ROBERT LEIPER AND THE LONDON SCHOOL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE

For its first 5 years the LSTM teaching was carried out by the medical staff of the hospital, but in 1905 Manson decided that it was time to appoint specialist teachers in protozoology, helminthology and entomology. Charles Morley Wenyon was appointed to the post of protozoologist and Robert Leiper to the post of helminthologist. These were strange appointments given that both had only just graduated in Medicine, Wenyon from Guy's Hospital when he was 26 and Leiper from Glasgow when he was 23. Neither had had any serious research experience nor had they had any experience in the tropics but Manson's gamble paid off as both went on to pursue distinguished academic careers and both were elected Fellows of the Royal Society. The third member of the trio was the entomologist, Alfred William Alcock. Alcock was much older than the other two, 46 when he was appointed lecturer in medical entomology in 1907, having served for over 20 years in the Indian Medical Service, and already a Fellow of the Royal Society. The lives of these three men intertwined over the next important years and in 2001 Wilkinson and Hardy wrote ‘It was specialists such as Leiper, Wenyon and Alcock, and their students and associates, who were to consolidate the tropical school's position, and to continue and expand Manson's legacy of excellence and achievements in the study of medically important exotic parasites and their life-cycles’ (Wilkinson and Hardy, Reference Wilkinson and Hardy2001). However, the person who concerns us here is Robert Leiper who played a major role in the next phases of the School's history.

At the London School, Leiper continued his studies on Guinea worm, schistosomiasis and extended his interests to hookworms. It was his interest in hookworms that brought him into contact with the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease (RSC). The RSC had been set up in 1909 with the aim of eradicating hookworm from the Americas and by 1914 it had succeeded its task. However, the RSC had also drawn attention to the need for improved public health services and so became incorporated into the International Health Board (IHB) of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1920, Leiper approached the Foundation and the IHB with ambitious plans for an Imperial School of Hygiene involving the LSTM, University College and King's College. London. This came to nothing but Leiper persisted with his plans to create a major public health institution in London, plans that eventually led to the purchase of the School's present site in Bloomsbury (Clark and Mackintosh, Reference Clark and Mackintosh1954). In 1922, the Rockefeller Foundation purchased the site, originally intended for a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, for the School for £52 000. Work on the new building began in 1926 and opened in July 1929. Sadly, Manson, who had been the prime mover in all of this, died in 1922 when plans were at a very early stage. The London School of Tropical Medicine became the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1924.

ROBERT LEIPER AND WINCHES FARM

In addition to his efforts to secure funding for the School, carrying out extensive research both in the UK and in the tropics and his teaching duties, Leiper was formulating plans for an Institute of Agricultural Parasitology. Never one to miss an opportunity, he obtained a Ministry of Agriculture grant, intended for the study of farm animals and plants, to purchase a site, Winches Farm, near St Albans in Hertfordshire, 20 miles north of London and within easy reach by train. Winches Farm dated back to the 16–17th centuries and consisted of a ramshackle collection of buildings. There, Leiper established an Institute of Animal Parasitology, which was to be concerned with helminth disease of economic importance and also plant and insect pests, with himself as its Director. Gradually, under Leiper's leadership the site was developed and rebuilt first in the 1950s and later in the 1970s. From the 1950s onwards, Winches Farm was used as the School's animal facilities and over the next four decades housed what can only be described as a menagerie that, at one time or another, included, a chimpanzee, monkeys, baboons, calves, pigs, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, cats, pigeons and doves and even an aquarium. Academic and support staff gradually transferred from London to Winches Farm until there was a thriving research community there working on various aspects of both plant and animal parasitology including root eelworms, schistosomes, trypanosomes, babesias, malaria, amoebae, Toxoplasma and a number of other protozoa and helminths. The scientists working there were either already distinguished in their fields or destined to become so.

Leiper's activities extended well beyond his research and teaching and, having had a deep interest in bibliography since his teens, he developed an interest in the literature of helminthology. In 1923, he started a new journal, the Journal of Helminthology, which he edited until 1947. In 1927, at a meeting of the Imperial Institute of Agricultural Parasitology it was recommended that there should be an Imperial Bureau of Agricultural Parasitology in order to provide information and advice to all those working in the Empire and elsewhere. This was established as the Commonwealth Bureau of Agricultural Parasitology (Helminthology) often referred to as ‘The Bureau’. Leiper rallied to the call for the promulgation of information about helminths and helminth diseases and in 1932 persuaded the Bureau to publish Helminthological Abstracts, a publication that has been invaluable to generations of research and field helminthologists as well as administrators. One of Leiper's little known achievements was his role in initiating its sister abstracting journal, Protozoological Abstracts, something he had mooted at the Second International Congress of Protozoology held in London on 1965, but which did not come to fruition until 1977.

Nothing, however, lasts for ever and, as part of the School's reorganization in the early 1990s, Winches Farm closed in 1992, nearly 70 years after Leiper's inspired acquisition of the site. These were years of internationally recognized parasitological research and a tribute to the man who made it all possible.

LEIPER'S LEGACY

Leiper retired from the London School in 1946 and was succeeded as Professor of Helminthology by John, Joseph Conran Buckley from 1946 to 1967, George Nelson from 1967 to 1980 and Gerald Webbe from 1980 to 1988. The 1980s marked the end of the Departments that had existed in various forms since the School had been founded as they were merged into three Divisions, Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, Community Health and Communicable and Tropical Diseases, the latter embracing parasitology, including helminthology. Leiper would have been sad at the loss of his loved department but another reorganization in 1990 into Departments of Clinical Sciences, Epidemiology and Population Sciences, Public Health and Policy and Medical Parasitology reinstated helminthology. This reorganization was also to be short-lived and parasitology became part of the Department of Disease and Vector Control, subsequently the Department of Vector Control, and helminthology as a separate entity became incorporated into other units.

REMEMBERING ROBERT LEIPER

This essay has been concerned with the man, Robert Leiper, and the London School of (Hygiene and) Tropical Medicine and not with his research much of which can be found elsewhere in this volume (Stothard, Reference Stothard2016) and in Grove (Reference Grove1990). There are good accounts of his life and work at the LSHT&M in Manson-Bahr (Reference Manson-Bahr1956); Garnham (Reference Garnham1970); Taylor (Reference Taylor1992); Wilkinson and Hardy (Reference Wilkinson and Hardy2001) and tributes from colleagues and co-workers in the Journal of Helminthology (1969). It seems appropriate to end this essay with two quotes and some reflections. In 1969, the Canadian helminthologist, Thomas Cameron wrote ‘…one can say safely that most of the leading helminthologists in all of the Commonwealth countries are either directly or indirectly his students’ and ‘In September this year, I came back to St Albans and found him just as energetic as he was in the previous thirty years. He did not walk around all the Home Counties on this occasion he merely walked around the battlements of the ancient city of St Albans and he was fresh and full of vigour at the end of it, whilst I was perspiring and out of breath’ (Cameron, Reference Cameron1969). Perhaps this was due to the haze of cigarette smoke that accompanied Leiper everywhere (author's comment). Sheila Wilmott, his successor as Director of the Bureau, writes ‘I can hear his chuckle and his characteristic cough – if he haunts the house, he is a benign ghost’ (Willmott, Reference Willmott1981). My personal, and sadly too few memories, are of an irascible Scotsman always looking for any receptacle to use as an ashtray. Among my collection of photographs I have one of the then new Keppel Street building with a prominent advertisement for a popular brand of cigarettes, he would probably have approved. What he would have thought about Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll's studies at the School on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer we can never know because he died before the definitive results were published: he would probably have ‘chuckled’. Leiper retained his Scottish interests in his farms in Scotland, which he never visited without a pile of uncompleted work. He continued to work at Winches Farm until 1953 when he moved with the Bureau, then the International Institute of Parasitology, to The White House, at St Albans, where he continued to be involved until his death in St Albans in 1969.