James robertson justice autobiography examples
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With his unmistakable booming voice and vast red beard, James Robertson Justice was one of the pillars of the British cinema in the Fifties and Sixties.
The star of seven Doctor In The House comedies – as surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt – as well as playing Lord Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, this 6ft 2in, 19-stone actor was larger than life in every sense.
However a new biography reveals, he was also a deeply contradictory and troubled man – a selfish fantasist, an unrepentant socialist who nevertheless drove a Rolls-Royce and was a friend of the Royal Family, a man with a great appetite for food and drink and yet a man who let his mother die from malnutrition, and a relentless womaniser.
For example, Justice always said that he was born underneath a whisky distillery on the Isle of Skye in Scotland – when he was actually born in Lee, South London, and was brought up in Bromley, Kent.
Indeed, he wasn’t even christened James Robertson Justice – only adding the middle name in his late 30s in order to sustain the myth of his being Scottish.
He also liked to boast that he had a science degree from London University and a doctorate in philosophy-from Bonn University, in Germany, when, in fact, he had neither.
Despite such relent
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WHAT’S THE Trauma TIME?
James Guard Justice: Description English Scotsman
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In this series of articles I am going to show you some of the exhibits contained in the Museum of Urology, hosted on the BAUS website (www.baus.org.uk). This month, I am joined once again by Kassie Ball to discuss the influence of two urologists on a famous literary and film character.
In 1952, Dr Gordon Ostlere (1921-2017), an anaesthetist, writing under the pen name of Richard Gordon, published a best selling comedy novel based on his time as a medical student and junior doctor. Within two years Doctor in the House was made into a film, a classic British comedy.
Figure 1: James Robertson Justice (1950’s publicity photograph; author’s collection).
One of its most notable characters was the terrifying, loud, bullying consultant surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt, played by actor James Robertson Justice (1907-1975) (Figure 1). On viewing a 1966 BBC interview with Robertson Justice we became suspicious that he had based his character on a well-known British urologist, Frederick ‘Snorker’ Barrington (1884-1956) (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Frederick Barrington (by kind permission of the Trustees of
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust).
Frederick James Fitzmaurice Barrington was born on 1 March 1884 in King’s Lynn, Norfolk where his father was a med