Great Lives is a download from Radio 4.

We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.

This is a quote from Samuel Johnson,

and it has particular relevance for our great life today.

Gordon Hamilton Fairley's life was ended abruptly on October the 23rd, 1975.

Up to this point, he'd been a son, a student, a husband, and Britain's leading

cancer specialist, the father of oncology, the study of tumors in the UK. He was also father to four children, some of whom we have here in the studio today.

Hamilton Fairly died aged just 45, killed by an IRA bomb intended for someone else.

Here in the studio nominating Professor Gordon Hamilton Fairly is the writer Charles Moore. Charles is very well known these days as Lady Thatcher's biographer but he also

continues to write for two of the publications he used to edit the Spectator

and the Daily Telegraph. Charles you, you knew Hamilton Fairly, and while it's now over 40 years since he died,

tell us how you remember him.

Well, I knew him in a purely personal way because the Hamilton Fairleys were neighbors of ours in Bayswater and we were very little children.

So he was the father of little friends and I have a very warm memory of him because whenever you talk to him he would address you in as if you were a grown up if you know what I mean.

The conversation would be on your level not talking down to you and very keenly interested and I think this was something that I later

discovered I didn't know I knew he was a doctor I didn't know he was a great and famous doctor at the time

that informed what he did actually.

Describe him as a physical presence, obviously it's a child's view, but do you remember

a tall imposing man, short?

No, slightly stooping, very nice smile, very amusing, but also very engaged, not sort of dry amusing,

more sort of almost quite intense, a sort of tremendous engagement in any conversation so that you remembered when he was

...