John Robert Shaw BDS LDS 24/4/1926 - 3/8/2004

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John and Betty at their golden wedding, June 2003.

 

A native Scot (from Aberdeen), with his wife Elizabeth produced 2 children: Peter and Caroline His parents were: Alexander (Sandy) and Flora Wiseman.

Born in Aberdeen in 1926, John Shaw grew up in a rather poor family background.  He never said much about the earliest period of his life, but used to go back to Aberdeen for holidays for most of his life while living with his parents.  Here he met his first cousin Helen Landery, with whom he re-established contact with in 2002 due to the internet.  (One little story captures the zeitgeist of this inter-war period.  On holiday in Scotland with his parents, little John was bought an ice cream.  By some mischance a large hen appeared, grabbed the ice cream and ran off with it.  That was the end of John's ice cream - they could not, or would not, afford to buy a replacement).
 
 

Around John's 4th birthday his parents moved south to Manchester, presumably as his father Sandy looked for work in the depression.  Many Scots families came as far south as Manchester then stopped.  John Shaw was always proud of being a Scot, despite never having any trace of a Scots accent (or drinking whisky).  John later played for and helped organise the Manchester Scottish Xmas festivities, and wore a kilt when he played music for Sophie Neubert's wedding.
 

It must have been about the time of the move to Manchester that John's interest in music appeared: by the age of 5 he was said always to make a bee line towards any piano, and after a while his parents relented in the face of such evident fascination, and let him start piano lessons.  He carried on playing the piano until a week before his death.  His parents never encouraged his musical development, and one of the deepest gripes John had about his mother was that she never came to his performances. (He never forced his children to take music lessons, on the basis that if we wanted to we would, and if we didn’t we shouldn't be forced. He was always disappointed that we turned out quite non-musical, but with hindsight trying to get us into an orchestra would have been flogging dead horses.)  I (Peter Shaw) remember lying in bed as a child trying to get to sleep and listening to father playing the piano for hours, both for fun and practice,  I did complain occasionally but generally enjoyed and priviledged to listen to his playing.  John could play anything on the piano, with his signature tune being "Moon river" from Breakfast at Tiffany's.  He could sight read anything, but usually just used a hand-written notebook giving the keys of named songs, then remember the songs note-perfect, playing for up to 6 hours without once reading a note.  He never actually took any formal music examinations, but earned the respect of many serious musicians.  He also played the church organ, and on learning of his inoperable cancer in June 2004 one of his first actions was (characteristically) to produce a detailed written plan of his funeral service, on the grounds that he had played for several very uninspiring funerals where the deceased had failed to plan for a good send-off.  Quite late on in life (in his 50s) he took up the accordion, and acquired an electronic keyboard for public performances to avoid relying on whatever ricketty old piano might be supplied on the night.  He could never listen to music on a car stereo while driving as it interfered with his concentration, whereas most people find that the auditory and spatial regions of their minds can run independently.
 

Given this effusive musical talent and love for music, one might have expected this to show through in his education.  Not so, for which we have to blame his parents' attitudes coupled with the financial realities of the pre-war years. John went to the Manchester Grammar School for Boys, an institution he thought very highly of and supported practically and financially throughout his life.  He was there 1937-1943, and read the equivalent of A levels in English, French and German.  Music was presumably not seen as a serious option, and one of John's proudest achievements was that he was the first boy at MGS to take music for school certificate, in 1941.  (The school gave him no help, and he relied on an organist called Harold Kirkham for tuition).

More remarkably, John then went to the Manchester Dental school and graduated as a dentist in 1950.  This involved a basic medical training, which in turn assumed scientific subjects at school.  John had a hard time here and failed several courses, but it is a testament to his intelligence and tenacity that he completed the degree and worked the rest of his life as a dentist.  It is also a testament to the stubbornness and fixity of opinion of his parents (especially his mother Flora, of Calvinist descent), since John always hated the job of a dentist and never chose the career as a vocation. The history behind this choice shows an example of contingency, the ability of small random effects to get magnified by subsequent events.  His mother Flora once worked for a short while in a shop in Aberdeen, making friends with a lady called Milly Dalgarno.  Milly became a lifelong friend of Flora, and expressed the opinion repeatedly that John should become a dentist like Milly's husband:  easy money and no formal training.  That was true in the 1920s, but by insisting on this career path Flora put John though a gruelling university medical / dental training (a requirement that came in after Mr Dalgano entered the profession).  Dentistry also gave John a bad back, which tormented him for years but which vanished after retirement.  (To cap it all, pay as an NHS dentist was never marvellous).  Towards the very end of his life John told me that he had never really got on with his mother since the age of 24, about the time he graduated.
 

To return to the 1940s, John was inevitably profoundly affected by WW2.  He was in the air training corp at school (getting two stripes and firing a Bren gun once or twice), and in the home guard though without seeing action.  His wartime stories included the time that his father saw bombs (incendiaries or markers I assume) being dropped in a rough circle around Manchester and said "We're in for it tonight" - Manchester was hammered that night, though Withington was undamaged.
 

John lived at home with parents in 50 Brooklawn Drive Withington as a student, and presumably had a rather limited social life.  I know that he had a brief engagement to a lady called Doreen Walker, but that this was broken off by John in 1947.  Doreen came from 68 Long St Easingwold, Yorkshire, and by a bizarre coincidence when John was up in Yorkshire in 1985 (with Peter, then doing a PhD at York university), John was taken aback to observe that 68 Long St Easingwold was occupied by a Dentist called Mr Walker. Doreen out of the way, John dated Elizabeth Kershaw.  The key date was their second meeting, at Belle Vue pleasure gardens in Manchester, and they married in 20-6-1953.  John remained devoted to Betty for the rest of his life, and could not have lived without her.
 

When not being a dentist or playing piano, John was very involved in helping steam-powered railways. He was especially involved with the Ffestiniog railway in Wales, where he supplied volunteer labour some weekends.  In later years we had many family holidays in this part of Wales, and John maintained connections with the Ffestiniog and the Stevenson locomotive society throughout his life.
 

John and Betty lived for a short while in a flat in Sale, Manchester while John worked as a dentist in someone else's practice.  Of this period I heard complaints about treating people who lived on a nearby caravan site (poor teeth and worse personal hygiene), and of mice in the flat.John swore that when he came down in the morning that he found them warming their tails by the fire.
 

In 1955 John and Betty bought 39 Ferndown Rd, Wythenshaw (OS Grid ref SJ80012 89480), for the then princely sum of £4500, helped by Betty's father and by a mortgage fixed at something like 3% for 20 years.  They were immensely lucky to find a house pre-made as a live-in dental surgery, with a tiled dedicated surgery and waiting room area annexed to a well-designed 4 bedroom house.  John started his own dental surgery here, and practised continuously until his retirement around 1990.  This arrangement meant that he never had to commute.(He always pointed out that this had the downside that people could, and did, disturb him for dental care at any time of day or night, even after he had retired.  As I sit in queues on the A3 at 0730 in the morning I think I know who had the better deal.)  Betty was never a dental assistant, although she helped washing napkins etc as needed.  There was a homely comfort in the daily rituals: mid-morning tea with Mum, dad and dental assistant, John's post-lunch siesta till 2pm, and a repeat mid-afternoon tea around 1530.
 
 

When bought, 39 Ferndown rd was surrounded by fields and market gardens, with a line of mature trees about 100m to the east marking.  I (Peter Shaw) can just about remember this phase as a blurred early memory.  John loved the house and worked on it extensively.  When new each room had just 1 pendant bulb, but John hated poor lighting and rewired extensively so that each room ended up with multiple pendant and strip lamps.  The airing cupboard came with a novel feature of no lamp and no internal handle, allowing one to get locked in in pitch darkness - John later said that this was his first repair job on the house. Over the years most of the floorboards were taken up and replaced, while the loft was extensively wired for light.  (Even the tiny flimsy loft above the double garage had lights installed, along with a very 1950s lampshade).  In his terminal illness John wanted nothing more than to stay in his house to the end, a wish that we managed to respect.
 
 

Around 1966 Manchester council bought the surrounding land and developed a council estate around the area, which must have been quite traumatic for John and Betty.  I do remember clearly walking through the buildings sites with my father, collecting scraps of wood, and how John was clearly unhappy about the whole development.  The families who moved in were certainly not middle class, with a minority of children who were simply badly behaved.  We had a few stones thrown at windows, and as children simply did not mix with our new neighbours, with a few exceptions of children in our class at the local primary school (Sandilands infant school).  Luckily most of the parents realised that a good NHS dentist was worthy of respect - with hindsight the antagonism could have been much worse.
 
 

John was a keen walker and excellent map reader, who knew the roads and footpaths around much of Manchester, and the Pennines, and much of Scotland, and virtually everywhere he visited, with such clarity and precision that we practically never got lost.  His map collection was superlative, as was his ability to read a map and memorise the route before setting off.  A few times in deepest rural France he would have to check the map during a car journey (and complain bitterly how inferior French maps were to good old OS maps), but it was only after leaving home and having to navigate for myself that I appreciated how good he was.  He took us up Kinder Scout to Kinder Downfall several times, a walk that has become iconic for me as a local Pennine outing. On return from a walk there was a mandatory picnic and cup of tea.  Not, as you might expect, from a flask.  The tea was freshly brewed on his beloved old Primus stove- a paraffin powered stove that became his trademark as much as beautiful piano playing.  For the uninitiated, a brief explanation.  Paraffin only burns well as vapour, so primus stoves have to run hot - in this state they are superb, boiling a pot of tea in a few minutes, putting calor gas stoves to shame.  The problem is getting them hot enough to ignite in the first place.  This is achieved by liberally dousing the burning zone in methylated spirits, setting the meths alight, and waiting a while.  When the meths is burning hotly, pump up the paraffin with a manual pump hard, then just as the alcohol flame is about to die open the valve and let the paraffin shoot into the heated zone, where it should ignite with a hot blue flame.  Or, as usually happens, it shoots up into your face with a sheet of smoky yellow flame, in which case you have to keep pumping and hope it warms up soon.  Our picnics invariably smelled of paraffin vapour, and sometimes of singed hair too.  (I later did this manoeuvre in a tent on school trek, and have to pass this advice on to future generations: DO NOT DO THIS IN TENTS!!)  One of the saddest things to find as John was in his terminal illness was his neatly packed wooden box of primus stove, teapot, tea caddy and teacosy.  Poor weather never ever deterred John from taking us on a healthy family walk.  One time in the lake district he was heard to pronounce "It's not really raining", as a hiker hoved into view protected by cagoule, overtrousers AND umbrella against the sheeting downpour.  Another time, in the Loire valley, John memorably had to wring out the teacosy before use as it was so soaked as to have lost any insulating qualities.  Also a keen cyclist, John's doctor recalled with amazement that John cycled the 2km to the surgery until a few months from his death at 78. Medically John was very fit, with one serious problem, namely his asthma.  This plagued his life, being especially triggered by any exposure to cats (notably long haired varieties).  In the 1940s this was essentially uncontrollable, and with hindsight he was lucky to have survived some of his asthma attacks.  A specialist once remarked that it wasn't often you met such a severe skin response as John showed to cat antigen - John dared not even enter a house where a long-haired cat lived. John also had a very sensitive skin, especially with regard to sunburn (a classic Scots skin).  He burned, never tanned, and always had to cover up totally, however hot the weather.  This was typically a shirt and jacket, long trousers and woolly socks.  Normally he also wore a bow tie, although this was shed on informal occasions.  His scalp skin was especially sensitive and flaky, though well protected by curly hair that remained black until late in life, and densely implanted until his death.  One curious little medical feature gave him his only really serious problems, namely his gall bladder.  In 1990 it emitted a gall stone which was so large that it blocked his intestine.  The problem was only just diagnosed and operated on in time to save his life, and this was after the event that his hair turned white.  The cancer that killed him in 2004 initiated on the gall bladder.   I gather that one of the few predictors of this cancer is a history of large gallstones: with hindsight the organ should have been excised earlier.  John was also diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2003 and underwent some unpleasant radiotherapy, which seemed to have cured the problem entirely.
 

John developed a taste for wine, becoming a member of the wine society, and meals in Ferndown road were always accompanied by good (often excellent) vintages.  The more alcohol-sensitive amongst us learned to handle John's generosity with caution, having discovered the hard way about unpleasant consequences the following morning!
 

John Shaw had a healthy inability to kowtow to arbitrary authority, which can probably be dated back to an unpleasant incident during the 1960s when John was the victim of what sounds like institutional bullying by Trafford Local Dental Committee, specifically its chair one Mr Glass, for no good reason that ever came to light.He was subject to two disciplinary hearings that sounded like kangaroo courts, and responded by first of all transferring to the Cheshire dental list (an unheard-of manoeuvre), then invoking his MP to seek justice.  John came out of it well, eventually, and became a long-standing and respected chair of the Trafford Local Dental Committee. The injustice he felt made him turn to civil liberties issues, and John ended up as the North west chairman of the National Council for civil Liberties (now known as Liberty).  One consequence of this was that John became an observer at a speakers corner in Piccadilly square Manchester: each Sunday evening there was a tradition that anyone could set up a soap box and speak their mind to the public in a corner of Piccadilly.  For no good reason that I know of, the then chief constable of Manchester decided to stop this, and sent officers to arrest speakers.  John was a regular witness, and gave evidence in court cases brought by the police that were routinely thrown out by judges on the grounds that free speech was not a crime.  For years he was sure that our phone was bugged by the government, but as he said, "if they want to listen to my mother in law yacking on for hours on end they are welcome to it!".  He opposed the invasion of Suez, and was vehemently against the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq - a cause espoused equally by his son Peter.  Another example was when BOC (British Oxygen Company, the then monopoly supplier of gases to dentists) made a mess of his account and tried to double charge him.  Rather than back down, John (whose filing and paper keeping were always meticulous) took them on.  One memorable day he received in the same post a court summons from BOC, plus a separate admission of error from different parts of the same company, which he simply copied and sent to the home addresses of the entire board of BOC.  Of course the company had to back down, knowing that they would have been expensively laughed out of court.
 

Quite late in life John became involved in the preservation and restoration of Brookes drive (more information here), a straight track originally running from Hale Barns to Brooklands station.   The northern section was tarmaced and is now Brooklands Rd.  South of the roundabout with the A560 the track remained straight but unmanaged, and as children John often took us for muddy walks along the drive to Fairywell wood, pointing out the hawthorn hedge, limes, Pines, copper beech and oaks that were originally planted for Mr Brookes  The name most associated with the restoration of Brooks drive is Reg Temple, for whom a memorial stone was erected, but John Shaw met and helped Reg extensively, writing letters on his behalf to Manchester Council.  A file of John's correspondence survives on the matter.  John was invited to sit on a Brooks drive management committee around 2000, but felt that he had sat on enough committees in his life and declined.  There is a pleasing circularity in that John's funeral service was held in Brooklands church (on 17August 2004).
 

John was blithely unconcerned about superficial details of appearance, either personal or in his work.  He habitually wore a bow tie with short hair, even in the 1960s and 70s when casual was de rigeur.   (One little story brings several of these strands together.  In 1974 we went to Cap d'ail in France for summer holiday, and we stopped en route in Nice.  We duly picnicked on the seafront in Nice in August, with the Mediterranean sun blazing down.  Dad wore his jacket long trousers and woolly socks as normal, and joked later that his primus seemed not to work because the steam was invisible in the hot dry air.  We sat there round the picnic table, amused at the oddity of all those people on the beach in bikinis supping their cold drinks - odd people those foreigners.)  His handywork around the house always had a distinctive, home-made appearance, which belied superb engineering and intelligent planning.  His workbench in our double garage had all that could be needed, with odd-looking wooden boards on the concrete floor (so that if his regular earthing checks failed and he did get an electric shock the path to earth would be high resistance and the shock survivable).  The tool store was an old wardrobe, eccentric looking but with perfectly placed internal lights and tool racks.  Above the bench I found an alarming weight of roof tiles and 'useful' old metal, but the wood was so well designed and fastened that the structure was quite safe.  Only months before his death a new sink in the bathroom developed a problem with the linkage that should have lifted the drain plug.  A professional plumber tackled this and charged handsomely for his services, but the problem returned in days.  John dug around in his collection of little bits of old metal, and cobbled together a little fastening for the linkage which solved the problem perfectly and permanently.  To understand this viewpoint, read Robert Persig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance" - and know that John inhabited the world of 'underlying form'.  The same idiosyncratic-but-perfectly-effective style permeated his dental surgery, which used equipment and manual filing systems that were dated but serviceable.  One dental assistant worked with John for some years, then moved on to a much flasher newer looking dentist nearby.  Within weeks she returned, tearfully asking for her job back, as the sparkly new surgery was nowhere near as organised or planned as John's.  (The analogy she made was with Fawlty towers, a 1970s sitcom about an incompetently run hotel).  John took her back and employed her until his retirement, and she has been a family friend ever since. The list of similar examples of John's idiosyncratic but effective way of doing things could fill many pages: I particularly liked the builders who wanted to borrow his ladder, laughed at his typed step-by-step instructions on getting the ladder down, and came back humbly requesting help half an hour later, after dad's home-made safety interlock defeated them.
 

The only thing that John had unexpected intellectual problems with was computing - as in the use of digital computers (his arithmetic was quite good enough to run the finances of his surgery).  I think that this was an example of his reluctance to delegate, seeing the use of a PC as delegation of thought processes.  We won the war without computers and he ran his surgery without computers, so why entrust this mysterious box with operations you can do on paper?  He did go to night classes in PC programming (where he never forgave the machine for giving him log-on difficulties), but was happy and fully effective in his analogue world.
 
 

None of this biography adequately encapsulates the inner core of John's personality.  Absolute honesty and integrity, devotion to family, job and self-imposed duties were hallmarks of his behaviour, but there were depths which only his family and close friends could know.  He was a congenital worrier, who always anticipated and planned for the worst eventualities, far beyond what most people would consider necessary.  Car drivers generally belong to one breakdown service: John Shaw was in both the AA and the RAC, and also took a demanding test each year to remain a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists.(He passed the test with the highest mark each time: there was one occasion when an inexperienced examiner only gave him the second highest mark, which he was deeply troubled by and managed to get this corrected by an appeal based on the circumstances of the alleged failing).  When his son Peter went to France with his school, John sent him off with, among other things, a list of all the British Consulates in France.  When a French hotel "accidentally" overcharged us, John spotted immediately that the bill did not agree with the value he had calculated before leaving the UK, and had the management correct the error forthwith.  Each bottle of wine in John's house had a hand-written label giving its origin, cost and date of purchase.  Until the last couple of days of his terminal illness John could still direct us to the exact location of each file containing whatever gem of paperwork or information that might be needed, and was so agitated about one insurance document not being in its correct folder that Betty had to lie and say that it had turned up, before quietly ordering a replacement.  Of course, it did soon turn up safe in a neatly labelled folder.  Being an only child of a Calvinist background, John had no conception of compromise or negotiation: he knew what was right and how to do things and that was that. As children we were simply baffled by children who might disagree with their parents - the concept had no place in the Shaw household. We went on a long muddy walk followed by a picnic most weekends, rain shine or snow.Fortunately he very much had our best interests at heart- the only thing he insisted on was that we took driving lessons as soon as our age allowed (a pre-requisite for survival in 20th century society), and that we did not go to the local sink comprehensive school, Brookway Comprehensive, which would have been a passport to underachievement.  He almost never raised his voice, even in the teeth of adolescent provocation, and put up with countless birdwatching outings with Peter to hang around in desolate muddy haunts waiting for some rare duck or wader.
 

The psycho-jargon term "control freak" could be applied to John, but only in the sense that he didn't trust other people to do things properly.  He was never happy delegating work, so could never have climbed the management ladder, and never wanted to do so.  He once explained that he could have made far more money by going private and treating as many people as possible to the lowest standard, but instead he obtained personal satisfaction from doing his job carefully and properly.  He was a perfectionist who will be sorely missed.
 
 

As a coda, I must record one of John's pet quotations.  It is of army derivation, but he applied it widely and I have found it to be really good advice in any situation where you know that people will look to you for guidance: fieldcourses, practicals, walks, outings etc:  "Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted".  Sadly he couldn't apply it to Death.
 
 
 

Last modified 11 August 2004.
 
 

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John Shaw when very young

with Peter Shaw in 1963 on a family walk.