by Karl Meyer. One case in particular that was resistant to all sulfas showed a prompt respond to penicillin.

We know all of this, only because of Dawson breaking protocol on several occasions to talk up Thygeson's work in public and print, perhaps hoping by doing so to get Thygeson to commit his work to paper. (No luck !)

Thygeson did not like Karl Meyer at all and thought him a paranoid - though many others had no such problem with him.

We know Leonard Colebrook had the strongest possible reasons to dislike Fleming.

He believed that Fleming had deliberately manipulated Colebrook out of the affections of the only 'real' father Colebrook felt he had - his and Fleming's boss, Dr A. Wright.

I don't think I am alone in thinking this is why the crusading doctor Colebrook overlooked using Fleming's penicillin to cure childbirth fever deaths, in the eight long years before sulfa drugs arrived.

Meyer also worked with the eminent eye specialist Ludwig Von Sallman , using penicillin semi-purified by Meyer.

I do not know the time this happened, but am inclined to think it happened after Thygeson left Columbia University.

It probably happened in mid 1942 , while Dawson was away having a serious operation and recovering and was published as soon as the medical censors would allow it - ie from late 1943 onward.

But when did Thygeson's pioneering penicillin work happen ?

My educated guess may surprise penicillin history specialists and is the subject of another blog.

But for now, let me note that Dr John Hedley-Whyte, in his fascinating article, "Lobar Pneumonia treated by Musgrave Park physicians", notes a few other eye related cases that involved pioneering use of early penicillin - and that these were reported (and as a result, we finally got penicillin for all.)

The famous policeman dying in Oxford had seen a minor rosebud scratch infection, over the months of ineffective treatment , go into his eye socket and then into his skull.

SBE, a classic disease of the innermost body ( it affects heart valves)  can be detected by many outwardly visible signs, one of them the famous Roth spots in the eyes.

Hedley-Whyte's powerful insight into Florey's behavior in April 1941

Hedley-Whyte's point and it both unique to him and powerfully insightful, is that penicillin for ten years was an eye doctor's tool and that an informal wash of communications about it, via personal contact and personal letters , went back and forth across the Atlantic from 1929 to 1941.

Hedley-Whyte  says this is how Fleming and Florey knew about Dawson's as yet unpublished work with treating SBE in New York in March 1941.

I know his case to be partly true because most printed claims about penicillin being "alway censored during World War Two" is loose historian's bosh.

For example, Leonard Colebrook in Britain  in 1940-41, is careful to disguise the word sulfa so as to get past the censors when responding to Perrin Long in America, but has no trouble using the full word penicillin.

Very little about penicillin was actually censored and even this was internal semi-voluntary censorship by editors at the largest scientific journals, acting patriotically under informal pressure from the scientific elites.

 All mention of serious chemical synthesis work on penicillin after about late 1942 was withheld by the relatively few teams engaged in this work.

But reporting chemical work to merely semi-purify penicillin at a crude level went uncensored: this is how Duhig in remote Brisbane learned how to make crude penicillin stable enough and safe enough to inject straight into dying patients.

True - that in America and due to the odious, unctuous Morris Fishbein - almost ALL mention of penicillin was withheld from the larger journals and the popular media from the Fall of 1941 till about the Fall of 1943.

Most effected were cases of treatments by semi-purified natural penicillin : Fishbein's committee's apparent hope was that if the public didn't hear about these efforts, pressure to actually make natural penicillin in commercial amounts could be held off until Science laid the marvelous egg of man-made penicillin....

Penicillin : both its mold and its morals seem to hang out in basements and sewers

Rollo Martins the Canadian naif to Harry Lime's evil...

When I started looking into wartime penicillin, back in late 2004, I quickly felt like that other Canadian , Rollo Martins, learning far more about the immoral underbelly of  the official - and sunny - penicillin story than either of us wanted to know.


About all I originally knew about wartime penicillin was from recalling a CBC TV production (originally from Britain ?) that involved a policeman dying of a cut from a rose bush and a doctor named Fleming .

(I had seen it in the late 1950s, back when I was about eight years old.)

That and the fact that the peacetime penicillin clan was a firm family friend - having saved my family many times from serious illness.

I had no idea of penicillin's Canadian connection - like virtually everyone I wasn't aware there even was one.

I gradually and dimly recalled penicillin coming up in a great British film called The Third Man.

I looked at a video of it again and then, on a visit to my brother in Britain, read a great book on how the film and novella came to be.

From both video and the book about the film and novella, I got a strong sense of the extraordinary moral over (and under) tones that penicillin has and that the other three hundred or so existing commercial antibiotics completely lack.

I am only guessing why The Third Man is rated , not near the top of the all time best British films (a dead cert that), but at the very toppermost of the very top : but for me it is the penicillin sub-text.

Britain, unlike Japan and Germany, had really and truly lost the war and so its wartime scientific discoveries like penicillin, jets and radar were seen as absolutely essential to retaining the British sense of collective self esteem.

And so for Harry Lime to muddy penicillin's (and Britain's) good name by , in effect, using it to murder helpless kids , was for them a worse crime against humanity than anything short of Auschwitz.

Sewers as a metaphor for both good - and evil 

Dark ,cool ,dank, concrete sewers and basements is where penicillin the green and gold agent of life actually originally came from - but it was also the true home of that agent of death, Harry Lime .

This was a masterstroke from Greene and Reed ,the one Ying and Yang symbol that puts this film over the top.....

Was Alexander Fleming a coward ?

FLEMING avoided this ....

Hard to say --  but he definitely didn't have a chivalrous bone in his body.  And twice - while still a young man - when given a chance to be brave,  he fearlessly declined.


Fleming joined an infantry unit when he was 19 and the Boer War was a year old and despite being a crack shot , he never volunteered to go and fight.

He remained with that infantry regiment, the Scottish London Rifles, enjoying laying at war until 1914 when a real war broke out.

He quit the regiment in 1914 (April, apparently) and thus avoided going into battle with them on October 1914 at Messines Ridge.

His regiment is forever remembered for being the first  ever Territorial Army unit to go into general war action : but Fleming wasn't among them.

Aged 33 when war broke out, Fleming was young enough to be conscripted but unexpectedly got married - shocking his friends.

(Marriage among lifelong bachelors is always very popular in wartime.)

As a married man ,he needn't fear conscription -- at least until after December 1916, when the marriage exemption was ended. Later the upper limit for conscription was raised from 41 to 51 , but in any case he was well under those limits and healthy as an ox.)

In any case, Fleming was already in military uniform, working at a desk job in a medical lab, well behind the front line.

Fleming and Florey : what a pair !

Howard Florey was equally (not) brave : a first rate, highly competitive athelete, he claimed health reasons for why he didn't join his fellow students in the Australian Army in WWI.

Like Fleming, in WWII now that he was safely too old for combat, Florey was a real chicken hawk on conducting an aggressive war policy when it came to rationing penicillin away from dying civilians and towards unfaithful soldier husbands with a dose of the clap...

Scots wha hae wartime penicillin : chase Fleming's synthetic chimera or save lives with Dawson's shovel-ready ?

Dawson vs Fleming decided wartime PENICILLIN 

The battle over the direction of wartime penicillin can be presented, semi-accurately, as a showdown between two Scots with widely different concepts of the continuing value of chivalry in a Modernist Age.


By unlikely coincidence , our two Scots, Alexander Fleming and Henry Dawson, were both born on August 6th, albeit 15 years apart (1881 and 1896).

Fleming was 18 when the Boer War broke out but refused to go and fight - he loved being in the London Scottish Rifles and was a keen marksman but was not really up for dying and discomfort and all that real chivalry stuff.

Dawson was also 18 when WWI broke out but only joined up in October 1915, after nurse Edith Cavell was murdered by the Germans in Belgium.

Dawson started off in the medical corps as a private and orderly  but became a junior officer in the infantry and trench mortar artillery, was wounded twice and got the MC with citation for displaying bravery, chivalry and command despite being badly wounded.

Now it is widely claimed that Modernity repudiated Chivalry, after the horrors of the battles of Somme and Arras during World War One.

Modernity repudiates Chivalry : Chivalry repudiates Modernity right back

But a few writers - like Raymond Chandler and Howard Koch - claim that in World War Two, Chivalry repudiated Modernity and this is a thesis that I also hold - pointing to the Henry Dawson and Patty Malone stories as my prime examples of proof.

Fleming and his ilk : Florey, the NAS/OSRD/MRC et al , were seemingly contend between 1928 and 1945 to keep on polishing a turd, to still chase the chimera of synthetic penicillin for a few years more, while the world all around them burned.

Dawson passionately believed that if impure natural penicillin could save lives now , he had a moral duty to do so - Now !

His penicillin might be quick and dirty and a pain in the butt* for doctors and hospitals to keep in supply but it was shovel-ready, with its sleeves rolled up, ready to save lives : anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Fleming's synthetic chimera won all the early innings but Dawson's shovel-ready came from behind to win the race , in the late months of 1943.

Just as Chandler's Big Sleep had proved an unexpectedly massive hit with the general public and voters, so had Howard Koch's Casablanca and Henry Dawson's shovel-ready attitude of using existing natural - albeit impure - penicillin to save lives of 4F civilians today !

Chivalry - it turns out - was far from dead....

* and often , a literal 'pain the butt' for the patients too !