Founder member of the BGS

Desmond Montgomery qualified with first class honours in Queen’s University in 1940, following a distinguished undergraduate career in which he won many medals and prizes. After a house officer year he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, being posted to the India/Burma theatre of war where he served with distinction and was awarded a military MBE in 1943.

Returning to civilian life he joined the training schemes that were arranged for ex-service registrars, rapidly obtaining the MRCP and MD. In 1947 while at Hammersmith Hospital for further training, he and another Belfast ex-service registrar, George Adams, who had been a naval medical officer serving in destroyers in the North Atlantic, attended a lecture in the Royal College of Physicians. At the question time they recognised an Ulster accent which they traced to Dr Tom Wilson, a contemporary of Desmond Montgomery’s, who was working with Dr Trevor Howell in Battersea Hospital, studying the value of cystometry in the management of incontinence. On his invitation they visited Battersea. At the end of their visit he invited them to have tea which would be served at a meeting taking place in the hospital.

It thus came about that three graduates of Queen’s University attended the meeting at which it was decided to form the Medical Society for the Care of the Elderly (the original name of the British Geriatrics Society). At the meeting Tom Wilson was elected Treasurer and immediately took a subscription of ten shillings each from those who were present. He went on to become a consultant in geriatric medicine in Redruth in Cornwall, the first consultant in geriatric medicine appointed in the United Kingdom. George Adams and Desmond Montgomery returned to Belfast, George starting his work on the care of older people in which he achieved such eminence, and in due course became the second President of the BGS.

Desmond Montgomery continued his membership of the Medical Society for the Care of the Elderly for a number of years and attended several meetings, but his professional career took him in a different direction. He first worked in cardiology, and then became the pioneer of endo-crinology in Northern Ireland. He had a most distinguished career with particular expertise in the management of diabetes in pregnancy, for which he was awarded an honorary FRCOG. Together with Richard Welbourn, then in the Department of Surgery in Queen’s University, but later Head of the Department of Surgery in Hammersmith Hospital, he wrote a successful textbook on medical and surgical endocrinology.

He chaired most of the important medical committees in Northern Ireland. Most notably, in 1960 he and a fellow endocrinologist from Dublin, Professor Ivo Drury, founded the Corrigan Club, an all-Ireland society of physicians which has continued to meet annually, alternatively in the North and South of Ireland, for over 40 years despite the civil unrest in Northern Ireland. He was awarded the CBE in 1981 and honorary doctorates from both the National University of Ireland and Queen’s University, Belfast.

The Northern Ireland region of the British Geriatrics Society was delighted to honour Desmond Montgomery at the time of the Society’s Jubilee in 1997. He and his wife attended the commemoration dinner and the President of the Society, Dr Arup Banerjee, presented him with a medal in honour of his association with the Society. Professor Montgomery was a highly skilled physician and a successful teacher, researcher and administrator, who was held in enormous respect by all who knew him.

Prof Bob Stout