The arrival of Professor Ian Donald in 1954 made an immediate impact on the Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital. Tall, impressive, with brilliant red hair and a rather leonine facial expression, he had a haughty aristocratic manner which was foreign to the inbred Glasgow scene. He looked rather like an English colonial administrator who had arrived to civilise the natives. This impression was emphasised by his occasional wearing of a monocle, although hauteur dissolved into laughter when it fell into his soup!

Those not in the intimacy of “C” unit, which he led, observed with cynical amusement how he sat in the centre of the long side of the table in the traditional hospital dining room with his juniors ranged to right and left. Those on his right hand looked left and those on his left looked right. It was a testimony to his personal magnetism that all of them seemed to hang onhis every word. He had arrived to challenge the obstetric establishment and much of what he said was provoking.

He was, however, heir to a long tradition. The great clinical experience that had accumulated in Glasgow was the result of much social change. In the eighteenth century, Glasgow was a pleasant, prosperous academic town in rural surroundings, rather like Oxford, and was centred on its twelfth century cathedral and the elegant renaissance buildings of its university.