My friend and colleague, the Rev Dr Anthony Bird, who has died aged 85, was a wise, thoughtful and questioning doctor and Anglican priest.
The second of four children of Harry, a parish priest, and Noel (nee Oakley), a teacher, he was born in Wolverhampton, and brought up in his father’s vicarage on the banks of the Severn in Shrewsbury. After boarding school at St John’s, Leatherhead, in Surrey, he studied classics, philosophy and theology at St John’s College, Oxford. On leaving Cuddesdon Theological College he was appointed to a curacy at Stafford, where he and his friend Peter Wyld developed a new congregation, St Bertelin’s, in the heady days of the Parish and People movement, which increased lay participation in church life. One initiative was a congregational breakfast in church.
In 1960 Anthony joined the staff at Cuddesdon as chaplain, later becoming vice-principal. In 1964, he decided to become a doctor, and went to Birmingham University to read medicine. On qualifying, he became a GP and practised in King’s Norton, Birmingham. But it turned out to be only a temporary change of career and in 1974 Anthony become principal of the Queen’s ecumenical theological college in Edgbaston. His ethics seminars were outstanding and his attentiveness to individuals striking.
In 1979 he switched career again and founded an experimental medical practice in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, becoming a full-time GP in a partnership of 30 years with Dr Mohamed Walji. Their aim was to enable patients to take control of their own health. To this end, a nurse practitioner, not then really known in Britain, was introduced, not to relieve the busy doctor, but to offer patients complementary therapies. Handing patients their medical records was another innovation in the practice.
Anthony thought that retiring was not a particularly Christian thing to do, and when he did so, in 1996, he continued to be available voluntarily to patients and colleagues. He served as assistant parish priest of St Paul’s Church, Balsall Heath, and took the churchwardens to Iona, in the inner Hebrides. He loved cats and music, especially the works of Bach.
He is survived by his second wife, Andrea, by his children, Markus, Stephanie and Dominic, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and by seven grandchildren.
