Major Greenwood (1880–1949): the biography

Background is provided on the discovery of an unpublished biography of Major Greenwood written by one of his sons. The motivation and preparation for online publication of the biography in Statistics in Medicine are outlined. © 2016 The Authors. Statistics in Medicine Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.


MAJOR GREENWOOD, F.R.S. : Pioneer of Medical Statistics by George Greenwood
Major Greenwood had two sons by his wife Rosa, née Baur. The younger, George wrote this biography. The elder, John, was my father. George's widow Joyce is still alive in her 90's but has no recollections on the writing of Major Greenwood's biography. George was a prolific writer, county councillor, and wrote and edited newsletters for two local history societies. He also published a novel entitled Misadventures of a Tookeyman under the pseudonym Richard Millar, which was a fictionalised account of his life working in a large department store before and after World War II. According to his son John, the household was 'Edwardian' in that there was a 'wall' between George's study and the rest of the household. Grandfather firmly maintained that a rocket could not propel itself as the exhaust had nothing to push against. My father pointed out Newton's third law and V2 rockets. I am not sure that grandfather really believed what he argued, as the family members often deliberately took an opposite view just to have an argument. I was occasionally asked what I was doing at school and grandfather had a tendency to ask rather penetrating questions which I sometimes had difficulty in answering. In general I remember him with great affection as being a kindly man. His death was a great shock.
Grandfather slept in a large spare room which was away from the road and looked out over the terraced garden at the rear of "Hillcrest". My parents slept in the main bedroom on the road side of the house. My room was adjacent to my parents' room and connected to it via a door. It was the room used by my father when a child and it was directly above Grandfather's study. Being young I was sent to bed earlier than the rest of the family. I can vividly remember lying in bed with the sound of a Brunsviga mechanical calculator grinding away below me. It started quietly and gradually rose to a crescendo, stopped, paused and started all over again. This was a sound I became familiar with many decades later when summing squares while I was doing the "Short Course in Medical Statistics and Epidemiology" in 1966 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
What grandfather was actually doing all those years ago I have no idea. When grandfather died I thought I might be able to use this machine for homework, but the machine was the property of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and they swiftly claimed it back. My father told me that it was an unusual machine as it had a transfer register, which I understood was a mechanical version of the storage register found in some electronic calculators.
Grandfather's study I tended to regard rather as the Holy of Holies. It was just inside the front door on the right. The study door opened into the corner of a room perhaps three by four metres. On the far left was a fireplace with a huge bottle of Stevens ink in the middle of the mantelpiece. The wall above was bare in contrast with all the remaining walls which were concealed by bookcases from floor to almost the ceiling, all absolutely full of books. In the middle of the far wall in front of a big window was grandfather's desk on which there was the calculating machine and a typewriter with various papers. Hillcrest had three floors. At the top were two bedrooms for servants and a large central room with long rooms off to either end which were under the eaves. (I had an air rifle range in one of these.) The main central room contained a table tennis table and, like the study, was lined with very full bookcases.
I can remember playing table tennis against my grandfather in this attic. I was running to and fro at my end while he just stood still at his end batting the ball back with a very low probability of missing it. He also taught me to play chess and loaned me a book on chess and its openings which I still have. He almost invariably won, which did not bother me in the least. I judged my performance by how long I lasted before being checkmated. I remember trying out some of the openings described in the book he loaned me. I found that when I attempted openings noted as weak that I did not last as long as when I used other ones. I usually played a defensive game. Once I did go for an all-out attack and he resigned. I suspect out of surprise rather than due to any skill on my part. We also went for long walks together in Epping Forest.
Uncle George occasionally visited us. He was a man of great enthusiasms. He and his family lived on the opposite side of London. He too had a study containing many books and did much writing.
Grandfather had a great friend of many years standing who lived within 10 minutes walking distance, a Mr. Nello. They met regularly and played chess together.
During the war grandfather did some medical work. I can remember going with him to visit a local nursing home and sitting with him in matron's office while he discussed some matters with matron and signed several medical certificates. He also had a petrol ration because he was a medical doctor.
I was in awe of my grandfather as he was rather looked up to as a 'great man'. I knew he was a Professor of Statistics and Epidemiology. I had some idea of what epidemiology was about, but none, at that time, of what 'statistics' involved. Subsequently I learned more of the latter as I pursued my own career in medical computing and statistics and came to understand more why Major Greenwood was regarded as a great man. I am very pleased that this biography can now be made available to a wider audience.
Dr Roger Major Greenwood East Leake, Nottinghamshire, May 2016.

Forebears
Greenwood's forebears on his father's side have been traced back to the 1590's. They were small yeoman farmers who held copyhold land at Haddenham in Buckinghamshire.
In 1682 a younger son came to London and was apprenticed to a silk weaver. His son, also a weaver, died in poor circumstances in 1732. His son James was educated at Christ's Hospital and apprenticed on charity money to become a Funeral Undertaker. He did well and founded a line of small shopkeepers in Bethnal Green. Greenwood's great grandfather, George, was a Smith & Bellows Maker. He and his wife both died in 1838 / 9 leaving two young boys, Major and James. They were cared for by relatives and both benefitted from the Will of a great uncle, James George, one of the Undertaker's sons. James George, who seems to have been some sort of property speculator, made a good deal of money which he left to his numerous relatives when he died in 1837. Although the portions of the two boys were initially quite modest, they were increased by the earlier deaths of other beneficiaries. With the money in hand, the boys' trustees apprenticed them to the medical profession. Greenwood's grandfather, Major the First, had six surviving sons. Four of them became doctors and two became lawyers.
Greenwood's father and grandfather both practised medicine in the Dalston area of East London.

Early Years
"My family group," wrote Greenwood, is "interesting as an example of cockneyism. Both my grandfathers, my father and four uncles were general practitioners of medicine. All first worked in East London. I do not think my father and his father ever slept for more than thirty consecutive nights more than twenty miles away from St. Paul's Cathedral. I myself have never slept more than forty consecutive nights further away." Greenwood was born at 2.30 pm on August 9 th , 1880, at 18 Queen's Road, Dalston, where his father was sharing his father's medical practice, Greenwood Senior living at number twenty six.
He was christened Major, after his father and grandfather, a name which gave rise to irritations later in life.
According to a Life History Album his father kept, Greenwood was born prematurely, but he grew quickly and scarcely ever ailed. He was lucky to have survived at all. The other two children born to his parents died in infancy from a tubercular infection, which ultimately carried away his mother.
At five, his father noted: "His intellect is rather precocious. Learns rapidly and notices with great quickness, and remembers things said in his presence." After a year or two at a dame's school in Hackney, run by a Miss Wright, in September 1889 he was sent to Merchant Taylors' School where his father and several uncles had preceded him. For the period it was a very good school; the teaching was effective but unimaginative. Not a breath of modern air troubled the Classical side.
The pattern of education was simple. The general run of boys left school at sixteen or seventeen to go into business. Those who stayed aimed to go either to the Universities, which meant Oxford and Cambridge, or into medicine, which usually meant London University.
Greenwood wanted to study history and go to Oxford or Cambridge; his father was determined that he should study medicine and go to London.
His school career was erratic. Although he took about seven prizes, he lacked concentration. He was for ever wanting to study something that was not then his business; he took strong likes and dislikes for particular masters, and being at loggerheads with his father over the choice of a career was ever on the lookout for a way of escape. He took little interest in athletics. His single recorded achievement was second place in a sack race in 1892! Recollecting this period, Greenwood wrote; "Parents in narrow circumstances. As the only surviving child I was much in the company of older people, my parents and their friends. That probably encouraged priggishness, and had another long time effect; viz.
that my intimate friends have mostly been men several years older than myself." Neither of his parents was much of a home-maker. They were too busily pre-occupied with other things. Greenwood's father was an only moderately successful general practitioner in a crowded East End area rapidly running down in prosperity, and his heart was on other things. He was a cold man, socially untactful, not much given to small talk and bed-side chatter, self opinionated and a literary snob. But he was a laborious worker, widely read and a good scholar. As well as numerous minor medical appointments he became something of an expert on medical law, qualified as a barrister and secured the position of Deputy Coroner for North East London. He was full of divers interests ranging from the writing of novels (one of which was published though whether at his expense or the publisher's is not revealed), the composition of poems, the rendering of Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose into modern English, historical articles on London, and long, exploratory cycle rides in distant parts of the kingdom to the urging of sanitary reforms and the improvement in the status of doctors backed by innumerable letters to the medical press. For all this he was a reserved, emotionally frigid man with some quirk in his character that kept back from the success that his intense industry ought to have merited. As a father he was man to be respected rather than loved.
Greenwood's mother was a little woman with dark piercing eyes, short hair, kind hearted but cynical, with a bitter tongue and the teller of tall stories, She was the daughter of old Dr Burchell to whom Greenwood's grandfather had been apprenticed. She had a first class brain, was very well educated, original minded, performed beautifully on the piano and spoke French with great fluency. She was well liked and Greenwood certainly loved her, but like his father, she was no home-maker. She led a rather lonely life and was infected with a tubercular illness that carried her off when she was only 46. She was so "prickly" that it was difficult for new acquaintances to become intimate with her.
Greenwood's "home" had something of lodgings about it. He went there to sleep and do his homework, but seems to have escaped it as often as possible to his grandparents' house, where his grandmother made a great fuss of him. Indeed, his mother showed remarkably little concern whether he turned up for meals or not.
He left School in 1896, passed the university matriculation examination, and then attended Birkbeck College for eighteen months to study for the 1 st MB. He was so idle over his proper work, and so industrious about other things, that to his father's indignation, he only passed part of the 1 st MB.
One of Greenwood's preoccupations in the winter of '96 was Latin. It was an early instance of escapism, and for the next ten or fifteen years he was always trying to escape from situations. A first rate knowledge of the classics was the hallmark of the "Universities" -Oxford and Cambridge, but not London. He wanted to go to the "Universities"; his father decreed that he should study medicine at London. Whether he really thought of Latin as a kind of substitute for the "Universities" he has not recorded, but the love of it -and a relish for its peculiar distinction never left him. At 18 he was typing out "exercises" on his father's machine, and making spirited renderings of the Roman poets into English.
Oh wither rush ye? Guilty band: Your new sheathed blades why seize again?
Has not enough -on sea and land -Of Roman blood been spilt in Vain?
(Plautus Trinummis (The Three Coins)) At 38 he was taking the Latin classics in their original away for holiday reading. At 58, in an age, when the classics had become unfashionable, his facility for quoting Latin tags seemed to mark him out as a survival from an earlier age of learning. In his earlier struggles in the academic world, where the "Universities" were the accepted background, he made lavish use of Latin quotes as a substitute for the classical background he had never had.
In 1898 he was entered at the London Hospital and won an entrance scholarship in "arts", really elementary mathematics and Latin. According to his own account, for the first year he was extremely idle, and did no more than complete his first MB.
His entry coincided with a turning point in the affairs of the Hospital. Hitherto most of the teaching had been done by the hospital physicians and surgeons. However good these gentlemen may have been at their particular professions, they were not always good teachers.
A new system was introduced to the Medical School. Full time teachers were appointed to replace the somewhat casual activities of the hospital physicians and surgeons. One of the first of these appointments was Leonard Hill, who became lecturer in Physiology in 1895. Towards Hill, as he confessed afterwards, Greenwood developed an almost school girl passion. Leonard Erskine Hill (1866-1952 came from a family of distinction. Many of his forebears had distinguished themselves in public and academic works; one of his great uncles had been Rowland Hill, the postal reformer, and his father was George Birkbeck Hill (1835 -1903), the editor of Boswell's Life of Johnson. He had been appointed to the London Hospital teaching staffs in 1895, and when Greenwood first encountered him he was deeply involved in original research.
Greenwood confided to Hill that he disliked the prospect of becoming a General Practitioner, and was attracted to research work. Hill sized up the situation quickly. Since his father insisted, he advised Greenwood to get his medical qualification as quickly as possible, and not bother about degrees or prizes. Then, if he still had a mind to research, to come back to him. Hill had a talent for spotting bright pupils and a sturdy goodness of heart to help them along. The interview had important results. Hill had befriended him, and Greenwood hitched his star to Hill's. The link was never broken, and until Greenwood was well on his way to success, Hill's helping hand was never far away.
Meanwhile a new influence entered Greenwood's life; Arthur William Bacot (1866 -1922). In later years those who never knew their background wondered at Greenwood's fierce emotional regard for Bacot. He who was so emotionally reserved about most things, would allow his voice to falter and tears to start up in his eyes when the name of Bacot was mentioned in the years after his friend's death. And when Bacot was gone he would start a Memorial Evening to him, and week after week trace out the walks they had taken together in Epping Forest.
Bacot was a kindly misfit. Of Huguenot descent, as a child he had been "delicate" and his education neglected. At 16 he became a clerk in a city firm of tea workers and was still there when Greenwood met him. At 33 he was a bachelor who lived with his sister and aunt at Bow House, High Street, Lower Clapton. He hated clerking and spent his spare time reading widely and studying entomology.
About 1895 Bacot joined the North London Natural History Society. This had developed in association with the Science Club of the Grocer's School at Hackney. One of Greenwood's fellow students at the Hospital was Millais Culpin, an old Grocer's School boy and member of the Society. His parents had gone to Australia. He had no home in London, and went to stay with Bacot. In 1899 Culpin introduced Greenwood to Bacot, and they all became fast friends. Instead of going home in the evening, Greenwood used to slip round to Bacot's house, and there the three of them would work snugly together, Bacot at his entomology, the medical students at their books.
The Bacot establishment became a more real home to Greenwood than his parents' house. The Bacots possessed all the warm understanding qualities that his parents lacked.
Physically Bacot was not unlike Greenwood's father. In other respects he was an idealised reverse. In contrast to Greenwood senior's straight laced orthodoxy, his cold, forbidding nature and his self opinionated impatience, Bacot was easy going, warm hearted, and tolerant of most things. Greenwood senior was a conformist, a Lessonreading church-goer, and a stickler for the accepted mode of behaviour in his social class.
Bacot cared little for these things. He was an outsider, politically a radical. Compared with Greenwood senior he was a Bohemian, who wore odd clothes, had freakish taste in food, and scandalised the pious by collecting horse manure for his garden in a noisy old wheelbarrow on Sunday mornings. He was a fanatical hater of property owners, perhaps the only subject on which he allowed himself to be worked into a temper.
He was a left wing Fabian, and Greenwood, having never thought very much about political matters, quickly accepted his socialist views. It was an instance of emotional conversion, To the day of his death Greenwood remained a socialist, more in memory of Arthur Bacot, perhaps, than from real conviction.
Bacot's sister Alice was one of those jolly people who become the best loved universal aunt to all their acquaintances' children. She was an amateur artist and added to the family income by giving lessons in drawing and painting.
Bacot and Greenwood were in the same quandary. Neither of them liked the path chance seemed to have laid down for them. Bacot hated clerking, and Greenwood hated the prospect of becoming a doctor. But there was a difference. Bacot knew what he wanted to do, Greenwood didn't. He lived in a state of doubt and perplexity. Then chance intervened, and suddenly the doubt and perplexity were cleared away.

Sickness and Research
Early in 1900 Greenwood began to suffer from headaches. Two of the most distinguished specialists of the day were consulted, Hughlings Jackson and Victor Horsley. They diagnosed the ailment as having epileptic origins, and gave instructions for him to stop all work for examinations for a year. As Jackson was an expert on epilepsy, and Horsley had made a special study of the localised functions of the brain, their diagnosis must have been extremely distressing. Yet nothing in Greenwood's previous medical history, nor anything afterwards, gives support to their views. After a period of rest he recovered and his health remained extraordinarily good. Looking back on the incident Greenwood liked to believe that his trouble had been psychoneurotic.
So as not to lose the year wholly from his medical studies, the experts allowed him to work in Hill's laboratory. Hill gave him a minor piece of research to occupy his time.
This was an investigation into binaural effects. Hill was methodising what was then known about the special senses. The finer mechanics of the inner ear were not fully understood. One of the problems was the way in which the two ears synchronised sounds received from different angles and different distances. At the time Hill and Greenwood believed that their investigations were original, but unknown to them Silvanus Thompson had recently investigated the same subject.
The time in Hill's laboratory passed very happily, and confirmed Greenwood in his wish to escape from general practice into research. What this research was to be and whether any opportunities would present themselves remained as obscure as ever. But there was one straw in the wind of his experience that moved in a particular direction. It was the phenomena connected with heredity. It cropped up in several ways. His father, for instance, had been interested in heredity. When Francis Galton, inspired to study hereditary traits, urged the collection of biometrical data, Greenwood senior, had purchased several of Galton's "Anthropometrical Registers" with a view to making such records about his children. Thus Greenwood himself, as a child, had been subjected to measurements of one kind or another, and later on his father had explained the theory behind the scheme. Then there was Bacot's preoccupation on the hereditary characteristics of moths. This was Bacot's special study. He bred colonies of moths and studied the transmission of wing markings. Then again the medical world, and this included his father, grandfather and most of his uncles, who were continually bickering about the predisposition of particular people to develop particular diseases. A hot point in this debate concerned tuberculosis. That it could be transmitted from person to person nobody seriously doubted, but the abounding mystery was why some people developed it.
Was this predisposition, if it existed, transmitted from parents to their children, or could it develop independently?
There was another subject too, about which he heard a good deal, and which indirectly had a bearing on the same thing. The efficiency of vaccination. Both his father and grandfather were Public Vaccinators. Vaccination against smallpox was compulsory, but there were still many people, including members of the profession, who doubted its wisdom or its efficacy. The anti-vaccinators argued, among other things, that vaccination spread the disease, or alternatively, that those who were vaccinated and did not catch the disease would never have caught it anyway. It was perhaps a matter of predisposition.
The only way to settle such disputes was by way of reference to the statistics of those who had or had not been vaccinated, and those who did or did not catch the disease. But the pro-vaccinators always found that their opponents could fault such references. Surely, they cried in distress, it ought to be possible to measure the success or failure of vaccination in a way that nobody can dispute. In a pamphlet on vaccination he wrote in 1886, Greenwood Senior had observed, "The proper understanding of statistics is only possible to experts, and the value they possess is obviously dependant on the accuracy with which they have been compiled, as well as on the extent and character of the data on which they rest." At the time there were no experts in this field of research but the subject was not altogether neglected. A certain Karl Pearson, Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College, London, was just beginning to take an interest in the matter. In 1900, during his period with Hill, Greenwood discovered the works of Pearson. Suddenly all his doubts were resolved, and he knew the kind of research he wished to do.
Recalling how he had first read Pearson's Grammar of Science and been thrilled by its vista of measuring living things, Greenwood wrote, "In 1901 I went back to ordinary work, and then the enthusiasm excited by the Grammar of Science caused me to spend a good deal of time extracting records of weights of viscera from the Post Mortem Room. I knew very little about biometry and in fear and trembling wrote to Karl Pearson, who invited me to come and see him in 1902. From that interview until now I have been a biometrician." To quote Lancelot Hogben, Greenwood emerged from that interview "a convert to the new cult of biometry, a self dedicated pupil of the great man and anointed evangelist of the gospel of numbers." (Hogben L. Major Greenwood 1880-1949. Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 1950; 7:138-154).

Karl Pearson
In 1901 Pearson and the biometricians stood for a new, exciting and controversial science. Biometry was a by-product of Darwinism. Francis Galton (1822-1911 started it as Anthropometry, the measurement of Man, with a view to tracing to exact laws of natural selection and inheritance. "Until the phenomena of any branch of knowledge have been submitted to measurement and number," he believed, "it cannot assume the status and dignity of a science." Pearson (1857Pearson ( -1936 was the pioneer of the mathematical measuring processes. He not only did his best to infuse the spirit of mathematics into all biological sciences, but succeeded in erecting the very processes of measurement of all living things. It was the foundation course of modern mathematical statistics.
At his very simplest, Pearson showed that the old fashioned methods of simple counting were insufficient when applied as measurement to living organisms that were subject to the chances and changes of environment. Without making allowances for chance and change, it was dangerous to draw general deductions from biological data. Pearson was primarily searching for the laws of evolution, but his methods and pronouncements frequently brought him into conflict with established "expert opinion".
By the year 1901 he had assembled a biometric laboratory at University College, where he ran post-graduate courses in biometry, and conducted a great deal of ingenious research work. His teaching was beginning to show results. Here and there were people beginning to use his methods, and one of his assistants, George Udny Yule, who had recently left him, was lecturing on the subject on his own.
Greenwood's first contact with the Pearsonian canon was the Grammar of Science. This was a massive work first published in 1892. It was intended to present to its readers in simple language the fundamental concepts of contemporary science. Pearson showed that the scientific method was essentially descriptive according to the sense perceptions, and that the scientific workers aim should be to find out HOW phenomena occurred, not WHY. Since the original publication date Pearson had become interested in evolutionary theory, and the second edition of 1900, which Greenwood read with so much enthusiasm, contained two additional and very long chapters on this subject.
There was something exhilarating about the book. It had a new slant on science. Pearson was a free thinker, a reformer and a socialist. He stressed the social value of science and made researchers into agents for the social good. He had a way of attacking old authorities that appealed to young men who longed to throw stones at old authorities. He gave the impression that mankind was on the edge of the most tremendous discoveries, and that the scientific worker could open up new realms of human happiness.
From the Grammar of Science Greenwood passed to other writings of Pearson's and thrilled in sympathy with some of his opinions. One of these strikes a familiar note in Greenwood's life-long aversion to "experts": "Religion once tyrannised the world, Science has followed Religion, but instead of setting up a republic of thought, has instituted a worse tyranny in its place, the oligarchy of scientific specialists, who expect mankind at large to accept on the ground of authority whatever they choose to proclaim as truth." However much he may have been influenced by the Grammar of Science, the work of Pearson's that directly activated Greenwood into doing something about biometry was the collection of essays entitled, The Chances of Death and other Studies in Evolution.
This was a very odd collection of essays, some of which had previously been published in the Fortnightly Review. They included such items as, Socialism and Natural Selection, Politics and Science, Reaction, Women and Labour, Variation in Man and Woman. The essay on Variation in Man and Woman has such a bearing on Greenwood's biometrical career that it is worth considering at some length.
The purpose of the essay was quite simple, and illustrates Pearson's biometrical methods.
Havelock Ellis in his book Man and Woman had confidently asserted that: (1) There was much greater variability in the male than the female type.
(2) That this variability had been one of the effective causes in determining the drift of civilisation.
(3) That this variability had had the widest social and practical consequences.
"The object of this essay," says Pearson in his introductory remarks, "is to lay the axe to the root of this pseudo-scientific superstition." And lay the axe he did, with all the biometrical precision he could muster. His method was simply to compare various measurable male and female data, such as bone lengths, and show that there was no evidence of greater variability in the male than the female range of measurements. After 119 pages of discussion and biometrical tables, he considered Ellis's assertions quite unproven and concluded with a remark characteristic of Pearson's brand of wit.
Regretting that many writers on evolution had copied Ellis's assertions as facts, he commented, "The "sequacity" exhibited by the multitude of semi-scientific writers on evolution is possibly a sign of the very small capacity for intellectual variation possessed by the literary male." Now the data at Pearson's disposal for his male and female comparisons were far from being as extensive or reliable as he would have wished, and there was a constant longing for more. Skulls were hardly the things one could collect in hundreds, much less livers and kidneys and other perishable data. The lay reader, in fact, looking over this work half a century later, is a little surprised to find so much mathematical precision applied to data of such questionable origin. But it was the best Pearson could get, and he was not a man to be daunted by difficulties. Thus we find him using the measurable bones of Ancient Greenwood agreed to call on Pearson at his rooms at University College at 4 pm, on the following Monday. The moment of conversion had arrived.
Pearson was a tall man, with a powerfully chiselled face, pugnacious jaw, high forehead and receding, backswept hair. He had something of the fanatic in his make up. He was pungent in controversy, and as he grew older, became intolerant and overbearing. He refused to suffer fools at all. His energy and working capacity were prodigious. He took great pains with his pupils, and inspired in many of them a personal devotion that survived the quarrels that his stormy temperament was apt to engender. In his biometric battles, especially when debunking "experts", he made many enemies, but few of those who had most reason to dislike him, ever failed to respect him. He was the "terrible KP", the ridiculer of the pontifications of the pundits, the layman who dared to attack medical opinion. He had just fallen foul of another enfant terrible of criticism, George Bernard Shaw.
What the Great Man said to Greenwood has not been recorded, but the sum was interest and encouragement. Greenwood left with him his notes on Bacot's moths, and embarked on the laborious transcription of the viscera records.
At the end of March 1902 Pearson wrote that although there was much interest in the moth data, he was doubtful how it could be worked into mathematical form. For measuring hereditary characteristics one needed a large number of pairs of parents whereas Bacot's data was based on a large number of offspring from few parents. It was, moreover, important that the offspring should have been born and reared in the same environment.
Thus advised and encouraged Greenwood redoubled his biometric efforts and hinted to his father of a desire to study under Pearson. His father, however, viewed these biometrical excursions with misgivings and banned any possibility of studying under Pearson until he had passed his medical finals. Nevertheless progress was made with the viscera data, and the results, heavily revised by the Master, were eventually published in Biometrika in 1904. The moth data appears to have been beyond biometric treatment.
In 1904 Greenwood qualified MRCS, LRCP, and when he heard the results, treated himself to a slap-up meal at the "Rotunda". "Then", he recorded, "my father allowed me to study under KP provided I helped him in his practice. It was a very strenuous year. The demands of the practice were not heavy, still there they were." In July 1904 he sounded Pearson on the prospects of biometrical methods being applied to medicine and Public Health, and wondered if he could take up part time study under him. On July 17 th Pearson replied "I certainly think you might achieve a very great deal by giving the afternoons for some months to biometry, and there is a deal to be done in medicine and also in public health in the matter. Some day we shall doubtless have a Registrar General who knows something of statistics …" Pearson agreed that Greenwood could join his study group in the autumn. As it was holiday time, Greenwood, full of zeal, wondered if he should go across to Germany and learn the language as the Germans were contributing much towards science. Pearson, however, was not interested in the contributions of the Germans, none of whom, he said, were doing much worthwhile biometric work. A knowledge of German would certainly be useful, and a seminar under Schwalbe at Strasbourg would teach him a lot. Pearson was remarkably insular in his biometric interests and could rarely be persuaded to pay much attention to the work of foreigners.

Study Under Pearson
For the next few months Greenwood helped his father and his medical relatives with their general practices. But he had no interest in clinical medicine, or in people. His bedside manner was terrible. He lacked the flow of soothing chatter so essential to make his patients and himself feel at ease. He had no idea how to tackle the ordinary East Ender.
His uncle's dispenser overheard the following exchange: Patient: "Oh, doctor, shall I rub camphorated oil on my baby's chest?" Greenwood: "If you want to do so, certainly do it. To me it has no value -except perhaps a pleasant odour." Patient: "Well, anyway, Dr Arthur Greenwood told me it was good." "General practice," said his aunt, "simply was not his line -the line when you give the patient something to do to make him feel you are interested." As the date for starting his part time study with Pearson drew near, Greenwood was filled with worrying doubts. His father was still hostile in principle. Greenwood had a living to earn. Was it really wise to side track the main issue of general practice with fanciful notions of scientific research. Could one really earn a living by research? On September 21 st 1904 Greenwood addressed his ambitions and doubts to Pearson.
Pearson's reply was long and painstaking. He agreed with many of Greenwood's views, and said that generally speaking, it was impracticable to take up pure research unless one had private means. On the other hand, there were people whose sheer determination overcame all obstacles. Not knowing Greenwood's capabilities, he was unable to advise him directly, least of all to recommend that he threw up medicine and devoted himself full time to biometry. On the other hand, if Greenwood studied under him for a time, he would give him the best grounding he could, after which the future would depend on Greenwood's own ability and determination. So far there were no biometrical posts and it might be a long time before any were established. Whatever his capabilities, a career in biometry would certainly be a slow and hazardous undertaking. He ended, "I wish I could give you better and clearer advice, but the answer must lie ultimately with yourself, for it is bound up with the strength of will and power of endurance, which even an intimate friend could hardly estimate." In October Greenwood started his training under Pearson and his "conversion" was complete.
As biometric techniques are based on mathematics, it is worth questioning how good a mathematician was Greenwood. Referring to these early days, he once wrote, "My mainly self taught mathematics were below the level of a pass BSc, but, with the help of a young Cambridge man who was KP's assistant -he boarded in my father's house -I did make progress." The Cambridge man was J Blakeman of Trinity.
Although Greenwood never claimed to be a mathematician, he had a distinct "flair" for the subject. Dr Leon Isserlis, who was a trained mathematician and whose help Greenwood sought, and with whom he sometimes collaborated in later years, said he liked mathematics, particularly algebra, for its own sake, and only used it for applications to statistics in later life. "For instance," says Isserlis, referring to the early years, "he read Netto's Substitution Theory -a book too difficult for 6 th form schoolboys -and read MacMahon's Combinatory Analysis in later years, long before the Fisher school of Mathematical Statisticians appreciated its importance to their subject. In later years, when he wanted my cooperation in putting some statistical problem into mathematical form, he always knew the right questions to ask, and could follow the solution with ease … His statistical sense usually saw almost intuitively what the answer should be, and mathematical analysis usually showed he was right." One of the first techniques that Greenwood learned from Pearson was the coefficient of correlation. In layman's terms it was a mathematical way of testing whether in a series of observations particular factors were related. It had been devised by a French mathematician, August Bravais, in the 1840s. Galton had been the first to apply it to biometrical observations but Pearson had greatly improved its application. He had done so with matters of evolution in mind. Greenwood was quick to see the value of its application to medical problems. The medical world was full of self styled "experts" whose inferences varied according to the way in which they interpreted their data. Here, Greenwood thought, was an unbiased, scientific way of testing these inferences. The Bravais-Pearson coefficient was to become an extremely useful tool.

Demonstrator in Physiology
For the greater part of a year Greenwood enthusiastically part-time studied under Pearson, and drudged reluctantly at his father's medical practice. What, he wondered, would be the outcome of all this. Affairs at home were becoming strained. At the end of 1904, after a long period of what amounted to therapeutic banishment to Herne Bay, his mother died. Meanwhile his father had become uncommonly intimate with his dispenser, Emily Maude Pearle, whom he subsequently married (1906). Then, as so often happened in Greenwood's career, when his affairs seemed darkest, a way of escape was offered. At the end of 1905 Leonard Hill had a vacancy on his staff at the London Hospital for a Demonstrator in Physiology. In the face of some opposition, he offered it to Greenwood, who accepted with eagerness. Now at last he was independent of his father, working with someone who was sympathetic to his ambitions, and free to extend his studies under Pearson.
"I was working in divers' sickness at the time," Hill recorded, "and he joined me in the experiments …. We did a lot on dogs and then went into the (pressure) chamber ourselves. I was also editing a second volume of Recent Advances in Physiology and asked him to deal with the Special Senses, which he did very well." Sir Alun Rowlands recalled hearing Greenwood lecture on this subject, and said he lectured very well indeed. From the notes he made, Greenwood published in 1910 his Physiology of the Special Senses. It had considerable success, and although long out of print and fifty years old, is still a useful summary of what is known of this subject, and to judge from such library copies as we have seen, is still occasionally consulted.
"By recognising the ability of a student with nothing behind him to show his worth and appointing him my assistant," said Hill, "I may claim to have started Greenwood on his career".
Hill had been led to a study of "Divers Cramps" -now known as Caisson Disease or "the bends" -through a general investigation of the physiology of the circulatory system. In 1905 he extended his researches into all the physiological effects of high pressure on the animal organism. The general causes and prevention of the Cramps had been established as early as 1877 by the French physiologist, Paul Bert. They were sure that the human body could withstand up to 7 or 8 atmospheres pressure without serious inconvenience: that under pressure the blood absorbed nitrogen and that rapid decompression caused this to be released in bubbles which caused pain and could cause death. The release of nitrogen could be prevented by slowing the rate of decompression to about 20 minutes for every atmosphere withstood. Although the subject had been more recently investigated there was insufficient detailed data, and very few precise measurements. Hill's purpose was to remedy this deficiency. He would study the physiological aspects; Greenwood, with his newly acquired biometric skills, would look after the measurements.
Siebe Gorman, who manufactured diving gear and were directly interested in Hill's results, allowed him to use one of their workshops and provided him with a compression chamber. This was a cylindrical metal tank, large enough for a man to lie in at full length.
Access was through a manhole. Inside there were a mattress, electric light, bell and telephone. There was a glass peep hole, usually kept closed by means of a metal shutter.
Pipes lead air into the tank under pressure, other pipes allowed for its gradual release.
In the winter of 1905 Hill and Greenwood got to work. Hitherto the highest recorded pressure to which anyone had been exposed was about 88½ lbs per square inch. This was on the occasion of a diver descending to a depth of 204 feet. He had, however, died on his return to the surface.
Hill and Greenwood took it in turns to lie in the chamber and record their sensations as the air pressure was raised. Greenwood, fearing that Hill's greater age and heavier physique would tell against him, insisted on experiencing the higher pressure alone. In November he achieved the record pressure of 92 lbs (about 7 atmospheres) which was reached in 54 minutes. He felt little discomfort, and after decompression over a period of 2 hours and 17 minutes, emerged from the tank unscathed. A pressure of 92 lbs (per square inch) was equal to a depth of about 210 feet. The occasion was commemorated with a handsome pair of sea (word omitted) inscribed "In memory of 92 lbs" which for many years occupied a place on the mantle shelf in his dining room.
The experiments led to others. One night his son, sleeping in an adjoining room heard strange noises coming from his father's room. Puzzled and worried he cautiously opened an intervening door and beheld a very strange scene. His mother was asleep. Beside her lay Greenwood with a clip on his nose and a tube running from his mouth to an enormous canvas-like bag on the floor. The noise was Greenwood's breathe passing through a valve on its way into the bag. Greenwood was trying to determine the output of his lungs during a night in bed. Next morning his son helped him deflate the bag through a gas meter.
Meanwhile, with Bacot's assistance, Greenwood tried some experiments of his own, such as the effects of pressure and decompression on larvae and caterpillars. The significance was that these creatures did not possess a circulatory system in which breathed air could be absorbed, and should therefore be free from the bubble effects of rapid decompression.
Experiments did in fact show that they were immune. Caterpillars of the goat moth withstood pressures up to 27 atmospheres without ill effects, survived rapid decompression, and pupated in the normal way. Greenwood's work on this was published in the Journal of Physiology and the Transactions of the Entomological Society in 1906.
As the experiments continued Hill allowed Greenwood to publish accounts of them in the British Medical Journal, and use the material as reports to the British Medical Association, which gave him a Research Scholarship for the years 1905/6 and 1906/7. In experiments in their Arris and Gale Lectures.
These collaborations brought him very close to Leonard Hill. In March 1907 he left his father's house and took lodgings at number 2, Meadow Road, Loughton, Essex, which brought him within half a mile of Hill's residence, Osborne House, on the London Road.
Here he was a frequent caller, most Sunday mornings and often on week day evenings.
He had his supper earlier than the Hills and used to arrive just as they were starting theirs.
He never ate anything, but sat in a corner chatting learnedly with his "Chief", an interruption which the Hill children heartily disliked. But they grew accustomed to seeing him about the place, with their father in the garden, bathing with him on Sunday mornings in a pond in Epping Forest, and talking endlessly during the long summer evenings. They called him "Wiry". It arose from a comment about his size, when their father added, "Yes, he may be small, but he's wiry, and will probably outlive us all." One of these children, Austin Bradford Hill, ultimately became Greenwood's academic successor.
Sir Philip Mansor-Bahr, roughly a contemporary there, records his impressions of Greenwood and Hill and the London Hospital.
"The impression he conveyed was one of a little slim stooping figure, with a finechiselled intelligent face, accentuated by a sharp-pointed nose made more conspicuous by a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. He would enter the Club dining room closely following his burly and somewhat ponderous Chief, Leonard Hill, walking closely to heel like some faithful dog. The luncheon table became notable for there would foregather William Bulloch, the famous bacteriologist, and Henry Head, the equally famous neurologist.
There followed a brilliant exchange of wit, interspersed with serious controversy, as the three combined to bait Head with all manner of questions, interlarded with distorted information regarding his own researches which he swallowed with much merriment.
Although physiology and biometry occupied his serious hours, Greenwood still found time for a great deal of rather random reading, mostly in the direction of history and literature. At the instigation of Bacot and Culpin, he joined the North London Natural History Society, went on cycling expeditions with them, and occasionally read them papers. For a time he flirted with Fabianism encouraged by the views of Pearson and Bacot.

Opsonic Index Controversy
In 1908 Greenwood, began an investigation which brought him into conflict with one of the most controversial characters in the English medical world, and resulted in his appointment as the first non-government medical statistician in the country.
As his disciple and torch bearer Greenwood had been supplying Pearson with biometric data from the London Hospital Records. Pearson was just then investigating the statistics of tuberculosis, and a hospital full of patients who could describe their families and backgrounds in relation to the ailments from which they were suffering was obviously a splendid source of biometrical data. In November 1907 Greenwood suggested to the Hospital House Committee that a Statistical Department be established.
Although Pearsonian methods were far from being generally appreciated by the medical world -after all Pearson was not even a medical man -they did have some powerful supporters in the Hospital. Leonard Hill was one. Another was William Bulloch (1868 -1941) the bacteriologist. The House Committee viewed Greenwood's suggestion with sympathy, and within a few months a Statistical Committee was in fact established. The Hospital authorities went even further. Soon after a Statistical Department was set up with Greenwood as Director and Dr JDC White as his assistant. By October 1908 Greenwood was offering to conduct courses in Biometry. Meanwhile a major event in the development of biological statistics was brewing up. This was the Opsonic Index controversy.
The Opsonic Index was a development by Sir Almroth Wright (1861 -1947), Bacteriologist at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, of the ideas and discoveries of Metchnikoff, Koch and others. It had been discovered that the white blood corpuscles, the phagocytes, had the power of absorbing and destroying disease bacteria. This power of destruction varied, and Wright was consumed with a desire to manipulate it by means of vaccines. The quality or condition that enabled the phagocytes to pursue their work of destruction Wright called "Opsonin" from the Greek word meaning "to prepare victuals".
Bernard Shaw, who guyed Wright in a friendly way in his Doctor's Dilemma, called the process "buttering" the microbes so that the white corpuscles could eat them.
Wright's idea was first to determine the normal capacity of the white corpuscles (phagocytes) in healthy blood to destroy disease bacteria. This was the Opsonic Index. In the treatment of disease he proposed to find out the capacity of the patient's phagocytes to destroy bacteria. If it fell below the Index normal, then he hoped to be able to stimulate it by means of inoculations. Wright's Opsonic Index was the result of much detailed work. In order to find out in quantitative terms the destructive capacity of healthy phagocytes, he had made a large number of tests. For these he took smears of blood on microscope slides, infected them with bacteria of various kinds, and after an incubation period, counted the number of bacteria that had been absorbed. He published his results and the Opsonic Index became internationally famous.
In the period 1907 / 8, however, various criticisms had been levelled at what Wright considered healthy or normal and what he considered unhealthy or abnormal. Wright had set fairly narrow limits for his state of normality. His critics argued that the destructive power of healthy phagocytes might vary much more or much less that the limits suggested by Wright.
This was exactly the kind of thing for biometric examination. The phagocytes were living things. They were subject to chance and change. They existed within precisely the kind of environmental circumstances for which Pearson's methods of measurement were designed. Moreover, there was a special reason for submitting the Opsonic Index to biometric tests. The Index was "News" in the medical world, and Wright was not only a distinguished controversialist, but he was also a proclaimed opponent of Pearson.
Wright was a rumbustuous and provocative genius with a fine flow of language and a dangerous disregard for caution. Although his writings do contain occasional admissions that biometry might have its uses, he was generally recognised as the leader of the Anti-Biometricians. He regarded the Pearsonian intrusion into medical affairs as impertinent nonsense.
As Wright was a man of distinction in the medical world, he was also a great stumbling block to the progress of biometry in medicine. He was an advocate of what he called the "Experiential Method" in science. This amounted to little more than experienced guesswork, which was the kind of thing biometry was intended to replace. He had, moreover, several times come into sharp conflict with Pearson, notably at high levels in 1904 over the interpretation of the statistical reports on anti-typhoid inoculation of troops fighting in the Boer War.
Who started Greenwood on his Opsonic investigations is not recorded, but it was probably William Bulloch at the London Hospital. Bulloch was himself critical of Wright's Index, and had already done some work on it himself. When Greenwood suggested an Opsonic Investigation to Pearson, the Great Man jumped at the opportunity and gave his full support. Acting in the name of the London Hospital Statistical Department, Greenwood therefore applied to Wright for data and explained his purpose, which was simply to apply biometric tests to the values Wright had shown in his Index.
Wright courteously sent him records prepared by his assistant, Alexander Fleming, later to become renowned as the discoverer of penicillin. With the assistance of Dr White, Greenwood got down to work.
It is noticeable that at the start Greenwood's approach to Wright was extremely cautious.
He aimed to avoid controversy. He intended simply to publish his results and let the scientific public draw its own conclusions. This was approved by Pearson, who disliked slanging matches which were neither scientific nor constructive. Once emotional hostilities were aroused he pointed out, all hope of one side convincing the other was ended.
Conviction or conversion in science should only be attempted by means of irrefutable logic -in this case the logic of biometry. Unfortunately in this instance emotional hostilities were aroused, and though they took several years to develop, they resulted in Greenwood striking a mighty blow for biometry but seriously offending Pearson.
The more Greenwood and White investigated the Opsonic Index data the stronger grew their suspicion that Wright's method of assessing the destructive power of phagocytes was faulty. The counts varied too widely from sample to sample. Wright's definition of what was normal was too limited. Wright's "normal" might be abnormal in some people, and his "abnormal" might equally be normal. They consulted Pearson on the mathematical intricacies of the problem. He not only gave his advice but set his students working on the problems involved.
When they had submitted their Opsonic Index data to biometrical examination Greenwood and White proposed to publish their findings in Pearson's Biometrika. The intention leaked out ahead of time. In January 1908, at a meeting of the Medical Research Club, of which Greenwood had become a member and at which Wright was present, the subject of the Opsonic Index was raised. Greenwood criticised some of Wright's deductions from his experimental work. This lead to an acrimonious dispute between Wright and CJ Martin who was Director of the Lister Institute for Preventive Disease.
What also emerged from this dispute was the disagreeable likelihood that if Greenwood and White's views on the Opsonic Index were unfavourable, the entirety of Wright's supporters would be mobilised to crush them.
The investigation proceeded slowly.
His relationship with Pearson was now pretty close. Having the entrée to the medical Journals, he was glowingly reviewing Pearson's works in these publications. He was also giving lectures on Pearsonian subjects at the London Hospital, notably on heredity. The Master was pleased, but far too busy to attend them. Perhaps this was as well. The Pearsonian doctrines were not always received with proper reverence. In March Greenwood persuaded one of Pearson's personal friends, Edward Nettleship, to lecture on certain aspects of heredity. The disbelievers treated him to some rude criticism. Heredity, like Darwinism and vaccination, was a subject that in those days aroused fierce partisan feelings. Greenwood tried to soothe his guest speaker and hastily sent words of pacification to Pearson. A certain Mudge was the ringleader of the critics. His name repeatedly appears as an unbeliever. India. He could hardly ignore the fact that most of Wright's "findings" on that occasion had subsequently been found to be incorrect. Indeed, Martin's most memorable discovery, the relationship between the rat "carrier" and the spread of Plague, Wright had airily dismissed as being unworthy of any consideration at all. Martin, therefore, had a good deal in common with Greenwood; the same unorthodox beginnings, an interest in mathematics and statistical analysis, and a profound distrust of Almroth Wright. He wondered if he could use Greenwood to analyse the Indian Plague data. It was high time the Lister Institute considered appointing a permanent statistician.
Confidential discussions took place: Hill and Bulloch were consulted, Greenwood himself was sounded. But such matters took time, Meanwhile Greenwood suddenly ventured into matrimony.

Marriage
Several things about Greenwood's marriage seemed rather odd to outside observers. Here he was, a member of a one hundred per cent Cockney family, extremely reserved towards the opposite sex, brought up in the Church of England with a traditional disregard for Roman Catholicism, yet he suddenly married a charming Roman Catholic girl in the heart of Germany. How did it happen?
"He married to learn German", was one comment. Another was that he married a German "to change the family strain". "Germans", said an aunt in recollection, "were often strong, which the Greenwoods were not." Both comments contain an element of truth. His marriage was certainly one of the results of trying to learn the language, and the need for changing the family strain was not wholly overlooked. Matters of heredity and predisposition to disease had been a preoccupation for years. It was one of the main springs of Pearson's multitudinous researches. Greenwood's mother and infant brother and sister had died of illnesses thought to have hereditary significance. His great grandparents' family had been almost wiped out by disease. And there was always that sinister recollection of the so called epileptic fit when he had started at the London Hospital.
As a boy and a young man, Greenwood's relations with girls outside the family were few and discouraged by his father. The only active encouragement his father seems to have given him in this direction was a hope that he might marry Grace, the attractive niece of his new step-mother. As a boy and a young man he was one of those busy, fidgety people, full of enthusiasms and bursts of energy, ever industrious, delving into this and that, filled with curiosity, never dull.
He was one of the "rowdy gang" at school, and by most accounts given to "ragging", and not innocent of what he called "brushes with the yokels". His blind spots were social ones. He was a shy mixer; emotionally reserved; no ability for small talk either dumb or talking too much and talking too smartly. He was anything but a ladies man. His marriage came about in this way.
When he was twenty or twenty one he went to France to improve his knowledge of the language. According to himself, he knew the grammar well enough, but was deaf and dumb for the conversational part. In France he fell in with a young German school teacher named Heinrich Schonder, who was there for the same purpose as Greenwood. It seems to have been love at first sight, for Greenwood was already contemplating marriage by the end of the same year. Yet there were certain facilitating circumstances.
Both his and Rosa's domestic situations were rather similar. His mother had died a year or two back after a long illness. There had been an embarrassing intimacy between his father and his dispenser. Now his father had married his dispenser, and what had always been a rather strained household, became much worse. He had loved his mother, but he had usually been at loggerheads with his father. Now his mother was gone, and the lady who had taken her place was a former employee, a servant almost, and she ganged up with his father so that both of them seemed to be against him. Marriage was clearly a most satisfactory way of mending his domestic affairs.
On Rosa's side, too, there were complications. Her mother had been dead for several years, and her father's familiarity with the housekeeper was causing trouble, if not open scandal. Rosa too had good reason for wishing to leave home.
Back in the damps of East London, Greenwood decided to press the matter of marriage.
He wrote to Schonder for advice. He quoted the snags, among which were language, and the fact that Rosa was a Roman Catholic, and asked if he should dare to propose to her (1906).
Schonder, who had since married Stephanie, considered the matter from every angle. His reply, couched in the quaint English he had learnt, ran to some seventeen hundred words.
(January 1907). He began with the sound caution against believing things to be true because one wish them so. This fault was particularly dangerous in people reckoned to be clever. Nobody was more likely to be mistaken about woman than people who were otherwise clever but were unaccustomed to dealing with them. German Professors were notoriously unsound choosers of wives, and many were saddled with real "monsters".
What Greenwood wanted, he counselled, was a wife primarily devoted to her own family, who would not be distracted by society books, relations, money or clothes. Such distractions were common in wives of the class to which Rosa and Greenwood belonged, but Schonder thought Rosa would be an exception. "She has something so plain, so homely, so sincere about her," he wrote, "that I am sure she cannot but think and feel naturally in that most natural of all things, the bringing up of her children." Language would present no lasting difficulty, neither would the difference in nationality.
As to adjusting herself to a new life in England, conditions perhaps favoured it. Rosa had no mother and her father was far from ideal. "She may love him," said Schonder, obviously in doubt, "I don't know anything about it. But she will love her husband much more for the fact that he takes her away from her home, which is not the ideal of a home at any rate." On the matter of religion, some kind of accommodation could be arranged, even though Rosa did wonder if Greenwood's scientific attitude might make him sceptical of religion.
Indeed, to Stephanie she had already expressed concern about his soul, which was surely a promising sign, and to Schonder she had wondered if he really believed in religion at all, which was not so satisfactory. Schonder was in much the same position as Greenwood. He was a protestant, and his wife a Catholic. They had settled by agreeing to bring up the children in what Schonder called "the poetic faith".
As for money, Greenwood's supposition that he should wait until he had £250 a year was needless. £150 a year was probably enough on which to start married life -£50 for rent, the rest for living. As to furniture, Schonder said that in Germany the bride was expected to pay for practically everything not actually worn by the bridegroom. "Even his gold watch she mostly presents to him when they engage. She is supposed to possess clothes and such things for a year or two, and linen and so forth for thirty or forty years." Having consulted the most learned of his colleagues on the problem, Schonder came to the conclusion that if Greenwood and Rosa were in love, then he should propose to her.

Appointment to the Lister Institute
By the spring of 1909 CJ Martin had persuaded the Governing Body of the Lister Institute of the importance of biometric methods to medicine. The Governing Body agreed in principle to the appointment of a biometrician -or a statistician -to their staff, and justified its decision by pronouncing "that the validity of conclusions drawn from many enquiries in experimental medicine, as well as those regarding the practical value of prophylactic and curative treatment, must ultimately rest upon the statistical analysis of the results, and that statistical treatment would aid in defining the relative importance of different means whereby disease is spread." This was not only important to Greenwood; it was important to statistics as a whole. It amounted to official recognition of statistics as a necessary tool in medical research. The Lister Institute did not represent all the medical profession but it did represent a progressive section of it.
It is noticeable at this point that the term "statistics" more and more takes the place of His industry was endless. He was busy collecting case histories of tuberculosis from hospital patients, and already had records of nearly five hundred.
In June 1909 CJ Martin tentatively suggested a statistical job at the Lister Institute.
Greenwood agreed subject to certain guarantees and conditions.
What his "guarantees" and "conditions" were we are not told, but freedom of action within his own sphere was almost certainly one of them. It is also probable that he suggested that G Udny Yule (1871 -1951)  Officer for Local Government, standing as his sponsors.
So at the age of twenty nine Greenwood became the first non-government medical statistician in the country.

Indian Plague
The Lister Institute, completed in 1898, was and still is, a handsome building at the river end of the Chelsea Bridge Road. Here in the autumn of 1909 Greenwood set about establishing a Statistical Department. His first major assignment was an investigation into the incidence of Plague in India, based on statistical data prepared by the Indian Plague Commission.
His aim was to answer three questions: 1. How does the disease enter a given country or district?
2. Having effected an entrance how does it maintain itself there?
3. What circumstances determine the transformation from endemic to epidemic prevalence and conversely?
He was to spend a good deal of his life attempting to find the answers to these kind of questions, and on the plague enquiry he laid the foundations of his reputation as an epidemiologist.
The aspect of epidemics that continued to fascinate and perplex him, was their periodicity, the strange cycles whereby a disease would be present (endemic) but not active for long periods, and then, for no apparent reason, spring into furious and contagious activity.
Why, for instance, did plague disappear from England at the end of the 17 th century and why was it inactive for long periods in India? (As a matter of interest there was a minor outbreak of plague in East Anglia in 1906. Small groups of deaths had occurred that had at first been diagnosed as due to a virulent form of pneumonia. Plague was not recognised until 1910. Plague infected rats persisted in the area until at least 1918. Why, since the rats were disseminating the disease had no serious epidemic occurred? ).
Since it was now established that rats carried the fleas that carried the plague bacteria, Martin began looking for someone to study the life cycle of fleas. As there was no qualified entomologist ready to hand Greenwood suggested that Arthur Bacot might be useful in this field. He introduced him to Martin and they immediately took to each other.
They had much in common. Bacot's study of entomology had begun in the kitchen of his lodgings at Bow; Martin's scientific studies had begun in a shed at the end of his Parents' garden at Hackney. Martin had begun life in an Assurance Office and hated it. Bacot was still in an Accounting Office and hated it no less. Martin longed to offer him a means of escape, but there were difficulties. Although Bacot had studied entomology for twenty years and was a first class microscopist, he was still an amateur with no professional standing. The Lister Institute was largely supported by public funds and it was inconceivable that the Plague Committee would agree to the appointment of an amateur.
The best that Martin could arrange was that Bacot should take up the study of fleas in his spare time, and that the Committee would pay his expenses and give him an honorarium.
It was a kindly gesture that paid off handsomely as we shall see.

Opsonic Index Enquiry Continues
Meanwhile Greenwood and White were pressing on with their enquiry into the Opsonic Index. Their first investigation had been based on limited data. Now they obtained data relating to the number of bacteria absorbed by some 20,000 white corpuscles. White, who worked in the Inoculation Department at the London Hospital, prepared the bacteriological material and did the counting. Greenwood's job was to look after the mathematical side, to find out how the absorption power of the phagocytes varied from sample to sample, and relate this variation to the whole range of material used. The actual counting was complete by December 1909, but Greenwood was at loggerheads with Pearson over the mathematical handling, and progress was slow.
Greenwood's appointment to the Lister Institute had strengthened his position in relation to the Master and where their opinions differed, he was now inclined to be rebellious.
However, after a great deal of discussion the Paper was ready for publication, and finally appeared in Biometrika in November 1910. This might have been the end of Greenwood's interest in Opsonic matters. The paper was strictly objective. It contained nothing deliberately controversial and there was no reference to Almroth Wright. Pearson had seen to this. The Paper was greeted with silence -or so it seemed. But Wright had read it and was determined not to let it pass unscathed.

Predisposition and Alcoholism
Greenwood's relations with Pearson had long since extended to the social side. In May 1910 he was suggesting a cycling expedition round the Essex churches, but Pearson was far too busy to join him. In June he invited Greenwood and his wife to an "at home", and in July, in a mood of biometrical enthusiasm he was wishing he had a grant of £4,000 a year to establish a great Statistical Laboratory, and could ask Greenwood and his other biometric disciples to join him there.
Pearson was just then involved in two major controversies, whether predisposition or infection was the dominant factor in tuberculosis, and whether chronic alcoholism in parents affected their offspring in a hereditary sense. Both, but especially the later, were of public concern and at times brought the disciples of biometrical studies into the national press. Pearson was the focus of controversy but all the time Greenwood acted as his lieutenant.
Pearson's interest in both matters lay in their hereditary implications. He was, basically, searching for Darwin's evolutionary processes, how one species evolved into another.
Could children really inherit tuberculosis from their parents as they inherited other characteristics? Or did they merely catch it by way of infection. He was inclined to believe that the disease could be transmitted through heredity and published some evidence to support this view but recognising that the disease was also undoubtedly infectious was angered by a government statement that tubercular stock could safely marry provided they got a good supply of fresh air. This he refuted and earned the enmity of Arthur Newsholme, the Principal Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, who thereafter became an opponent of the biometrical school of thought.
The alcoholism controversy was much more violent and became a national affair.
To most people of intelligence it seemed only reasonable that excessive alcoholism in parents should have some deleterious effect on the mentality and physique of children born to them after they had succumbed to this state. To Pearson this belief had a special significance. If it were true, it would seem that alcohol could in some way interfere with the natural laws of heredity. He and Ethel M Elderton conducted a biometrical investigation into the problem based on data on alcoholics in Manchester and Edinburgh.
They published their findings in 1910, which showed no significant relationship between the intelligence, physique or health of children and their alcoholic parents. In short, they found no evidence that alcohol affected inherited qualities.
This enraged the advocates of temperance who raised a cry of protest. Foremost among them was Sir Victor Horsley, an eminent surgeon, who had been heading a campaign against alcohol since the beginning of the century. Horsley, it will be recalled, was one of the "experts" called in to diagnose Greenwood's quasi-epileptic fits in 1899. He was a lusty, bigoted opponent, who referred to all who touched alcohol, no matter how abstemiously, as alcoholics. In one of his wittier moments he gave John Bull and Father Christmas as typical examples of fatty degeneration due to excessive drink. He led the "popular" side against Pearson, who seems to have been astonished at the furore he had caused.
Pearson as a controversialist was superb but among the medical profession he suffered the damning handicap of not being a medical man. All through their early years the biometricians had suffered from this handicap, and it fell to Greenwood, who was a member, to at least provide a key that would unlock his profession's disbelief.

Scientific Papers
Greenwood was now well launched into the way of reading papers before the learned societies. He started as a passionate preacher of the biometric doctrine. Many of his early papers were associated with the current Pearsonian controversies, but he gradually introduced wider aspects of biometric application. On February 21 st 1911 he read his first of many papers before the Royal Statistical Society. This was a Study of Hospital Mortality Rates from 1751 to 1901. He had extracted his data from the London Hospital records with Dr RH Candy. It was one of the efforts of the London Hospital Statistics Department, begun before he moved to the Lister Institute. "Before long," Candy recalled many years later, "Greenwood went to the Lister Institute and it was there that I used to go for all the latter part of the work on pneumonia in which I did the donkey work, whilst Greenwood supplied the brain power. He was extremely kind to me in all sorts of ways.
He was a remarkable man …" Candy joined the Army Medical Service, went to India and subsequently retired as a Major General.
Greenwood joined the Council of the Royal Statistical Society the following year and remained on it almost continually until his death. He became Honorary Secretary in 1919 and only retired from this position when he was elected President in 1934.
In April 1911 he took up cudgels for Pearson before the Epidemiological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, arguing, with the support of Bulloch, that predisposition was an important factor in the transmission of tuberculosis. Nobody, it seems, could be found to controvert this view.

Charles Creighton
Greenwood's attendance at the Epidemiological Section brought him in touch with the It is difficult to tell how far Creighton influenced him. Perhaps their interests merely happened to coincide, and Creighton's possession of them confirmed Greenwood of their propriety. Certain it is that Greenwood's opinion of Creighton quoted above might equally be applied to himself. He had the same odd literary taste, the same passion for mixing his subjects epidemiological, statistical, theological, historical, the same aloofness from contemporary medical thought.

Friction with Pearson
It will be recalled that when Greenwood secured his position with the Lister Institute, GU

Advancement
Meanwhile in the summer of 1911, largely it would seem at the instance of Martin, Greenwood was appointed second in command of the administration of the Lister Institute. By now, thanks to the demands of the Indian Plague Investigation, he had established a fully equipped statistical department, and told Pearson that he had "probably more statistical data than ever existed before". It was now time to apply statistical investigation to diseases nearer home, and he proposed to do so on cancer. With this in mind he sounded Pearson on securing the services of David Heron, one of Pearson's assistants at University College, who had already begun an investigation on this disease.
It brought a sharp rebuff and their correspondence ceased for six months.

Arthur Bacot at the Lister Institute
In December 1911 a sudden happiness, as he put it, entered Greenwood's life at the Lister Institute. The Trustees decided to establish an Entomological Research Unit and largely due to his influence Arthur Bacot was appointed to take charge. Bacot's report on the bionomics of rat fleas had at last admitted him into the charmed circle of research workers.
Perhaps his most significant contribution to the Plague Investigation was his demonstration of the mechanics by which fleas transmitted plague bacilli into their human hosts. At the risk of over-simplifying a complex matter the puzzle had been this; when plague infected fleas bit human beings they sucked blood out. How then did they manage to pass their own plague infected blood into their hosts? Bacot demonstrated with a great deal of microscopic proof that in fleas infected with plague bacilli the foreparts of their stomachs often became blocked by the growth of these bacilli. Fleas so affected could not properly draw fresh blood into their stomachs, and in attempting to do so, regurgitated and thus drove infected blood from their own bodies into the bodies of their host.
Bacot got on famously with the staff of the Institute and his easy conversational ways soon made him everyone's friend. By contrast Greenwood lacked his social graces.
According to a member of the Institute who remembered him from the early days, he hardly seemed to fit into the cosy atmosphere of the place. He was a great talker at the tea-time get-togethers but he lacked Bacot's ability to avoid wounding other people's self-esteem. If he saw a weakness in anybody's defences he was inclined to take a jab at it, He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder and gave the impression that he rather despised the scientific workers who had prosperous family backgrounds as though only those who were poor and struggling were genuine researchers.
"Bacot", said a contemporary, "was marvellous fun, bald headed but bearded, rag-tag clothes and very odd meals … But Greenwood, well he had a phenomenal memory but he had an inferiority complex and that is fatal in a clever man … Perhaps he was bullied at school. He was certainly sensitive about his height. But he grew mellower as he grew older and I expect changed when he realised that he had "arrived".
To anticipate a little, the Bacot-Greenwood relationship grew closer. A year or two later Bacot and his sister moved to a house in Loughton where he set up his entomological laboratory in a wooden shed under some hazel trees in the garden. Greenwood took a larger house nearby, and they spent much of their spare time together. They began a ritual that was to last for many years. Every Sunday morning before breakfast, when the weather was fine, they cycled into Epping Forest and bathed in the Wake Valley pond.
After breakfast in all weathers, when the bells were ringing for church, they met again and walked with their dogs in the forest until lunch-time.

Battling for the Faith
As Pearson's biometrical apostle Greenwood was untiring. He lectured, he spoke up at meetings, he reviewed books and wrote to the press whenever opportunities presented themselves for propagating the Faith. But untiring apostles sometimes become an embarrassment. They have a tendency to change the message and supplant their Master in the public eye. Unconsciously at first Greenwood was doing just this.
Pearson had developed the Faith for purposes of evolutionary theory. Greenwood adapted it for application to matters of public health. He was no Evolutionist, but nor was Pearson a medical man. Pearson's narrower cause was of interest only to the few. Greenwood's applications could possibly affect the health of many. As he pushed his version of the Faith his reputation expanded, whereas that of the Master's became as it were petrified, touched perhaps with a hint of crankiness.
In 1912 they appeared to be battling together, shoulder to shoulder. Heretics, unbelievers and rank pagans abounded. It was extraordinary how medical men, even scientists, disregarded the most elementary mathematical aids to their investigations. A medical degree, it seemed, qualified a man to make any pronouncements he liked on mathematical matters provided the subject was medical.
The chief opponents were Sir Victor Horsley and Sir Almroth Wright who complained effectively of the interference by mathematicians in the affairs of medical men. Their reputation in their own fields of study was so high that editors were over-awed by them and were inclined to censor Greenwood's comments on their views on biometry. Even Pearson became uneasy about his disciple's boldness in defence of the Faith.
Then suddenly Sir Almroth Wright struck back. He launched an attack on biometricians in general and Greenwood in particular. In responding to it Greenwood lost the tutelage of Pearson and discovered his own strength.

Quarrel with Wright
In  (1910). Wright referred scathingly to armchair statisticians and the deplorable effects that had been produced by handing over the adjudication of medical results to lay mathematicians. The only name mentioned, and that but once, was "Mr.
Major Greenwood". It would have weakened Wright's argument to have admitted that Greenwood was a medical man himself.
On October 15 th Pearson suggested to Greenwood a reply in Biometrika. "Are you prepared to write it -quite a short note -or would you like a joint one?" On October 17 th Greenwood said it would be an honour to co-operate in a reply to Wright. He preferred not to publish anything under his single name because a) he had already replied to Wright's general criticism at the Medical Research Club, and to do so again might be attributed to wounded vanity, and b) as medical opinion was largely a matter of Authority, there was little point in pitting himself against Wright's great reputation.
"I am sure," he continued, "it is both for my own happiness and my usefulness to publish only research work, however crude, and if people say it is rubbish let it go at that." He was, in fact, extremely hurt. "As to whether Wright's statements are due to muddleheadedness' or dishonesty," he continued "I think they are due to neither, but the product of pure contempt. Wright thinks I am a fool and treats a fool according to his folly -you will note that he carefully abstains from any reference to your paper; his assumption is perhaps not entirely devoid of justification although I naturally do not accept it …" A note of tension entered their correspondence. While agreeing that Wright was "an enemy not merely of biometry but of all science whatsoever" (Greenwood) and that he was "fighting for something more substantial than Truth" (Pearson), they could not agree on how the heretic should be handled. Pearson was for a dignified scientific refutation, Greenwood, who was suffering from a bout of inferiority complexes, and could not forget the great esteem with which Wright was generally regarded, preferred flattery followed by rapier thrusts. Pearson objected to this. On December 17 th he wrote him a stern letter making his views abundantly clear, and signing himself "Yours sincerely" instead of the customary "Yours very sincerely". Pearson's epistolary style was full of danger signals of this kind. When on the best terms he wrote "My dear Greenwood". Any cooling off, and the "my" was dropped. Inviting Yule to his new house for the Whitsun week-end, he comments; "We have got a room for you and I will leave a Bible and current number of Biometrika on the wash stand so that you can feel more Christ-like than ever." This was a reference to a remark by Yule, "I'm so proud of being credited by Karl Pearson with disciples -sounds so Christ-like".
In those peaceful days before the First World War, Greenwood and his friends did a lot of cycling in the eastern counties. Bacot's nature studying jaunts had started the thing off, but Greenwood made ancient village churches his special object. How far he appreciated them from an artistic point of view was never quite clear, but he developed a rather mechanical knack of identifying the particular architectural styles, and spent most of his time strolling round these buildings picking out fragments of "First pointed", "Perp" and "Decorated." Among his friends he had the reputation for being a hard rider, and several of them complained that he practically killed them with his long sustained exertions. Greenwood was shocked into humility by these revelations in contrast to his own worries and condolingly replied in phrases of Johnsonian cadence. None the less he gave the appearance of being at his wits end and rather than submit to being placed under a nominee of Pearson, spoke of throwing in his hand and abandoning research altogether.
He wrote about buying a share in a medical practice. Yule hardly knew whether to take him seriously, and having tried to discourage him from buying a medical practice, offered to help him with a loan if he were really serious.
So the matter rested in the early months of 1914 until the Governing Body of the Lister Institute would be called upon to make its decision later in the year. Meanwhile there was time for Greenwood to muster the opposition.
His peace of mind was further disturbed by the imminent departure of Bacot on a mission to Africa, where he was to take part in the work of the Yellow Fever Commission at Freetown in Sierra Leone.
Troubles shared with an intimate friend were troubles much diminished but soon there would be no Bacot.
In May he and Rosa took their bicycles and stayed with Yule at Cambridge. Later in the summer they proposed to spend their holidays in Germany. Bacot's suggestion made a year before when they stayed together at Keswick, that the country might be drifting into war with Germany still seemed quite unreal. At the end of June came news of the murders at Sarajevo, but they caused barely a ripple on the minds of the researchers. In July Bacot sailed for Africa, and as late as July 30 th Yule was under the impression that the Greenwoods were still going to Germany. Pearson himself was actually in Germany, and just managed to get back to England on August 4 th ! The Greenwoods changed their minds and went to Southwold instead.

Outbreak of War
The first impact of the 1914 war was slow to be felt by the "outsiders". It was a job for the professionals, and the professionals at first meant to keep it that way. For Rosa Greenwood the war became an immediate tragedy and she was soon to experience the hurtful things that people would be saying about the Germans.

Liquor Control
While Greenwood's new department in the Ministry of Munitions was organising itself to cope with the Welfare problems of the factories, he suddenly found himself invited to his first seat on an important Government Committee.
In May 1915 a Board of Liquor Control had been established under the Defence of the Realm Act to cut down what Lloyd George had called the "lure of alcohol" which was increasingly hampering the war effort. Its first duties were to reduce the number of places at which drink could be bought and restrict the hours during which it could be sold.
Thereafter the Board issued a stream of regulations that caused a social revolution in the British drinking habits that endure to this day. The Board, however, was hampered by an absence of exact information about the physiological effects of alcohol. Thus, for example, some "experts" believed that alcohol in beer was absorbed faster into the bloodstream than alcohol in spirits; other "experts" held the opposite view. There were equally divergent views on the qualities of drunkenness caused by beer and spirits. To those entrusted with the duty of making regulations for the control of drink and its side effects, it was important to know the truth. If, indeed, beer made a man drunk quicker than the equivalent amount of alcohol in spirits, then perhaps it might be as well to discourage excessive beer drinking by raising its price, or reducing its alcoholic content.
To overcome these uncertainties, in November 1916, the Board appointed an advisory committee to investigate the physiological effects of alcohol in its various forms. Cecily Thompson and Miss Wilcox, and awaited an in-pouring of data. It was not long in coming. Not only was there a munitions crisis, but it was beginning to be aggravated by a growing food shortage caused by enemy submarine action.
The first investigational material dealt with nutrition. Food rationing had already been introduced in 1916, but when the enemy began unrestricted submarine sinkings early in 1917 there was a food crisis. Rationing had to be extended, and the government virtually took control of all the food services. As with liquor control, the authorities were continually hampered by an absence of exact knowledge on the amount of food that was actually being consumed, and how much of this consumption was necessary. It was believed, with some justification, that customary food usage was extremely wasteful.
Thus, for example, bread was often thrown away when it became stale, yet the amount of bread so discarded represented a considerable tonnage in shipping space for which men risked their lives.
The Ministry investigation was only concerned with Munition workers, but it had ample scope. Questionnaires were drawn up and sent to the managers of munitions hostels to find out what and how much the workers were actually eating. Greenwood's department then drew up an elaborate report on the diets consumed by the largest sample of industrial workers ever taken.
At first hostel and canteen managers were sceptical about the practical use that could be made of this information, but when it became available, they changed their minds, and the Ministry was able to effect on the one hand economies in total foodstuffs and on the other, an improvement in variety. The information further proved of great value to the Food Section of the Ministry when it was set up in 1918.
Work on dietaries then developed along more complex lines, and the significance of calories was introduced to the British public. Investigations were carried out to ascertain the amount of calories needed to perform particular physical work, with a view to discriminatory rationing according to physical need. One of the enquiries on which Greenwood was engaged was to determine the most calorifically economic speed of marching. It proved to be 88.38 yards a minute, almost three miles an hour, though the army seems to have stuck to its standard speed of 120 yards a minute.

Labour Wastage
The next major investigation dealt with absenteeism and labour wastage among some Fears were entertained that this would be damaging to their health. As events proved, this was not so, and as Greenwood remarked in the book he eventually wrote with Collis on the Health of the Industrial Worker (1921) the effect of industry on women was far less important than the effect of women on industry. In trying to protect women from the hazards of industry, the Government awoke more fully to the fact that men too needed to be protected, and much of the welfare legislation that followed the conclusion of the war stemmed from action originally taken in the interests of women employees.
Another investigation in which he was involved dealt with the frequency of industrial accidents. He seems to have been the first to draw attention to the fact that a majority of accidents were caused by a minority of workers, and that the distribution was by no means as random as the word "accident" generally connoted. This gave rise to a theory of accident-proneness, that some workers, perhaps on account of some psychological defect, were more prone to accidents than the average worker. Everyone recognised that some workers were more careless than others, but this proneness to accidents seemed to go further than this and to involve more complex factors. It was a problem, moreover, particularly fascinating to a statistician because in the analysis of the data it was necessary to recognise where the reported accidents exceeded the distribution of chance.
Although his report on the subject was published in 1919 he toyed with the problem in a mathematical way for several years and regarded it as one of his most useful contributions to the subject of industrial accidents.

Post War Uncertainties
When the war ended in November 1918 Greenwood expected that the activities of the According to the Ministry's First Report, covering the years 1919 / 20 Greenwood's efforts had made it possible to obtain statistical studies of health and sickness of an entirely new kind. Although he had been mainly engaged on the influenza studies he had begun re-organising the collection of statistical data relating to infectious disease, and had made a preliminary report on the epidemiology of tuberculosis.
In the Ministry's Second Annual Report we find the following statement: "From its Intelligence on mortality and morbidity returns with a view to obtaining early warning of local epidemics, and c) conducting statistical research." Opinions had changed since Almroth Wright's onslaught on the biometrical busy-bodies before the war. "Mr" Major Greenwood was now an officially appointed watchdog to vet the inferences sought to be drawn from various data by the medical experts".
Although in 1920 he was mainly engaged on the influenza work, he did a laborious investigation into the relationship between pneumonia and bronchitis and meteorological conditions. He began an enquiry into the changes in the death rates in various parts of the country. All the while he found his services more and more in demand as the Ministry's machinery got into action and produced ever increasing quantities of statistical data. He

Reconciliation with Pearson
In Pearson was cautious about this suggestion, and during the correspondence he let slip an interesting piece of information. The London County Council had been persuaded into supporting Pearson's department by paying for the appointment of a Medical Statistician.
He added, moreover, that a highly competent appointee was in mind.
This was exactly the kind of job Greenwood was anxious to secure, and his apology to Whatever the outcome of the jockeying for places, the most important thing was a resumption of the old cordiality between Pearson and Greenwood, signified by Pearson's return in his letter to "My dear Greenwood".

First Chairmanship and Leon Isserlis
In 1920  There is an odd little tailpiece to these recollections of Leon Isserlis in the early 1920s supported by no more than family gossip. From this it would appear that Isserlis's mathematical skills had not passed unobserved in Russia and that he had received an invitation from Lenin to return to Russia and work for the re-organisation of the new state.

One of the by-products of Greenwood's industrial health researches during the final years of the war was his collaboration with Collis in the preparation of a large book entitled
The Health of the Industrial Worker.

The book originated in a request from the publishers, J & A Churchill, to Collis -who was then Home Office Medical Inspector of Factories -for a book on Industrial
Medicine. Collis said afterwards, "I think they had in mind Industrial Disease, but I said Industrial Health seemed to me a better thing. Then I asked Greenwood to collaborate as he had been so active just then in the whole subject. Except for any statistical angle, which was his speciality, we did not take any part to either of us. While he certainly contributed to the historical side, my recollection is that I myself wrote most of that part.
At every stage each saw the other's MSS, and altered or added as seemed advisable. It was just collaboration." "Without being a best seller, the book just about covered the publisher's expenses; but by the time the first edition was sold out much time had passed and an entire rewrite would have been needed rather than a second edition. At any rate it was not contemplated, especially as we were neither of us any longer actively engaged upon Industrial Health problems…" "I only know that we got some small contributions from sales during the next ten or circulation than its high price permitted. Quite apart from its main purpose, the book is still a quarry for ideas, and touches on such themes as the relation between mortality rates in the coal mines and strike ballot results, the charms of alcohol, the differences between industrial and convivial drinking, the effect of women on industrial employment generally, the physiological capacity of women to work, and the dangers of administration based in "a priori" reasoning. As the authors said in their preface, they had at least made plain how great is the influence of employment upon general health.

Death of Arthur Bacot
On Apart from routine work, he sat upon numerous committees enquiring into such matters as quantitative problems of human nutrition, telegraphist's cramp, the physiological action of alcohol, cancer statistics and the propaganda necessary to stimulate the public into seeking early medical advice on this disease. His department was busy on such matters as mental hospital diets and the measurement of the insane, tests for physical efficiency, secular trends in adult death rates and health conditions in rural areas.
Meanwhile another form of statistical activity was creeping up on him. Long ago he had realised the value of collating international sickness statistics when the means had not been possible. Now international sickness statistics had become a matter of world concern. The ravages of the war had left a mounting toll of disease and brought about circumstances likely to favour a rapid spread of infection. Whatever its causes, the world spread of influenza in 1918 had been a terrible warning. Now there were soldiers returning to their homelands from all over the globe; there were refugees openly or covertly, crossing the old frontiers; systems of government had been overthrown and national boundaries reconstituted. In Russia there was revolution; Poland was stricken with disease; Germany was ruined and starving; the northern villages of France were heaps of rubble; water systems had become polluted; drains had been destroyed, and in large areas of Europe the whole pre-war organisation of sanitation had broken down.
The League of Nations Health Organisation decided to set up a system of standardised international vital statistics so that it would be possible to detect at once where particular diseases were on the increase.
The first step was to prepare a series of handbooks for distribution to the principal European countries describing how these statistics should be compiled. Greenwood's immediate chief at the Ministry of Health was Sir George Buchanan who represented Britain at the League's discussions. He asked Greenwood to assist with the preparation of these booklets. In this work Greenwood was greatly assisted by Percy Granville Edge, the "Major Edge" who subsequently became one of his intimates.

Major Edge
At first glance Edge and Greenwood had very little in common and in later years people not knowing their background wondered how they came to be so close. Then suddenly an opportunity occurred.
The preparation of the international handbooks required a great deal of organisation.
Edge was an adept at organisation. He was taken onto Greenwood's staff at Hampstead. Starting from this there grew up between them a kind of mutual protection relationship.
Edge protected Greenwood from the rough, workaday officiousness of jacks-in-office, and Greenwood protected Edge from the aimlessness of uncertain employment after his release from the Army life he had loved. As the years went by this relationship mellowed but at the bottom it still remained protective.

Foreign Affairs
Greenwood got on well with his foreign collaborators. shall see later on, he had already taken steps, but had withdrawn again.

The Hampstead Circle
As his name came to be more widely known in fields where medical statistics were of importance, so there began an increasing stream of visitors to his rooms at Hampstead.
Here after consultation the visitor would usually be asked to join the "Tea Party". The Tea Parties were derived from Lister Institute days. Everybody in the department met for tea and talk in the middle of the afternoon. In his early days at the Lister Institute Greenwood had been one of the junior members and had tried to force his way with cynicism or barbed wit. Now he was the Chief to whom all eyes were turned for a lead.
But he had mellowed a great deal and the lead he gave was a gentle one. He encouraged general talk, especially among the juniors, and when called on for a lead, usually gave it away from subjects connected with work. He was now, sharply against anyone who attempted to play the cynic as he had once played it. His tea parties became a part of the social life of the National Institute, and friends from other departments used to join in for a chat. One never quite knew who was going to be there, and there was always a chance of meeting some more or less distinguished foreign visitor. Among the regulars were For thine is the Square Root, the Cos and the Theta, Work without end, Amen.
(The Brunsviga was a well known calculating machine). His position was one of considerable strength. He had his fingers in a great many statistical pies; he had access to official records, power to influence official action, and friends in high places. And above all, having three Masters he effectively had none, and was far from being restricted to the limitations of a purely academic post. He became, in fact, a kind of Dictator in the field of Medical Statistics.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical
His new appointment was to begin on October 1 st 1927, but it was not until July 1929 that he was able to move into his rooms in the new school in Gower Street.

The Royal Society
In 1926  When at the presentation ceremony Greenwood went up to the platform to collect the medal he was puzzled to receive two, a second one in silver. Returning to his place in the body of the hall, Sir Charles Sherrington who was sitting beside him, whispered in explanation, "one for yourself and one for uncle", thus indicating that the recipients were expected to sell the golden version to a pawn broker.

The Academic Plateau
In Greenwood had now reached a kind of plateau in his progress. Hitherto he had been climbing in one way or another, by intent or accident. Now he was forty nine and had reached a point where he could remain comfortably for the rest of his working life, or progress further by attaching himself to a party, or a cause, or a person. He had ample opportunity for doing the latter, and in later years we find him writing speeches and preparing information on a personal basis for dignitaries as highly placed as Cabinet Ministers, but he seems to have preferred to stay where he was and remain as he hoped an influential "back room boy". Considering the smallness of his income when he moved into Hillcrest it says much for the low cost of living that he was able to maintain a housemaid, a cook and a part time gardener.
In the dining room was an unidentified oil portrait of a lady in a beehive hat holding a bunch of roses and dating possibly, from the early 19 th century. It was thought to be one of his grandmother's relatives. He scorned to have it properly cleaned on the jesting grounds that it might then prove to be worthless. Close by was a hideously unflattering photograph of his mother, and over the side-board prints of Virchow and Helmholtz whose works he had once studied. The drawing room walls were embellished with oil paintings in heavy gilt frames done by Leonard Hill and a large framed engraving telling the story of a bell, a German legend, which came from Rosa's family. Up the staircase hung a series of twelve engravings depicting the months of the year. In the bedrooms were more framed cathedrals, an engraving of Dr Samuel Parr, a gift from Yule, and coloured lithographs of Wellington's first encounter with the French (at a Military School in Brussels) and Nelson's departure from his mother, gifts at some time to his sons. There was a fine water colour copy of an old engraving of Shoreditch Church, possibly done by Greenwood's mother, and a few small water colours by Sydney Burchell, a relative of his grandmother.
His furniture was an inherited mixture, Victorian upholstery in the drawing room from his father, a Bechstein grand piano from his mother, his father's surgery desk, and odds and ends picked up at sales, notably that of the Hills when they left Loughton. There was a magnificent wardrobe in his bedroom, thought to have originated from his German parents in law, and a fine side-board and set of six chairs in Heppelwhite style, made by a local joiner, Chiswell, to an original Heppelwhite card table design, the gift of his father.
The idea for this seems to have originated from WW Jacobs, the comic novelist who was an acquaintance and local resident at Loughton. He gave Greenwood an early 19 th century tea caddy which was used as a cigarette box. The Heppelwhite chairs were somewhat shamed by a cheap dining table which was constantly covered by a thick, plushy tablecloth.
Greenwood and Rosa were never collectors of fine things, at first without the necessary means, and later, when they had them, old habits had died hard and they were not really interested. One of Greenwood's few concessions to personal luxury was the installation of an electric fire on the ceiling over the bath. As they grew older the furniture of their younger days began to wear out but they had no inclination to replace it. Their blackout curtains from the First World War survived to do similar service in the Second.

The Study
The most important room in the house as far as Greenwood was concerned was the Study. It was a small room, lined with overlarge bookcases. The wall space above them was decorated with framed pictures of English cathedrals, a photograph of Arthur Bacot and another of his army colleagues in 1917. The desk under the window was a cheap knee-hole affair that had once been the property of a mid Victorian doctor in Bethnal Green and had been part of his Father's surgery furniture. The desk light was thoroughly inefficient and the telephone was an old fashioned bracket affair, fixed at such a height as to be uncomfortable and inconvenient. Indifferent to inefficiencies of this kind Greenwood never bothered to have them put right.
He spent a great deal of his time in the Study, poring over his papers, twirling the handle of his Brunsviga calculating machine, and typing endless letters and draft reports.
In the household the Study acquired the aura of a Headmaster's study in a school. It was a place for serious conversations. Greenwood in the dog's armchair was Greenwood in slippers, but Greenwood in the Study was the Headmaster at his most awesome. When he sent for his children there they went with flutterings of anxiety. When he held consultations with his wife there, great events were thought to be afoot. When the maid brought him tea there, her knock was especially subdued.

His Books
His collection of books was large and gradually expanded into the bedrooms and the attics. Yet it was an extraordinary raggle-taggle affair, reflecting his wide range of reading. He was no collector in the general sense of the word. His library was of the magpie variety, odds and ends picked up in a variety of casual and accidental ways. Able to get whatever he wanted from the many libraries to which he had access, he never bought expensive works, but preferred to pick up stray titles that caught his eye on bookstalls and in second hand lists. Mathematical and statistical works predominated, but Towards the end of his life, after Rosa's death, when he became lonely and his interests began to flag, he turned towards his books and started to catalogue them as though listing old friends that were still with him. After 31 closely written pages he gave up. The end of his collection came as an anti-climax. Heaven knows how many books there were, several thousand at least, but of the three book dealers invited to tender for them, two, without seeing them, offered £20 for the right to pick what they wanted. The third, rather shrewder, sent a cheque for £250 and on the following day collected the lot. When asked many years later what he had done with them, he said he had made his profit on the sale of the runs of Biometrics and the Journals of Royal and the Statistical Societies. The rest, about 90% he still had in their original bundles gathering dust in his store-room.

Intruder
One night in the early 1920s, when everyone was a-bed, somebody blundered into the garden at Hillcrest like an incompetent thief, perhaps after Rosa's chickens. Shrill cries from the bedroom window drove the intruder away and next morning Greenwood bought a burglar alarm from the Civil Service Stores in the Strand. It consisted of a metal stake fitted with a runner which contained a large blank cartridge. The stake was driven into the ground, the runner raised to the top position and held there by a trigger. Attached to the trigger was a long, thin piece of cord which was stretched across the area requiring protection. On the trigger being pulled by the cord, the cartridge container dropped onto a pin and exploded with a terrific detonation.
The first time the thing was set up, in front of the house across the full width of the garden, the only intruder it caught -with devastating effect -was the postman. Learning from experience, the gadget was set up behind the house where its only effect was to terrify Rosa when she went to feed the chickens and forgot about the trip cord. The alarm was soon abandoned.
The chicken run at Hillcrest was an important feature. The chickens had been installed during the First World War and their descendants survived into the second when some of them had a harrowing experience. The broody hens had been banished to a somewhat dilapidated wooden shed where, during an air raid, an incendiary bomb fell through the roof and singed their tails. According to Greenwood they were so shocked by the experience that they began laying the very next day.

The Daily Round
On weekdays Greenwood was seldom at his best at breakfast, and the children at any rate felt the tension relax when he went out into the hall, laced up his boots sitting at the bottom step of the stairs, and set off for Town. In the old days he used to cycle to Loughton station and go up to Liverpool Street by train. It was one of the last suburban lines to defy modernisation. In the middle 1920s he grew tired of it and bought a car, a Morris Oxford, which he called Dinah (Yule bought a car about the same time and called it Susie. The two cars used occasionally to pass messages to each other through their owner's correspondence). Thereafter he went up to town by road, using a complicated route to avoid all the main thoroughfares. At Woodford he used to pick up Major Edge, and when Edge bought a car of his own, they used each other's cars in turn. The car established a weekly ritual. Every Saturday morning Greenwood and Edge used to clean it, with the dog barking around them. Greenwood wasn't a bad driver, and was never involved in any serious accident, but he was repeatedly scratching the wings on gate posts which vexed him exceedingly. When anybody else knocked into him his fury knew no bounds. On one occasion when his elder son was driving the car, they were stopped by the police for speeding. When the case came up before the magistrate Greenwood, as a witness, scandalised the court by refusing to say how old he was on the grounds that the question was irrelevant and impertinent.
Although the car was a far more convenient way of travelling up to town it provided endless scope for squabbles and personal sulkiness. Apart from scratches and bumps and mechanical failures and indignantly disputed repair charges, there was the reluctance of his sons to help with the cleaning, or the lateness of Edge, or the badness of the roads, or the lunatic driving of others. Neither Greenwood nor Edge were at their best in the early morning and a cross word from one would elicit a cross word from the other. There were periods when, as a result of some imagined slight, they travelled alone in their own cars.
But the squabbles always blew over and the car went up and down year after year covering thousands of miles of the meaner back streets of the north London suburbs.
At the School Greenwood's life was on a lordly plane. He looked in on his colleagues, ran through his mail, and fulfilled the day's engagements like an elder statesman. He lectured, he gave advice, he sat on numerous Committees, he presided over the daily tea parties, and enjoyed himself immensely at intimate little gatherings of the Learned Societies of which he was a member. By now he numbered among his friends many men of distinction and it was pleasant to have snug little lunches with the great ones at the Atheneum, Claridges or in gracious mansions in Wimpole Street.
He came home at about six o'clock, was greeted wildly by the dog, and ceremonially unlaced his boots on the bottom step of the stairs. He had a glass of sherry and a roast supper and then, after general chatter of the day, retired to his study "to work". The nature of "the work" varied, but the name was generic and covered any intellectual process.

Dogs and the Sunday Ritual
If in matters of human love Greenwood was horribly shy, he loved dogs unashamedly.
With them his emotions were quite unguarded. He kissed and caressed them as he would never have dared do with his children. He elevated doggy companionship to absurd height, and drew from them untenable human parallels. Many years later in a BBC broadcast he defended Euthanasia. He referred with a breaking voice to the pitiful scene of an old dog dying slowly of a painful disease. If it were right, he argued, to put the dog out of its misery, and he maintained that it was right, then surely the same mercy ought to be extended to human beings.
He only kept one dog at a time, usually a fox-terrier. The first was Ami, the companion of forest walks with Arthur Bacot's Jake. Ami grew old and ill and too testy to be teased by the children. One night in 1921 Greenwood and Culpin "put him to sleep" with chloroform. The business went off badly and Greenwood was shaken for days. Then he did something that was completely out of character. Never a Do-it-yourself man, and ham-fisted at handy-crafts, he got a piece of wood, part of an old dart board, converted it into a marker for the dog's grave, and laboriously carved the name Ami into it. Yule's obituary comments on the occasion are worth quoting; "I hope he is in some pleasant paradise where rheumatics and diarrhoea have fled away and kindly angels will let him sleep on their laps until in a new found youth he will take to chasing the deer in the celestial groves, and the deer will chase him, and angels and dogs and deer will all thoroughly enjoy the game, and a panting little dog will lap up a bowl of ambrosia to refresh him after the run." The next dog was Bayes called after the Reverend mathematician of that name, whose works Greenwood was then studying. Bayes was so timid that on one occasion he ran yelping away from the sound of his own wind. He was found dead in the road, killed by a motor, and was buried by the side of the brook that runs through Loughton.
Then came Derby who arrived on Derby Day in 1929, a short-tempered brute that flew into rages whenever the doorbell or telephone rang. In January 1935  The forest in those days was almost deserted and the walkers knew practically everyone they met, if not by name, then at least by their dogs.
These forest walks were among the happiest moments of Greenwood's life. His friends might drop away but always his dog remained, that grew restive after breakfast on Sunday mornings, and barked loudly when the boots were produced, and who never grew tired of the old familiar round. His dog was always eager, always anxious and frisking, never tired. When at last Greenwood found himself walking alone the beauty of the woods brought tears to his eyes and he believed the end was near.
When he died there was found in his pocket book a faded typescript copy of Rudyard Kipling's poem, The Power of a Dog: There is sorrow enough in the natural way From men and women to fill our day; But when we are certain of sorrow in store, Why do we always arrange for more? Brothers and sisters I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
Buy a pup and your money will buy Love unflinching that cannot lie-Perfect passion and worship fed By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head. Nevertheless it is hardly fair To risk your heart for a dog to tear.
When the fourteen years that nature permits Are closing in asthma or tumors or fits And the vet's unspoken prescription runs To lethal chambers, or loaded guns.
Then you will find--its your own affair But--you've given your heart to a dog to tear.
When the body that lived at your single will When the whimper of welcome is stilled (how still!) When the spirit that answered your every mood Is gone--wherever it goes--for good, You still discover how much you care And will give your heart to a dog to tear.
We've sorrow enough in the natural way When it comes to burying Christian clay. Our loves are not given, but only lent, At compound interest of cent per cent. Though it is not always the case, I believe, That the longer we've kept 'em the more do we grieve; For when debts are payable, right or wrong, A short time loan is as bad as a long--So why in Heaven (before we are there) Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?
After the Sunday morning walk came a roast lunch preceded by sherry. If the Greenwoods were thrifty over their furnishings, they ate very well. It was a partiality, Greenwood said, inherited from his father. Greenwood senior, a great one for long cycle tours, used to stay at remote inns and insist, no matter how late the hour, on a roast chicken supper.
Apart from a partiality for German sausage, which he used to bring back from Schmidt's, his tastes in food were not exacting, though as he grew older he rather fancied himself as a judge of wine. Reading his diaries of the middle thirties, it is extraordinary to notice how much old port seems to have survived. He had a hoard of 1908 port which he drank on special occasions and which lasted down to the 1940s. He kept a stock of wines, but was a very restrained drinker, and seldom touched spirits.
Rosa had two cats, a tabby and white one who developed a taste for sharing Sunday lunch if they had the opportunity. They used to settle themselves on each arm of her chair and wait patiently for anything that was offered.
After the Sunday lunch, when the children were younger, he read to them for about an hour -he was a first class reader and never seemed to tire and then withdrew to the Drawing Room for a nap on the sofa. Sleep was induced by means of a dull book.
Usually he retired to bed at about 11.30, read for a little by the light of a candle and nibbled plain chocolate which he kept in a drawer beside the bed. From time to time bits of broken chocolate would find their way into the bed and Rosa was most concerned that the housemaid should not misunderstand the brown stains they produced. On one occasion in the midst of a nightmare he seized the chocolate and scribbled with it on the wall. On another he cried out loudly, "God has a built a temple up to heaven …" His dog slept at the end of the bed or on a triangular sofa at one corner of the room.

Christmas
Ever since the children had been old enough to appreciate it, the Greenwood's Christmas had tended to follow the German pattern. Christmas Eve was the moment of high magic when the presents were given out. Stockings were only nominally used. The German method guaranteed more sleep for everyone concerned.
Christmas officially began with tea on Christmas Eve when the Cake first made its appearance. This was usually preceded by a walk in the forest if the weather were suitable to keep the children out of the house while things were being got ready. During these walks Greenwood would hint darkly that if there were any fairies about, it was only on Christmas Eve that they could be seen by mortals, and the children, openly expressing doubt, nevertheless kept a sharp lookout for them. The forest at that time of the year, and time of day, was usually grey and gloomy and well suited for the appearance of the supernatural, but the trouble, as everyone suspected, was the dog. At the sound of his barking and scampering feet, the fairies all fled away ….
By the time they got back, Uncle Ernest had arrived from Brighton in his car. Uncle Ernest was Greenwood's uncle on his mother's side, a large Victorian looking General Practitioner, who combined an old fashioned manner with a surprising fondness for newfangled gadgets, and who could always be relied on for the most exciting Christmas presents.
Nobody was really hungry for tea and the Cake was scarcely nibbled. Then came a hush of expectation while Rosa went into the Drawing Room where the gifts were laid out on the sofa, and lit the candles on the tree. At the signal of a brass hand-bell, everybody went into the Drawing Room, presents were claimed, chocolates and fondants from the Civil Service Stores were opened and handed round, and the dog was bundled out of the room while the crackers were being pulled. The grown-ups sat in the big Victorian armchairs and dipped into the Christmas books.
About half past seven Pendred, the family doctor arrived, and soon everyone went in to supper of York Ham from the bone, Trifle and Stilton Cheese. Afterwards Rosa withdrew to make coffee in a deliberately leisurely way, while the men stayed behind with the Port.
At this point the conversation between the three doctors usually became fascinatingly gruesome and the children lingered on to listen. Pendred would recount a curious case of gangrene he had just seen; Uncle Ernest would cap it with an extraordinary ulcer he was treating, while Greenwood, who had long since ceased having anything to do with practical medicine, would recall some parallel incident from his almost historic days at the London Hospital. So it went on until some point of discussion arose, like the way increasing age seemed in some people at least, to diminish the fear of death, and the children crept away to bed ….

Music
When Greenwood inherited his mother's Bechstein grand piano he tried for a time to pick out tunes from an old song book, and even sang Down Among the Dead Men to his own one finger accompaniment. Pearson was astonished when he heard about this and commented, "All bad musicians ought to be crucified because of the torture they inflict.
His musical interlude was mixed up with the mathematics of harmony, a Prout's Harmony coming into his possession about this time.
He loved Gilbert & Sullivan Operas which he knew well, and from which he could recite long passages. He had a partiality, if he had to listen to singing, for the kind of deep base Russian songs favoured by Chaliapin. But he had no real feeling for music, possibly on account of his emotional shyness. He was never one to rave openly about anything except dogs, and to listen to music with a tight rein on the emotions must have been like wearing ear plugs.
His favourite musical anecdote related to Samuel Johnson, rolling about in boredom during a harpsichord recital. His hostess said to him in mitigation, "It is a very difficult piece," to which he replied, "I would to God, madam, it were impossible."

Appearance
Too many photographs survive to make any description of Greenwood's appearance worthwhile, except that he was a little over 5 foot 4 inches, slim, small boned and with delicate hands. At times he was sensitive about his height and was hurt to discover that Culpin's small daughter called him "The Little Professor", her father being large and bulky. Curiously many of his most intimate friends were tall. In the early days little Greenwood used to follow big Leonard Hill into the dining room of the London Hospital.
At the end it was tall Major Edge who followed him into the dining room of the School of Hygiene.
He had little real interest in clothes though the gay antiquity of his Doctor's robes amused him. He was a traditionalist. Having found something that suited him he went on wearing it regardless of any change in fashion. In 1897 he started wearing brown "Trilby" hats and continued the style and colour for the rest of his life whenever he felt that a hat was necessary, Usually he went bareheaded but shared Arthur Bacot's view that bank managers and the like regarded hatless men with suspicion. Latterly he took to wearing a beret.
For forest walks he wore knee breeches and stockings, and sometimes even leggings.
In the late 1920s he turned up at his sons' Public School at Chigwell wheeling a bicycle and wearing a Norfolk jacket, knee breeches and a little old fashioned cycling cap. He caused a minor sensation and was unfavourably compared with "Old Daddy Dawkins" the village eccentric.

Conversations
As a young man he had attended classes in elocution and never forgot them. He knew all the techniques and practised them. Once, while staying at a Guest House on holiday, he gave a recitation during a Saturday evening concert. While delivering a melodramatic monologue late comers paused outside the concert room.
"What's happening?" somebody asked, listening at the door.
One of the party peeped inside, "Some chap trying to burst a blood vessel," he reported on Greenwood's energetic performance.
Although he prepared his lectures extremely carefully, he spoke better extempore. With prepared notes his style was perhaps too precise and his delivery lacked the warmth and colloquialisms so necessary to put an audience at its ease.
As a conversationalist he was first rate and a good mimic when telling stories, but he had to be in the right mood and with the right company. His phenomenal memory and wide reading gave him ample to contribute on almost any subject that was slightly out of the ordinary. Indeed, he rather specialised in what somebody called "left-handed" information. In criticism, even of his friends, he could be icily out-spoken, and sometimes coined phrases that were too clever to be forgotten easily. As a young man he was cynical and censorious, and his wit had a cutting edge that hurt, but as success came to him he mellowed and became genial. To many he appeared unapproachable, cold and too critical, but when approached he was kindness itself. Without ever having justified it, his family, particularly his children, when young, were a little afraid of him. The basis of this awe was possibly his apparent inability to come to terms with "silliness", a word of criticism that he used frequently.

Reading and Working
He read rapidly and with a great deal of skipping, and over These were in addition to the scientific papers with which he dealt as his stock-in-trade. Then he drank a glass of port. After a suitable time, he typed the next verse. Then he took another glass of port, and typed the third verse …. And so on. At the end, he counted the number of mistakes in each verse and related them to the number of glasses of port consumed. Not perhaps wholly scientific, but at least a practical form of experimentation.
Critics have commented that Greenwood's literary style was extremely good and deserved a wider readership than it obtained in his lifetime. It did, but its literary placing was too narrow. His worked appeared almost exclusively in scientific publications, whereas much of it would have been appreciated by a non-scientific public in journals of wider appeal.

Experts and Amateurs
He had a hearty and long continued dislike of "experts" and "Leading authorities", especially when they made pompous ex cathedra pronouncements. He may have caught the germ from his father who was constantly deploring that legal coroners should be permitted to make medical decisions. Certainly he hated his father's "expert" advice that he should become a doctor, and when he did become a doctor, he soon joined Pearson in attacking the medical "experts". In the very last year of his life he commented in a letter to his younger son, "I should like to head a crusade for the extermination of "experts" and "leading authorities". I have never yet met a really first rate researcher who liked to be called an "authority".
Emotionally his attitude was probably grounded in a mixture of juvenile rebellion and the feelings of inferiority he felt when he first mingled with the scientific researchers at the He had a profound belief in dedicated curiosity and recalled with regret how scientific methods were ousting curiosity from the affairs of the Statistical Society. Once, in the old days, a preponderance of the Fellows had been non-mathematical gentlemen in all walks of life who shared a common curiosity. They counted things, made unscientific observations and frequently drew wrong conclusions from them. In doing all this they opened up a wide range of interesting enquiry. Later the Fellowship had largely changed.
The laymen were vanishing before a tide of professional "experts", who counted nothing, and relying upon officially published statistical evidence, wrangled for hours over mathematical procedures. In their latter years Greenwood and Yule used to shake their heads over the science they had been instrumental in developing, and admitted that the new mathematical processes were quite beyond them.
There is some evidence that when Greenwood collected together staff for his various departments he deliberately avoided "experts", and preferred willing amateurs. Certainly few of his intimate collaborators and assistants had any formal mathematical training.

Visit to the United States
In the autumn of 1931 he accepted an invitation from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to deliver the 20 th Herter Lectures in the first week of December at the School of Hygiene there, the elder sister of the London School of Hygiene. The invitation came at an opportune time. He was mentally exhausted and suffering from bouts of depression.
He needed a rest, and decided to take the slowest possible boat and enjoy the sea voyage.
Not over enthusiastic about the United States before he set out, his views were rapidly changed when he got there. The view of New York, coming up over the horizon he thought the grandest sight he had ever seen. He was greeted on the quay as a near celebrity and experienced the enormous hospitality of the Americans.
He stayed in Baltimore with a friend of long standing, but only seen at rare intervals. This Greenwood returned to England in the middle of December having thoroughly enjoyed his adventure and with a much higher regard for Americans than when he set out. He received his fee for the lectures at a time when the American dollar was at a premium and benefitted considerably from the rate of exchange. He sent his wife and elder son on a lush cruise in the Mediterranean and then with a characteristic streak of conscious stricken generosity decided to use the balance of the money to subsidise the holidays of his staff who did not have the advantage of being paid to give lectures abroad during their normal working hours.

Academic Assistance Council
In  Hungary. It is a tragic reflection on "progress" that the twentieth century persecutions of learning in Europe were as cruel and bigoted as those of the middle ages. The Society still continues its work.

Karl Pearson and the Guy Medal in Gold
In 1933 His refusal, he said, was certainly not through any want of gratitude and he thanked the Society for the honour it wished to pay him. But when he had started his career in statistics about 1889 the Society had occupied a field that was most distasteful to him and he had accordingly stood aside. Since then the attitude of the Society had changed, but this change was due not to him, who had played no part in its affairs, but to its younger members. To them the honour should be paid. Medals, he said, were a great encouragement to young men. When old, one wanted no encouragement and went on because it had become a habit.
Greenwood replied on December 11 th : "My dear Professor, I shall, of course, try to express your wishes. If it would be in any way objectionable to you as a matter of principle, that is an end of the business. I think, indeed I know, that to give you even a small pleasure is the primary motive. A secondary motive is no doubt that which -if my memory is not at fault -led the French Academy to put up a bust of Moliere in their meeting room with the inscription "Rien ne manqué a sa gloire, il manqué a la notre". In a way the RSS does represent "statistics" officially and it is a blot on its record that the greatest living statistician is not a member (a defect which we are unable to remedy by electing him an honorary fellow, because under the bye laws no person resident in Great Britain can be elected an honorary fellow). So, no doubt, that motive has some influence, but only a secondary influence.
What you say about "honours" is my faith, but I suppose there is something to be said on the other side. In a "deferential" country -as Walter Bagehot once called us -honours do practically always come to people who are not in the least likely, when they come, to be thereby stimulated to further efforts. But I suppose the imagination of some young people is stimulated by the dream of one day becoming Lord Chancellor or even President of the Royal Society. I don't think a renunciation of "honours" by the rarest spirits of the age will really lead to the conferring of them upon young, worthy men. It will only mean that instead of wise, elderly men receiving some proportion, dull and vain elderly men will take the lot and generations will pass before the whole world sees what nonsense it is.
Ever yours,

Major Greenwood"
There is some evidence in the Yule correspondence that Greenwood had put out feelers to get a Government Honour awarded to Pearson on his retirement from the Chair of Eugenics at University College in 1933 and that when this failed, or more probably was scotched by KP himself, the possibility of the Guy Medal came to mind. KP remained the Great Commoner to the end.

Diarist
In 1934 Greenwood started to keep a diary which he continued on and off until his death.
It was mainly a brief affair, listing his main appointments for the day, the things he did, people he saw and books he was reading. There were relatively few comments on people or things. Much of it was written last thing at night, almost as a chore, when he was tired and in no condition to make profound or amusing comments on anything. Humour never breaks in; unkind comment about others, rarely; self congratulation sometimes ("lectured, rather well"); self-pity, frequently towards the end ("depressed, gloomy", etc) …. Yet for all their scantiness these diaries are at times amusingly self-revealing. Food he seldom detailed, except during the war years when academic affairs were sometimes, to his dismay, discussed over sandwiches. He never recorded conversations, which shows he was no diarist at heart.

Nutrition Controversy
Early Medical Association which argued that 3400 calories were the minimum requirement.
Mention of "experts" made Greenwood see red. In a letter to the Times on the 8 th he defended the MRC and attacked the BMA committee in terms that were perhaps rather more bitter than the occasion warranted. On the 9 th the BMA "experts" replied. Although the affair gained him an influential friend it was on the whole, unsatisfactory publicity. His Committee's calorie requirement figure was based on a scientific minimum. The BMA "experts" were more generous. They believed that men and women required more than the bare minimum. The matter was given press publicity and in some quarters Greenwood was unfavourably criticised and accused of wanting to keep the unemployed at starvation level.
Repercussions followed: Feb 13 th "Rude letter from (Sir George) Newman." Greenwood's superior at the Ministry of Health. "I telephoned an equally rude answer." Feb 14 th ; "Hysterical apology from GN".

Centenary of the Royal Statistical Society
Inspite of its somewhat nebulous status among the learned societies, the Royal Statistical Society was an extremely august body. Founded in March 1834, its patrons had usually been the reigning monarch and its honorary presidents the heir to the throne.
In 1933 plans had been outlined for the celebration of the Society's Centenary, and among them Greenwood had been nominated to become President. Although officially he did not take office until later in the year, he was heavily involved in the centenary arrangements which were due to begin on April 16 th . Baronets, nine Knights, and thirteen commoners, one of whom had been Mr Gladstone.
The character of the presidents had changed with the character of the Society. Originally the Presidents had tended to be statesmen and the interests of the Society numerical observations on the affairs of the State likely to be of value to guiding policy. By the 1870s the papers submitted were becoming more technical and the Presidential choice increasingly fell on people who had distinguished themselves in statistical work. By the turn of the century a custom had grown up of alternating an "internal" with an "external" President. The "internal" President would be a statistician, the "external" one some distinguished non-statistician who could keep the Society in touch with the world outside.
Greenwood's predecessor had been a highly placed Indian Civil Servant; his successor was an ex-minister of the Crown. As the "external" Presidents seldom knew much about the internal workings of the Society, they necessarily had to depend upon their "internal" predecessors.

Mice
Much of Greenwood's "home-work" during this period dealt with epidemiology among

Epidemics and Crowd Diseases
In March 1935 his first full size book was published. He sub-titled it, An Introduction to the Story of Epidemiology and dedicated it to "The Tea Club" at the School, where some of its themes had been discussed.
The first 127 pages discussed general principles and methods; the remaining 252 dealt with special illustrations with regard to particular diseases. The book was favourably reviewed and within the limits of the subject interest and its relatively high price, it was well received. In a sense it was two books and reflected Greenwood's dual personality, his mixture of literary and scientific interests. It combined historical and philosophical observations with text book illustrations. He might actually have made money out of the effort if he had written the two parts separately, but the two parts together were never destined to be a money-spinner. Science and literature combine only in the rarer sprits.
The average student of epidemiology was as likely to lose patience over a page that quoted Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Galen and Sir Thomas Browne, as a literary reader over a page packed with decimalised statistics and casual references to algebraic methods. The text-book part has since been re-written by men who were not literary minded, some of whom were perhaps the author's pupils, and in the curious way Time has with books, Epidemics and Crowd Diseases has now become quite rare and may in future be prized not for the scientific ideas it propounded, but for its literary and philosophical comments which were perhaps closer to the author's heart than the scientific parts.

Fathers Lopez and Albert
His interest in psychology having been aroused by Millais Culpin and May Smith, Greenwood began dipping into the works of Galen, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
He had long been convinced that the ideas of the ancients deserved sympathic reexamination, and deplored the popular assumption that because the deductions of the ancient writers were now proved to be wrong, all their work was therefore equally valueless. Because the writings of Galen as a physician were useless as a guide to treating a sore throat, this did not automatically mean that nothing Galen wrote had any bearing on modern medical practice. On psychology he thought the ancient writers might well be illuminating. With Galen he felt reasonably at home, but the theological turn of the

Bisset Hawkins Medal
In 1938 the Royal College of Physicians awarded him the Bisset Hawkins Medal, a splendid gold piece weighing nearly half a pound. According to the Trust this was to be bestowed on "some duly qualified medical practitioner, who is a British subject, and who has, during the preceding ten years done such work in advancing Sanitary Science, or in promoting Public Health, as, in the opinion of the College, deserves special recognition.
The award was founded in 1896.

In Imitation of Alexander Pope
His involvement with the Academic Assistance Council not only made him increasingly aware of the growing persecution of German academics but occasionally brought some of

Outbreak of War
As the international news grew worse his gloom deepened. August 24 th : Very gloomy, think too much of the future; 25 th : Very gloomy; bathed, went to town, perhaps for the last time; 26 th : Still depressed; D's guest has appendicitis." The last entry above had a tragic outcome that overshadowed the actual break with Germany. His son had been called up and his daughter in law had staying with her a young foreign girl. She became ill almost as soon as she arrived in England and it was discovered that she had contracted typhoid while travelling through France. The girl's mother hastened over from Hungary and barely arrived before her daughter died. This was on September 2 nd ... War was declared while Greenwood was arranging the funeral, trying to soothe the heartbroken mother and organise some way of getting her back to her own country. According to those who were involved he excelled himself, and by pulling every wire he knew, just managed to get the mother onto the last plane bound for a neutral European country.
It was a shattering experience and yet it temporarily lifted him out of his gloom -to be of assistance to someone who had far greater reason for unhappiness.
What immediately followed the outbreak of war came as an anti-climax. There was no saturation bombing. There were scarcely even any warnings of possible air raids. Nothing violent happened at all. Instead there was a stream of official regulations. As far as Greenwood was concerned the daily round continued as before. He was called on to advise on statistics for the Civil Defence Technical Committee, and feeling a need for more personal involvement, he called on his Local Medical Officer of Health and offered his services if ever they should be required. The year ended with a "rabble" of Ministry of Information staff taking over a portion of the School.
Rosa were driven to sleeping in makeshift shelters downstairs. By early October the raids, sleeplessness and the general disruption of the daily round had brought his depression on again. 7 th October: "I really no longer take any personal interest in the future. I see no reason why we should win or lose the war. I should suppose that a gradual destruction of civilisation in Europe and England is now entirely certain." This observation shows how divorced he was from the common belief of his countryman. A small number of academics may have thought as he did, but the rank and file of his countrymen, rightly or wrongly, had no such forebodings. 10 th Nov.: "I do honestly wish I was dead, but shrink like most people from being blown to pieces and think it disloyal to Rosa to kill myself." How wrong can the experts' be! The people of beleaguered Britain were healthy as never before. On the 16 th November some bombs actually fell on Loughton, demolished Lord Stanmore's house and killed five people. Greenwood put out feelers for a temporary lodgement in Cambridge but withdrew them when he realised how much Rosa disliked the idea. She hated bombs but she hated the idea of leaving home much more.
The bombing eased and Greenwood was distracted from his private miseries by being called on to assist the Local Medical Officer of Health. He began inspecting local Air Raid Shelters from the point of view of hygiene, visited local hospitals, held clinics, did inoculations and resumed signing death certificates after a lapse since 1904! When the war was a year old he became resigned to the state of things and to distract himself from private worries worked hard at algebra, which he found difficult, and played chess with Vincent Nello, a Loughton neighbour. When the Russians joined the war against Germany he was not very optimistic of their success but contributed in print to the Labour Monthly News his praise of their scientific genius and his condemnation of German sterility in his own field of studies. "One of the dogmas devoutly believed by all Englishmen with no knowledge of Science (ie. practically all Englishmen who hold key positions in public life) that German science is far superior to any other science has never seriously been shaken, "he began. At the most one of our "leaders" might go so far as to admit, that since the coming of the Nazis, German science has deteriorated, but, were he Thirty years ago! Before the 1914 war, when he and Yule had cycled around East Anglia, and from the crowded uncertainties of the Lister Institute he had envied Yule's appointment and longed for a set of rooms himself in some ancient college court ….
The lecture was over; afterwards there was a Feast at St. John's and he sat between the Master and Yule and they drank Richburg 1923, a port of 1891, and ate soup, steak, asparagus and gooseberry pie, delectable fare in the fourth year of the war.
In September the acting Dean of the School, Colonel GS Parkinson, was released for war work, and reluctantly Greenwood allowed himself to be appointed in his place.

Diary Extracts 1944
In February the bombing of London started again. On the night of the 23 rd the guns were noisier than usual and after a time Greenwood came downstairs. As he did so he heard a number of soft hisses. "Opened the front door," he wrote to his son, "upon a scene like a gigantic theatre staging the end of a Wagner Opera. The sky was alive with shell bursts and searchlights, and the general blazing with the incandescent glare of incendiary bombs. One of them was by the garage. I shouted to mama to come down, expecting the garage to go up in flames, and then smelt burning in the house. It seemed like a finale ….
But there were plenty of soldiers who were billeted in the house next door and half a dozen of them rushed over with a stirrup pump. A bomb had come through the roof and was burning on the maid's bed. They soon extinguished it and dragged the smouldering mattress into the garden, where something like ten incendiaries had fallen. A house opposite had 29.
One bomb went through the roof of our oldest chicken house and was arrested by the concrete floor. It burned away within inches of the rotten woodwork and singed the tails of one or two roosting hens. Next day there were six eggs laid, double the average.
British hens, you see, can take it." In summer 1944 Bernard Shaw published his Everybody's Political What's What. It contained a good deal of scathing comment on Greenwood's subjects under such titles as The Collective Statistician, and Our attempts at Anthropometry. Greenwood was not mentioned, but his hero was and much that he stood for, "Pearson, always smiling and charming, would not admit that anyone who was not a mathematician could claim any scientific authority whatsoever. I subscribed faithfully to his journal Biometrika without understanding any of its equations or more than, say, 5 per cent of its sentences. But I found that the biometricians, though their technical skill and subtlety seemed wonderful to me, were as credulous, as prejudiced, as thoughtless as to the facts they were measuring and the assumptions from which they started, as Isaac Newton himself. Even their counting was not to be depended on; for they added up facts and opinions indiscriminately, and cooked their calculations by "weighting" them with fancy figures which represented nothing but their personal guesses and tastes." There was much more in this vein and an attack on the effectiveness of vaccination. The Editor of the British Medical Journal asked Greenwood to "pick out some points for criticism …. That would help non-medical as well as medical readers to get the matter in perspective." (BMJ Oct 28 1944:ii:570).
It was a difficult assignment to cross swords with one of the greatest wits of the age, whose opinion of the medical profession was perfectly well known since The Doctor's Dilemma of 1906 which continued to earn him royalties. Everyone knew that Shaw exaggerated his views and wrote for effect, to shock or amuse his readers into taking notice and it seems a little stuffy that the BMJ should have taken the matter so seriously.
For Greenwood it was a repetition of the controversy with Sir Almroth Wright thirty years earlier. But times and circumstances had changed. The battle of the statisticians had been won and although Wright -who as a personal friend of Shaw -had at least known something of the medical background, Shaw knew nothing. Greenwood contented his editor with an examination of the vaccination issue and exchanged a few letters with Shaw via The Times. At this distance of time one is tempted to think that a better rejoinder might have been to poke fun at the great man -though perhaps the BMJ was not the best place to do it.

The Guy Medal in Gold
On April 5 th 1945 the Council of the Royal Statistical Society unanimously passed the following resolution: "That a Guy Medal in Gold be awarded to Professor Major Greenwood FRS for his outstanding work in the field of vital statistics and epidemiology: for the many original contributions he has made to the Society's proceedings and for his valuable services to statistical science over many years."

10.11."Victory in Europe Day" Thoughts
On May 8 th 1945, Greenwood typed on a single sheet of paper: "Diaries were so scarce and I was so listless that I had not kept a diary this year; but the end of the European War is an opportunity to begin again. Rosa has stood the anxiety and cold well. I think we shall continue to live on the ground floor for some time (both were now finding the climbing of stairs exhausting), perhaps always, but she enjoys life.
There is an uproarious rejoicing in the village; it is like a Sunday morning, except for flags -my father's White Ensign floats from our attic, many holes in it, not due to my action, but moth -and a queue at the fishmongers.
I feel rather old, but fit to do a little intellectual work still. I have been given the title of Professor Emeritus and the dear old Statistical Society have given me their gold medal.
They are kind people. I have contributed nothing to statistical methodology which will be remembered, except what Yule and I did on Accident Proneness and, just possibly, my paper on the measurement of infectiousness (On the Statistical Measure of Infectiousness; Journal of Hygiene 1931; XXXI:336). I had enough scientific imagination but not enough mathematical technique and innate ability ever to produce a first rate piece of statistical algebra; still, I have helped younger and better educated people by interesting them in problems and so am not wholly unworthy of the honours I have received and think I have had more than my share. I suppose that if I were offered a knighthood -I see no reason why I should be -it would please me to make Rosa "my lady" and I should accept but there is certainly no "decoration" I covet at all. I should like to go on earning a little money by lecturing and presiding over the MRC Statistical Committee, for we are pretty hard-up with a gross income of about £1100 instead of £1700 -£1800. But that does not worry me a great deal (Perhaps because of his East End origins and his "built in" inferiority complex, he was a continual worrier about money. At times as he grew older he spoke as though he were on the edge of penury. In fact he rarely had less than £800 in cash in his current account, moderately substantial investments, owed nobody anything, and died worth rather more than £20,000 in days when the pound was worth a lot more than it is today).
It is going to be a hard world for old people and I clearly perceive that my knowledge and talents, such as they are, have no commercial value. I am a pretty good writer in a rather Victorian way, but a slow writer, so not an earner of money in periodical literature."

Retirement
On September 28 th 1945, with a good deal of sadness in his heart, he went up to the School for the last time as Professor on the active list. The farewells, however, were only nominal. He had every intention of continuing his associations there with the honorary title of Professor Emeritus. Then, with exaggerated anxiety about his finances, he secured a part-time consultancy job dealing with medical statistics for the Essex County Council at Chelmsford. After a few weeks the reality of retirement became quite enjoyable. It was rather pleasant going up to the School in a leisurely way, two or three days a week, chatting with his friends and consulting the store of reference books there. He was able to linger rather longer in his old haunts, at the libraries of the Royal Society and the College of Physicians, and the London Library, and he still gave little supper parties after meetings at Schmidt's in Charlotte Street. At more solemn dining places there was no more 1908 port, but there were plenty of worthwhile substitutes.
He was still in demand as a lecturer, and was particularly pleased in November when he was called on to give a lecture on Social Medicine to the Cambridge University Medical Society. Times however, were changing, and Yule his former host there, was old and ailing and capable only of entertaining him to tea. Mid-week he used to motor across country to Chelmsford to give advice on the county medical statistics, and took the occasion to dine at quaint old inns he had known in his earlier cycling days with Bacot. Then suddenly he received a blow from which he never completely recovered. On December 13 th Rosa died in her sleep beside him. Her death completely unnerved him.
For a time the dual parts of his nature were separated. Emotionally he wept for her as a wife and a mother and his grief was unbearable, and the only recourse open to those about him was to steer him into the old escape route of intellectual activity …. There were no diary entries, no written accounts of his feelings, no letters. For a time there was silence until something that seemed like normality returned.

Diary Extracts 1946
His last years were summed up in the poignant entry in his diary for June 13 th 1946.
Sitting alone in his study, listening to the silent house, he wrote: "Six months since she died. Oh, my dear, my dear. Why keep a diary?" Rosa had never shared his intellectual interests. She had never been able to hold her own with him in discussions, but she had always been there as a companion, a kind of anchor to reality, and a constant reminder of their youth. "Rosa is not clever", he once said. "I am clever, but she is wise and I am not." It was often her wisdom that had turned aside the dangerous cutting edge of his cleverness.
It had been fun acquiring a position and accumulating academic distinctions and pitting his wits against the "experts" of the establishment, but now that Rosa had gone, nothing seemed to matter any longer. There was nobody left to care.
This, however, was an illusion. He had sons and grandchildren, and an enormous range of friends, all of whom would have gone far out of their way to have done him some service.
Yet life went on; visits to the School as an elder statesman, dinners with the Society, visits to his few surviving relatives and his old time neighbours at Loughton. Vincent Nello came in increasingly to play chess. In October he delivered the Heath Clark Lectures at the School, his subject being Some British Pioneers of Social Medicine. When they were published he dedicated them to Rosa with a Latin quotation, which she would never have understood.
On 20 th December he wrote to his younger son, "I have put your flowers on your mother's resting place. I visit it every day and say a little prayer; not because I suppose any God there may be is in need of my admonitions, but because it is an emotional relief to do so …."

The Letter from Downing Street
On January 2 nd 1947 he got a letter from Sir WR Dunstan a friend of long standing, who was astonished at not seeing Greenwood's name in the New Year's Honours List.
"Unless you have refused a knighthood I am amazed at the omission of your name from the Honours list after all the valuable work you have done. If I have not overlooked your name, then I think the omission scandalous, especially when I remember the sort of honours even mediocrities in the Civil Service get." Greenwood was ill at the time, heart trouble, and spent the first few weeks of 1947 in bed. In May the "Honours" business came up again. He got a letter from the Prime Minister's office intimating that his name had been forward for a CBE in the forthcoming Birthday Honours List, and asking if such a decoration would be agreeable to him. He replied tersely: "Sir, I was born in 1880 and am long past by first childhood but not yet, as I think, entered upon second childhood. Consequently the intimation contained in your letter is not agreeable to me Faithfully yours, M Greenwood" (May 15 th 1947) In his diary for the day he simply noted, "Received and declined an offer of CBE (Cheek)." When Isserlis heard about the affair he was indignant. "In offering to "honour" you by a CBE (the Prime Minister) was insulting the whole body of scientific statisticians -and not only the RSS. Your official work for the Ministry and the MRC alone deserves generous recognition. Still, I suppose no government honour would give you as much pleasure now as the Royal (Society) gave you with its medal." The "honour" was certainly offered in a careless way, but there were extenuations. He had continually rebelled against working full time for a government department, and had consistently sneered at titles in circles, where they were held in regard and where influence in the awarding of them was not unknown.

The Communist Danger
The later part of the year 1947 was to some extent enlivened by a somewhat exotic interest inspired by Sir Ernest Graham Little. Graham Little, who had long been MP for London University was at this period anxious to oppose the influence of Communist infiltrators. The exposure of Alan May Nunn, who had once been a somewhat distant associate of Greenwood's at the University, as a traitor who had been selling scientific secrets to the Russians, had come as a revelation to Graham Little. He saw academic spies lurking in many corners. He asked Greenwood to employ his journalistic skills in exposing the menace. Graham Little's excitement was somewhat naïve and boyish -he was just turning 80 years old -but nevertheless Greenwood did allow himself to become mildly infected and eventually produced a manuscript. What is much more important is that Graham Little roused his interest in the darker aspects of Russian political psychology. He had already been considering the possibility of Epidemics of the Mind in relation to the Nazis and now it seemed, Russian Marxism and its derivatives might provide data well worth studying in this connection. He dipped into dialectical materialism and its curious application to science via the Lysenko controversies. He began reading the works of Hegel, and gradually there emerged, or at least seemed to emerge, some kind of epidemic pattern. He started to work out his ideas on paper.
"Within the present generation two psychological epidemics, Fascism and Communism, have devastated Europe and Asia. Each infected group has hated, tortured and killed individuals of the other group with the same ruthlessness as characterised the wars of religion in the 16 th and 17 th centuries … Eventually he finished the manuscript of a book entitled Epidemics of Body and Mind. He submitted it to a publisher but withdrew the manuscript on the offer of only a 10% royalty. It still remains unpublished.

Towards Three Score and Ten
Greenwood was not yet 68 and seemed at times surprised that he had survived so long.
Various entries in his diary for 1948 suggest that he was curious to know what the signs of senescence really were. Yule was only too ready to provide them. His carcass was steadily wearing out, and he spent much of his time in bed. But Yule was older than Greenwood, and though his decrepitude was much more apparent, he survived his friend by several years.
The escape route into books and talk and letter writing was still open but the way was becoming a little weary, and when he was not travelling it, Greenwood felt increasingly lonely. He still went up the School three times a week in a leisurely way, and went to Chelmsford about the County's statistical affairs on the other two. He did fewer sums now, and talked and wrote more about the generalities of his subjects. "I have been spending much time," he wrote to his younger son in October, "on a statistical report sent to the Medical Research Council. It suggests to my partly senile mind that although the younger generation of "expert statisticians" know a good deal more algebra than I did at the same age, they have less common sense. They seem to me like the old fashioned schoolmasters who quoted a great deal of Latin when the points could have been made as well or better, in English".
He lectured from time to time and was listened to with awe and a certain amount of incomprehension. Up and coming students asked his advice; former colleagues confided their troubles and asked him to help in their careers; he examined for Doctorate degrees, was asked his opinion on promotions and to support nominations for awards. American Universities asked him to use his influence in persuading English training epidemiologists to teach in the United States. The London Natural History Society made him their Honorary President.
It was all very flattering in a way, but life was becoming emotionally uncomfortable.
Many of his old friends had gone into retirement and moved away, or become senile, or died. Leonard Hill, the hero of his youth was still alive, but he was now over 80 and scarcely to be visited. Yule was an invalid, Isserlis was in Dorset, Edge in Wales, Culpin was still accessible at St. Albans and so were one or two others, but usually when he went to stay with his old friends and their families he grew restive and longed to be at home again. There he followed the old routine, forest walks with Toby, the solemn beauty of Monk Wood …. Chess with Nello …. And he went occasionally to church ….

Diary Extracts 1949
The New Year started badly. On 5 th January his dog Toby had to be put away. As usual on these occasions he was miserable for days. "Poor me," he wrote. "No close friend left.
I must work." On January 19 th he participated in a Third Programme BBC broadcast on Voluntary Euthanasia. That he should have agreed to advocate it throws a stark light on his soul.
Against him were a woman physician and a Catholic KC. He rested his advocacy on pure reason. They tore it to shreds with human emotion. "I dare say many abusive letters will be directed to me," he had written to Culpin's wife a little earlier, "but I shall not read them." With a sob in his voice he had recalled the necessity of putting his dog Toby to sleep, because he was old and ill. If dogs, why not human beings, seemed to be the implication. One recalls Bernard Shaw's suspicion of the reasoning powers of the biometricians!
As the year wore on he began to imagine difficulties at home. Reluctant to leave Hillcrest when Rosa had died, he had asked his elder son and his family to move in. The house was amply big enough, but in post-war terms it was old fashioned, inconvenient and expensive to maintain. Unwilling to modernise and sweep away things that had associations for him, and over anxious about the cost of upkeep, he considered moving into a smaller house and letting his son's family return to their own. Vaguely he built up in his mind an ideal place for retirement, an ancient rectory, perhaps, preferably in East Anglia, with a Victorian library and an old garden surrounded by stately trees, which he could share with a like-minded retiree. He wrote around and soon one or two possibilities turned up. But there was usually something wrong. At one place the hauteur of the owner, whose improbable sounding double-barrelled name sent him searching doubtingly into Debrett, put him off. A 14 th century manor house with 20 th century amenities and a first class housekeeper sounded very attractive, but there was really no hurry, and he determined to look further afield.
He got in touch with a Suffolk parson who had an old rectory. They met and liked each other. For a time it looked as though he really would leave Hillcrest. But the pull of old associations was still strong. Hillcrest high on the hill, was full of memories, the country house of his youth, still in a wistful way as marvellous as when he had seen it on moonlit nights cycling homewards from Loughton station. It was still haunted by the ghosts of the past, by Rosa, and the children when they were younger, and Arthur Bacot, and the Culpins and the rest. It took little imagination to lie in bed and hear the tinkling of the bicycle bells and the barking of the dogs on Sunday mornings. The church bells would clash out, and there would be the walk in Monk Wood, and Rosa at lunch asking whom they had met there …. It was a hard decision, to leave all this.