The promise of merit awards bought them, with the condition that though the total sums and the subjects are published the names are not. It has been a kind of old- boy arrangement for consultants and has caused the keenest resentment from both the GPs and the young consultants. “Patients are entitled in emergency,” contended Callander, “to be seen by one of their own practice: if not by their own doctor, at least a doctor with easy access to case notes”.Callander’s first taste for UK medical politics was whetted when I asked him to meet the then Secretary of State for Health Richard Crossman, whose PPS I was when he came to Scotland. His experience was translated into a fervent belief in 24-hour cover by the practice itself, in contrast to centrally organised cover in one form or another by a Health Authority. An accident in the Glen Trool Forest in the first few weeks of his first job made him determined to promote the need for urgent skilled medical attention to be provided in outlying areas.

He extolled the value of the small cottage hospital.In 1956 he moved, partly out of a romantic respect for his seafaring ancestors, to Bo’ness, then the mining town of the huge Kinneil Colliery whose seams stretched under the Forth, and became the junior partner of Hugh Howieson, an experienced doctor and leading authority on pneumoconiosis, silicosis, and emphysema, the curse maladies of coal-miners. “At first, we thought Donald was very strange,” said Callander, “rattling his primitive iron bars in order to diagnose the condition of ill patients. Later we realised that he was a genius.”Callander’s first job was at Port William in Wigtownshire, from 1954 to 1956. This short period left an indelible mark of understanding of the problems facing the deeply rural GP whose cause he was to champion as a member, and subsequently chairman, of the Rural Practices Sub-Committee of the General Medical Council of Scotland and at BMA House in London. The obligation of night visits to remote farmsteads and hamlets without a doctor ought to be recognised.Callander also helped to enhance the interest of his BMA colleagues in addressing the all too frequent injuries to agricultural and forestry workers. He acknowledged the role of devoted schoolteachers at Hillhead in giving him the confidence as a working-class boy to do medicine, and was interested in making sure that the medical profession should be open to all regardless of means in boyhood and during their time as students.At Glasgow University, like his lifelong medical friend Dr Dickson Mabon, later a prominent minister in the Wilson and Callaghan governments, he came under the influence of the distinguished physiologist Professor George Wishart, Charles Illingworth, a pioneering surgeon, Stanley Alstead, Professor of Therapeutics, and Ian Donald, Professor of Obstetrics and a medical engineer who developed ultrasound as a diagnostic tool.

And he was good.Callander’s father was a master joiner in Glasgow. At pounds 2 per term, he sent his son to the Corporation-run Hillhead High School – the school for boys, many of modest means, which produced two chairmen of ICI, Sir Harry McGowan and Sir Alexander Fleck, Sir Ian McGregor of British Steel and the Coal Board, the Vice-Chancellors Sir Charles Wilson and George McNicol, Sir John Rennie of the UN Relief and Works Agency, the ambassador Sir Horace Phillips, the newspaper editor Sir Alistair Dunnett, to say nothing of the politician Menzies Campbell QC MP and the comedian Stanley Baxter, and instilled the ethics of extraordinarily hard work into pupils.More particularly for Callander were three role models in medicine, Professor Eldred Wright the anatomist, Professor Jack Dunnett the medical crystallographer and Ian Gillespie, the surgeon. Another reason was that he generously acknowledged that partners such as the late Dr Angus Leys and Dr Tom Sargent were more talented diagnosticians of rare conditions than he was. One reason for harmony in the view of his colleague, Dr John Park, was that even during the times of his greatest number of absences in Edinburgh and London doing the business of the BMA, he was meticulous about doing his fair share of day and night duty.

John Callander, as a doctor, was one Guardian: his colleague for some years has been Colin Cuthell, the well-known central Scotland undertaker: “One to take it out and the other to put it in,” as the local wags felicitously put it.In my 30 years as the town’s MP, not a single complaint, or whisper of a complaint, came to me about either Callander or the practice of which he was senior partner. The original chest is in the Bo’ness museum, which owes much of its development to Bo’ness Heritage, of which Callander was a senior committee member. For 360 years it has had two locks with a different key, so that both Keepers or Guardians have to be present whenever it is opened. The 50 members of the society who are annuitants of the fund claim that it is the oldest Registered Friendly Society in Britain. And, professionally he was top-class, as my family and I can testify since we were his patients for 35 years.On his mother’s side, John Callander came from a family of sea captains, many of whom sailed from the Firth of Forth. Some sailors were murdered; others were taken prisoners and had their thumbs cut off. He took pride in his role of one of the Keepers of the “Sea-Chest” – a charitable fund in the 10,000- population town of Bo’ness on the Forth, in the Middle Ages the second busiest port in Scotland, to which he was to devote 40 years of professional practice and where he was much loved.The “Sea-Chest” was created in 1635, when a ship from Bo’ness was captured by Turkish pirates.