I was still sufficiently alive to wish that I could stay longer and drive home other nails which I had been hammering at for many years. The day before I left, Sir Maynard Hedstrom, who had supported me in everything, pointed to the School and said, “Next you know, Lambert, they’ll be putting up a statue to you.” I said, “I don’t like statues. But if I rate one, I hope it will be of solid brass and show me wearing a pair of wrinkled shorts and carrying an armful of specimen tins. No, in a year or so if anybody says ‘Lambert’ they’ll be asking ‘Who?’ I’m not worrying about a sculptor. What does worry me is the chance of some political thimblerigger coming along to undo everything we’ve done.”
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I spoke with healthy pessimism, and only half-believed my warning. The Central Medical School had been going for a little over ten years, and seemed to have stemmed the tide. It was one of the three pet ideas which Montague and I had hatched back in 1922: a model leper colony at Mokogai, an advanced Medical School for natives, and a Unified Medical Service to cover every island group in the Pacific. Two of these pets thrived and grew to maturity. The Mokogai colony came in with a rush of enthusiasm in 1923, and building began almost at once. The School required seven years of wire-pulling before it began to operate at the beginning of 1929. Up to then there had been but a poor little makeshift, backed by the only funds the Fiji Government could afford.
I have told you of my disappointment in the buildings when the school first opened. The Principal had to run his office in the physiological and chemistry laboratory, which we also used for a classroom; lectures on pathology were about ruined by the horrible overcrowding in the postmortem room, which was a little death trap. The dormitory for men was so inadequate that we had to limit students and hold the scholastic course down to three years.
Then came more ambitious planning, and a long tussle with Bacteriologist John Campbell, who insisted on a pathological laboratory that would cost £5,500 and upward. Dr. Heiser visited us in 1934 and saw our plans for the structure, 70´ × 33´ with floor space for a postmortem theater that would seat the whole student body; this building would be adequate for research work all over the South Pacific, and serve as a teaching institution for our N.M.P.’s. In 1934 the Foundation granted the money for this improvement. On my return from a three weeks survey in New Zealand I had brought back plans, drawn up by their experts, so that we could include a biochemical laboratory in the plant. Dr. Macpherson, our newly acquired bacteriologist, had meanwhile decided with Mr. Campbell that another building must be added and that most of our old equipment must be junked—these items would come to around £2,500 more.
Dr. Heiser had stipulated that the Colony should bear the cost of equipment. Fiji’s wisely economical Chief Medical Officer, Dr. McGusty, thought that £500 would cover everything. Campbell and Macpherson finally convinced him that four times that amount would be needed, and they were right, I thought. I was more or less a referee in this argument between one Irishman and two Scotchmen. But we finally got our beautiful laboratory for research and for practical instruction in preventive medicine.
These facts and figures are just to show, in brief, the time and the effort it cost us all to bring things to anything like a satisfactory conclusion. In 1935 Mr. E. J. Theodore, an Australian mining man, gave £5,000 for a children’s ward in the Hospital. That was a generous gift. But in my absence somebody decided to place the addition right next to our Central Medical School, so near that the noise would interrupt lectures; the idea behind it was to create a nuisance that would compel us to move the School off the Memorial Hospital grounds.... The politicos had been playing with our plan ever since we began building.
It required the long arm of Sir Murchison Fletcher, Fiji’s fair-minded and progressive Governor, to scotch the plot. In 1936, when I went to London to confer with Sir Thomas Stanton, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer, Stanton must have heard from Fletcher, for he asked me if I was satisfied with the location of the children’s ward. I said, “No!” explosively, and Stanton cabled Fletcher not to do anything about that building until I got back and talked to him. Fletcher, aside from being my good friend, was an excellent bridge player and one of the best losers I have ever sat against—a rare virtue in the Colonies where winning any game from the Governor “isn’t done,” or is done at the risk of his friendship. It didn’t take long for Fletcher to settle the matter of that spite-building, and in our favor.
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The third of the schemes which Montague and I had formulated succeeded “in effect” in 1927. That was the Unified Medical Service for the South Pacific. We got another half-loaf there; the other half was lost through Montague’s sense of honor, combined with the hen-minded jealousy of Fiji’s very little Colonial Secretary.