Heaton History Group’s Arthur Andrews was looking through some papers belonging to his father’s first cousin, Alison Jeffcoat, recently when he came across a page from ‘The British Dental Journal’ dated 20 February 1988, containing an obituary for a Professor Arthur Darling. Noticing that the professor had been born in Newcastle, he decided to do some research to see if there was, by any chance, a Heaton connection.

Happily for us, it turned out that, in 1912, Arthur Darling’s father, John Straughan Darling, who worked in insurance, had married Henrietta Jeffcoat, a clerk at a boot manufacturer and a great aunt of our Arthur, the researcher. The Jeffcoat family were living at 8 Bolingbroke Street at the time.

Indeed, for a time, the Darling family had lived at 36 Third Avenue, next door to the Jeffcoats at number 34.

Not only was Arthur Ivan Darling a distant relative of ‘our’ Arthur, he was also a direct descendant of George Darling, the brother of Grace, the Northumberland heroine who, in 1838, helped rescue passengers and crew from the shipwrecked, paddle steamer ‘Forfarshire’ off the Farne Islands.

Cutting his teeth

John and Henrietta Darling went on to have four children: Joyce, Edna Grace, Arthur Ivan (in 1916) and Kathleen.

The family relocated to the coast, while Arthur was still a young boy, so he was educated firstly at Monkseaton and then Whitley Bay Grammar School. He went on to Kings College University of Durham to study dentistry. On qualifying, he became a lecturer at the Newcastle Dental School on Northumberland Road where he was greatly influenced by the Dean of Newcastle, Professor Sir Robert Bradlaw, who encouraged him to obtain a medical qualification, as well as to carry out research into caries (tooth and bone decay) for his Masters. Arthur achieved all of this by the age of 29.

Vigour

At the time, Bristol University was looking for young people ‘of vigour and vision’ to enhance its department of dentistry. Arthur fitted the bill and so became Bristol’s first Professor of Dental Surgery in 1947 at the age of 30.

WWII had depleted all of the dental schools of staff, students and resources. At Newcastle Dental School, Professor Bradlaw had put the emphasis on discipline and research as a basis for progressive teaching by doing both himself. Arthur set about doing much the same at Bristol.

At first, it’s said that his blunt north country approach did not go down well at all. There was opposition from some of the part-time honorary dental surgeons and senior members of the medical faculty, who looked upon Arthur as a ‘young upstart’.

Arthur admired Jack Armstrong and his Northumbrian pipe playing and he emphasised his northern roots by singing Geordie songs at dental school concerts and anyway he was ‘too young to be a professor’! But he was a fighter, carrying on his, sometimes lonely, battles for full-time staff, resources and the power to use them as he saw fit.

Reputation

Gradually the dental school’s reputation grew, as more full-time staff were appointed and student numbers increased. Research papers were published. Arthur’s own work on enamel structures was highly-rated. The Medical Research Council set up its first dental unit at Bristol, with Arthur as Honorary Director.

Soon Arthur’s whole-hearted enthusiasm for teaching dentistry and advancing the dental school broke down the earlier hostility from the older members of the university and hospital staff. Through his own research, he achieved first a national and then an international reputation in the dental world.

He successfully attracted funds to the university too, including a large sum from the Wellcome Foundation for a new research wing at the dental school. He was rewarded with the position firstly of dean of the medical faculty and eventually that of pro-vice chancellor, where he continued to display his skills as an academic politician.

Honours

Nationally, Arthur became an important figure on the General Dental Council, at the Royal College of Surgeons, the Department of Health and on many other bodies.

His services to education and dentistry did not go unnoticed and he was rewarded with a CBE and many honorary degrees.

Home life

Arthur and his wife, Kathleen Pollard, had four children.

He is described as having had a great sense of fun and he enjoyed fishing, music, foreign travel and working with wood, becoming a competent maker of chairs and stools, enhanced by delicately carved designs.

Arthur Ivor Darling died on 22 December 1987.

Postscript: Yet another Arthur and another Andrews

A scrappy fragment of a newspaper photograph in a diary belonging to Arthur Darling’s uncle Leslie Daykin Jeffcoat (of whom we have written previously) led our Arthur (Andrews) in another direction.

He knew, from the 1911 census, that Leslie’s father, also called Arthur (keep up!), had been a foreman at a chemical company. The words he could make out on the above photograph led to the discovery that Arthur Jeffcoat worked for 45 years at Wilkinson and Simpson Ltd who had premises at 36 and 38 Newgate Street and also at Low Friar Street in Newcastle. Numerous advertisements can be found in the British Newspaper Archive for many and varied concoctions. One that caught our Arthur’s eye was for ‘Natural Health Salt’ , their own version of Andrews Liversalts. (Ed: Not more Andrews as well!)

Can you help?

If you know more about Arthur Darling, we’d love to hear from you. You can contact us either through this website by clicking on the link immediately below the article title or by emailing chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org

Sources

British Dental Journal – 20 February 1987

British Newspaper Archive

Ancestry

Findmypast

Acknowledgements

Researched and written by Arthur Andrews, Heaton History Group. Copyright Arthur Andrews and Heaton History Group except images for which permission to reproduce must be sought from individual copyright holders.