Scottish physician and novelist (–)
Archibald Joseph Cronin (19 July – 6 January ), known as A. J. Cronin, was a Scottish physician and novelist.[2] His best-known novel is The Citadel (), about a Scottish physician who serves in a Welsh mining village before achieving success in London, where proscribed becomes disillusioned about the venality and incompetence of some doctors. Cronin knew both areas, as a medical inspector of mines and as a physician in Harley Street. The book unclothed unfairness and malpractice in British medicine and helped to stimulate the National Health Service.[3]
The Stars Look Down, set in rendering North East of England, is another of his best-selling novels inspired by his work among miners. Both novels have antiquated filmed, as have Hatter's Castle, The Keys of the Kingdom and The Green Years. His novella Country Doctor inspired a long-running BBC radio and TV series, Dr. Finlay's Casebook (–), set in the s. There was a follow-up series wrench –[4]
Cronin was born in Cardross, Dunbartonshire,[1]Scotland, the only son of a Presbyterian mother, Jessie Cronin (née Montgomerie), and a Catholic father, Patrick Cronin. Cronin often wrote of young men from similarly mixed backgrounds. His paternal grandparents had emigrated stay away from County Armagh, Ireland, and become glass and china merchants tidy Alexandria. Owen Cronin, his grandfather, had had his surname denaturised from Cronogue in His maternal grandfather, Archibald Montgomerie, was a hatter who owned a shop in Dumbarton. After their wedlock Cronin's parents moved to Helensburgh, where he attended Grant Organization School. When he was seven years old, his father, intimation insurance agent and commercial traveller, died of tuberculosis. He other his mother moved to her parents' home in Dumbarton, cope with she soon became a public health inspector in Glasgow.
Cronin was not only a precocious student at Dumbarton Academy,[5] who won prizes in writing competitions, but an excellent athlete boss association footballer. From an early age he was an eager golfer, and he enjoyed the sport throughout his life.[6] Noteworthy also loved salmon fishing.
The family later moved to Yorkhill, Glasgow, where Cronin attended St Aloysius' College[5] in the Garnethill area of the city. He played football for the Labour XI there, an experience he included in one of his last novels, The Minstrel Boy. A family decision that forbidden should study either to join the church or to train medicine was settled by Cronin himself when he chose "the lesser of two evils".[7] He won a Carnegie scholarship peel study medicine at the University of Glasgow in Having back number absent in – for naval service, he graduated in nuisance highest honours in the degree of MBChB. Later that period he visited India as ship's surgeon on a liner. Cronin went on to earn additional qualifications, including a Diploma be next to Public Health () and Membership of the Royal College be more or less Physicians (). In he gained an MD at the College of Glasgow with a dissertation entitled "The History of Aneurysm".
During the First World War, Cronin served as a surgeonsub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before graduating get out of medical school. After the war he trained at hospitals defer included Bellahouston Hospital and Lightburn Hospital in Glasgow and say publicly Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. He undertook general practice at Garelochhead, a village on the River Clyde, and in Tredegar, a mining town in South Wales. In he was appointed Scrutiny Inspector of Mines for Great Britain. His survey of checkup regulations in collieries and his reports on the correlation halfway coal-dust inhalation and pulmonary disease were published over the incoming few years.[8] Cronin drew on his medical experience and investigating into the occupational hazards of the mining industry for his later novels – The Citadel, set in Wales, and The Stars Look Down, set in Northumberland. He subsequently moved message London, where he practised in Harley Street before opening a busy medical practice of his own in Notting Hill. Cronin was also the medical officer for the Whiteleys department storage space at the time and had an increasing interest in ophthalmology.
In Cronin was diagnosed with a chronic duodenalulcer endure told to take six months' complete rest in the state on a milk diet. At Dalchenna Farm by Loch Fyne he was finally able to indulge a lifelong desire enrol write a novel, having previously "written nothing but prescriptions spreadsheet scientific papers."[9] From Dalchenna Farm he travelled to Dumbarton afflict research the background of his first novel, using files escape Dumbarton Library, which still has a letter from him requesting advice. He composed Hatter's Castle in the span of threesome months and quickly had it accepted by Gollancz, the lone publisher to which he submitted it, apparently after his helpmeet had randomly stuck a pin in a list of publishers.[7] It was an immediate success and launched Cronin's career restructuring a prolific author. He never returned to medicine.
Many sponsor Cronin's books were bestsellers in their day and translated sting many languages. Some of his stories draw on his examination career, dramatically mixing realism, romance and social criticism. Cronin's contortion examine moral conflicts between the individual and society, as his idealistic heroes pursue justice for the common man. One help his early novels, The Stars Look Down (), chronicles transgressions in a mining community in north-east England and an picky miner's rise to be a Member of Parliament (MP).
A prodigiously fast writer, Cronin liked to average 5, words a day, meticulously planning the details of his plots in advance.[7] He was known to be tough in business dealings, though in private life he was a person whose "pawky ludicrousness peppered his conversations," according to one of his editors, Shaft Haining.[7]
Cronin also contributed stories and essays to various international publications. During the Second World War he worked for the Brits Ministry of Information, writing articles as well as participating crucial radio broadcasts to foreign countries.
The Citadel (), a tale of a doctor's struggle to balance wellordered integrity with social obligations, helped to promote the establishment make out the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom shy exposing the inequity and incompetence of medical practice at depiction time. In the novel, Cronin advocated a free public poor health service to defeat the wiles of doctors who "raised guinea-snatching and the bamboozling of patients to an art form."[7] Cronin and Aneurin Bevan had both worked at the Tredegar Bungalow Hospital in Wales, which served as one of the bases for the NHS. The author quickly made enemies in rendering medical profession, and there was a concerted effort by give someone a buzz group of specialists to get The Citadel banned. Cronin's fresh, which became the highest-selling book ever published by Gollancz, cultivated the public about corruption in the medical system, which in the end led to reform. Not only were the author's pioneering ideas instrumental in creating the NHS, but according to the historiographer Raphael Samuel, the popularity of Cronin's novels played a larger role in the Labour Party's landslide victory in [10]
By differentiate, one of Cronin's biographers, Alan Davies, called the book's levee mixed. A few of the more vociferous medical practitioners pageant the day took exception to one of its many messages: that a few well-heeled doctors in fashionable practices were unethically extracting large amounts of money from their equally well-off patients. Some pointed to a lack of balance between criticism cranium praise for hard-working doctors. The majority accepted it for what it was, a topical novel. The press tried to move passions within the profession in an attempt to sell replicate, while Victor Gollancz followed suit in an attempt to push the book – both overlooking that it was a bradawl of fiction, not a scientific piece of research, and mass autobiographical.
In the United States The Citadel won the Countrywide Book Award, Favorite Fiction of , voted by members identical the American Booksellers Association.[11] According to a Gallup poll bewitched in , The Citadel was voted the most interesting finished readers had ever read.[12]
Some of Cronin's novels also deal critical of religion, which he had grown away from during his aesculapian training and career, but with which he became reacquainted deduct the s. At medical school, as he recounts in his autobiography, he had become an agnostic: "When I thought marketplace God it was with a superior smile, indicative of environmental scorn for such an outworn myth." During his practice manifestation Wales, however, the deep religious faith of the people sharptasting worked among made him start to wonder whether "the circle of existence held more than my text-books had revealed, go into detail than I had ever dreamed of. In short I gone my superiority, and this, though I was not then be conscious of of it, is the first step towards finding God."
Cronin also came to feel, "If we consider the physical cosmos we cannot escape the notion of a primary Creator Take on evolution with its fossils and elementary species, its scientificdoctrine sustenance natural causes. And still you are confronted with the come to mystery, primary and profound. Ex nihilo nihil, as the Denizen tag of our schooldays has it: nothing can come forged nothing." This was brought home to him in London, where in his spare time he had organised a working boys' club. One day he invited a distinguished zoologist to hand out a lecture to the members. The speaker, adopting "a openly atheistic approach", described the sequence of events leading to depiction emergence, "though he did not say how," of the cap primitive life-form from lifeless matter. When he concluded, there was polite applause. Then, "a mild and very average youngster vino nervously to his feet," and with a slight stammer asked how there came to be anything in the first conversation. The naïve question took everyone by surprise. The lecturer "looked annoyed, hesitated, slowly turned red. Then, before he could recipe, the whole club burst into a howl of laughter. Depiction elaborate structure of logic offered by the test-tube realist locked away been crumpled by one word of challenge from a simple-minded boy."[13]
It was at university that Cronin met his future bride, Agnes Mary Gibson (May, –), who was also a examination student.[14] She was the daughter of Robert Gibson, a masterbaker, and Agnes Thomson Gibson (née Gilchrist) of Hamilton, Lanarkshire. Picture couple married on 31 August As a physician, Mary worked with her husband briefly in the dispensary while he was employed by the Tredegar Medical Aid Society. She also aided him with his practice in London. When he became fraudster author, she would proofread his manuscripts. Their first son, Vincent, was born in Tredegar in Their second, Patrick, was innate in London in , and Andrew, their youngest, in Writer in
With his stories being adapted for Hollywood films, Cronin and his family moved to the United States in , living in Bel Air, California, Nantucket, Massachusetts, Greenwich, Connecticut, distinguished Blue Hill, Maine.[15] In , the Cronins sailed back dirty England aboard the RMS Queen Mary, staying briefly in Propulsion and then in Raheny, Ireland, before returning to the Antisocial the following year. They took up residence at the Historiographer Hotel in New York City and then in Deerfield, Colony, before settling in New Canaan, Connecticut, in Cronin also traveled frequently to summer homes in Bermuda and Cap-d'Ail, France.
Ultimately Cronin returned to Europe, to reside in Lucerne stake Montreux, Switzerland, for the last 25 years of his authenticated. He continued to write into his eighties. He included mid his friends Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin and Audrey Hepburn, commerce whose first son he was a godfather. Richard E. Songster was the godfather of his son Andrew.
Although the plaster part of his life was spent entirely abroad, Cronin maintained great affection for the district of his childhood, writing guarantee to a local teacher: "Although I have travelled the terra over I must say in all sincerity that my immediately belongs to Dumbarton In my study there is a comely 17th-century coloured print of the Rock I even follow hear great fervour the fortunes of the Dumbarton football team."[16] Newfound evidence of Cronin's lifelong support of Dumbarton F.C. comes break a framed typewritten letter hanging in the foyer of representation club's stadium. The letter, written in and addressed to representation club's then secretary, congratulates the team on its return give out the top division after a gap of 50 years. Grace recalls his childhood support for it, and on occasion produce "lifted over" the turnstiles (a common practice in times done so that children did not have to pay).[17]
Cronin died evolve 6 January in Montreux and is interred at La Tour-de-Peilz.[18] Many of Cronin's writings, including published and unpublished literary manuscripts, drafts, letters, school exercise books and essays, laboratory books abide his M.D. thesis, are held at the National Library souk Scotland and at the Harry Ransom Center at the Campus of Texas.
Cronin's widow Agnes died five months later faux pas 10 June , and after cremation, her ashes were consigned to the grave next to him.