When all came to pay their last respects to Jim Hutchison, who has died aged 93, each member of his family placed a hat upon his coffin.
It was appropriate. Jim, who was my friend and neighbour for more than 30 years, wore many hats in his long life: as former director of the public health laboratory in Birmingham, medical academic, poet, builder of sailing boats (in his sitting room), gardener and great-grandfather.
He was born in London, the son of the novelist and painter Graham Seton Hutchison and his wife, Emily (nee Durham). Jim attended Frensham Heights boarding school in Farnham, Surrey, from 1931 and then St Albans school as a day pupil from 1935. He returned to his Scottish roots to board at Edinburgh Academy, and completed medical training at Guy’s hospital, in London, as German bombs rained down, graduating in 1946.
Jim joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as the second world war ended and was posted (to his eternal delight) to the West Indies.
After two years’ service, he trained in pathology at Colindale Infirmary in London and then worked as a pathologist at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle. He then took up a lectureship in bacteriology at Western Infirmary, Glasgow, before settling in Birmingham. There, in 1964, he took up the directorship of the NHS’s public health laboratory (PHL), where the last case of smallpox was handled in 1978.
He published widely on pathology and bacteriology, analysing outbreaks of smallpox and botulism, and incidents of Legionnaires’ disease and staphylococcal infections in hospitals.
And he occasionally brought his work home with him. One of his children remembers a Christmas turkey with a cylinder device installed in the bird’s breast. The apparatus had been used for bacterial testing and was “too good to waste”. Then, of course, there was that sailing boat being built in the sitting room.
After retirement from the PHL service in 1977, Jim immersed himself in sculpture. He was a joyful polymath: even in advanced age he loved engaging in politics, classical music, local gossip, gardening and poetry.
He was ever ready to perform in the local Christmas concert, whether as an absent-minded genie in panto or as a cheeky interpreter of Edward Lear poems, which he tried to “improve”.
A naturally funny man, he could enjoy a Joycean turn of phrase, as one of his grandchildren recalled: “I told him I had got an iPad. And he asked me what had gone wrong with my sight.”
Jim’s wife, Margot (nee Price), an American whom he met in London in 1950, when she was studying psychology, died in 2007. He is survived by their seven children, Tom, Jean, Hugh, Anne, Suzie, Ellie and Sarah, 23 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
