Victor Bonney Society

 History of Victor Bonney

Victor Bonney's eighty years included the last days of sheltered life of British history; his working life was from about 1905 to 1945, he was at the top of a conservative profession, medicine, as a master surgeon, probably the finest of his class in gynaecology.  Surgery has reduced in scope over the last twenty-five years: hormone therapies have taken the need away for some, laparoscopically-assisted operations have reduced the extent of surgery for others and much malignancy is now treated the non-surgical disciplines of chemotherapy and radiation.  Victor Bonney stood at the peak of gynaecological surgery and showed us how to do it.  He was a determined man and he ensured that his juniors learned from his principles.

Bonney, son and the grandson of doctors, was brought up in Victorian days in a tall house in Chelsea.  It had a well-wooded back garden in which he and his brothers could play.  His parents were artistic and there was a procession of singers and musicians coming through the house performing.  He was at first educated at home and did not go to Miss Parker's Day School until he was nine.

His main memories of that school were that he used to make up part of a gang to fight the boys in the Clockhouse Board School.  His father had not realised the importance of small boys mixing with other children the same age and so he had had an adult orientated childhood.  In consequence he was rather lonely at school.  Later he attended St. Mark's School where he was thought to have a superiority complex.  He did not make friends of his own age until much later on in adolescence.  He had a good working brain and a fine understanding for mechanical things.  He knew Chelsea before the great museums were built in Exhibition Road and often used it to walk to Hyde Park with his nanny, to sail his boat on the Round Pond. 

Influenced by the careers of his father and grandfather, Victor Bonney had always wanted to go into medicine.  He took the Cambridge Local Examination in 1887 and passed with First Class honours.  In 1891, he started medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School; he enjoyed a few months there but transferred to the Middlesex Hospital Medical School very soon.  This was a hospital renowned for a consultant staff serving the Royal Household and providing Presidents for the Royal Colleges.  He worked his way through the medical school until the finals where he passed the Conjoint Examination in Obstetrics and Surgery easily but failed in Medicine.  He realised that he had to settle down and started to work.  He tied facts together logically so that he did not have to remember isolated events but looked for trends that linked them together.

In 1896 he passed Medicine with Distinction and went on to take the London MB in all parts and again he gained Distinction.  He became a house physician but fell foul of the great Sir Douglas Powell for two reasons.  Firstly, he often saw and treated patients before his superior had arrived at his weekly visit; secondly, his notes were brief, containing only the relevant facts.  His superiors were also to some extent unhappy about Bonney's popularity as a teacher of students and so when he applied to become a Senior House Officer at the Brompton Hospital he was unsuccessful for his two previous chiefs had blackballed him.  He applied back at the Middlesex for a medical post but again was not supported. 

It was probably a chance meeting with the great gynaecologist Sir John Bland Sutton in the corridor of the Middlesex that led to Bonney taking up a career in gynaecology.  Sir John enquired about his old student's career and, on hearing the story, he is alleged to have said 'We want a House Surgeon at Chelsea, the job is vacant.  I will see you get it if you apply'.  This is a little different from the processes doctors have to go through to get into jobs these days.

A resident's post at Chelsea Hospital was followed by one at Queen Charlotte's and he then returned a year later to be a Registrar at Chelsea Hospital.  He became Outpatient Gynaecologist in 1903 to that hospital and a Registrar in the subject at the Middlesex.  In 1905, he married Annie Appleyard, a Tasmanian nurse who was a sister at Chelsea Hospital.  He met her, wooed her and married her but sadly within two years of this marriage Annie had menorrhagia severe enough to drop her haemoglobin critically.  After much consideration it was agreed that she should have a hysterectomy at the Middlesex Hospital.  This was done and a single fibroid was found at the fundus.  It was the end of the Bonney's hopes of a family and Victor always remembered this.  It turned his mind towards conservative surgery for benign conditions of the uterus and ovary and influenced his whole career.

In 1907 he became an Assistant Gynaecological Surgeon but still did not have any inpatient beds - but two years later Bonney became a full gynaecologist at the Middlesex Hospital and in 1913 filled the same post at Chelsea Hospital for Women.  The great professional achievement was surgery for carcinoma of the cervix.  He, along with Comyns Berkeley pioneered this operation in Britain and the Empire.  The Wertheim hysterectomy was not popular in this country for it was a very difficult operation but Bonney mastered it.  He by now was in the full flood of his work, rising early in the day, writing before breakfast sometimes walking across the park from his home in Harley Street to Chelsea Hospital.  He would consult in the hospital all day and in the later afternoon see private patients.  In the early evening he would do research and write.

Bonney was not however a dull man, He was a very sharp dresser, always in dark suits with a fresh carnation in his buttonhole each day of the year.  He and Annie always dressed and dined formally in their home even though they were alone and afterwards would often go out to a night club to dance for a few hours for they were both extremely good sleek dancers.  He had the habit of calling everyone (male and female) 'Darling' which was endearing to some but irritated others and was frankly astonishing when some six foot Australian gynaecologist met him for the first time and was addressed as 'Darling'.  Bonney drove smart cars around London and as his practice grew, he acquired two chauffeurs; his total staff was thirteen at home including his secretaries and he worked them all hard.

When the First World War started, Bonney went to the War Office to volunteer but was told rather briskly that gynaecologists were not required, and rather rudely reminded that 'the days of Amazons had passed'.  He and Comyns Berkeley spent the war running the convalescent home of the Middlesex Hospital down at Clacton-on-Sea.  They would go there turn and turn about, three days each working in London or down at Clacton.  Whilst at Clacton they were the only Medical Officers so performed all sorts of duties from taking X-rays to doing major abdominal and thoracic surgery.

As the years passed, Bonney did not seem to age.  He still had enormously long operating lists, travelling round London performing dexterous surgery.  He retired from his two teaching hospitals in London in the late 1930s aiming to live quietly in his home, Seabournes, on the River Wye.  The Second World War however intervened and he came back to do a locum at Hereford Hospital for the whole of the War to release a younger man to go to the armed services.

Bonney's last home, overlooking the River Wye

After the Second World War Bonney recognised that his operating skills were diminishing.  He led a quiet life in Wye with many visitors from all around the world.  In 1949 he was fÍted at Guest of Honour at a conference on malignancy in Newcastle and gave his last scientific paper there.  He had a coronary thrombosis in 1953 at his home after developing a chest infection, and was transferred to the Middlesex Hospital where, after a cerebrovascular accident, he died on July 4^th of that year.  He was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery next to his father.