Peter Draper was an extraordinary man. At times infuriating, at others inspirational. Our working together forever changed me and I shall never forget his influence, his passion - or his cigars.
We first met when I came down to the Department of Community Medicine in 1973, for the third year of my first degree, when Peter was working with Tony Smart on the 1974 reorganisation of the NHS. We talked long and hard about the ‘scientific management’ that reorganisation was due to introduce. Peter invited me to consider returning since he was hopeful of establishing a new research unit that looked at health policy. I was delighted to go back.
In 1976 the Unit for the Study of Health Policy was established under Peter’s leadership with an economist, Gordon Best, myself and Pat Bolton. I have only just thrown away the original artwork that we commissioned for our first major publication “Health, Money and the NHS”. That pamphlet and almost all USHP publications were born of many hours of polishing the text trying to ensure that its meaning was unambiguous. We tried very hard to facilitate the informed public discussion of health policy – comprehensible text was essential.
One major new grant saw new co-workers – Jenny Griffiths, James Partridge and Jennie Popay. (I’ll post a picture below of us.) Another saw us joined by Linda Marks, Howard Cox and David St George. Then there were the medical students who joined us on attachment. One of them has written to me “I do remember and very much appreciate his efforts to educate me and to get me published! I produced a rather inept paper on unemployment and health, almost entirely a summary of Harvey Brenner's work. Peter arranged for me to meet the rather baffled editor of the Lancet with a view to writing more! Need I say the meeting did not lead anywhere. I mentioned this to two friends a few years later- a psychiatrist about to take up a chair and a nephrologist. The conversation went along the lines of "you turned down the chance of writing for the Lancet! How could you!" There were two reasons- firstly at the time I didn't quite understand what a big deal this was and how much Peter was putting into this; and secondly my total lack of talent in the area!”
Another of them, Steve Wood,. is sorry he can’t get to the celebration but wrote
“I would like to record my great affection for Peter and my gratitude for all he did to educate me and sophisticate my thinking as an ignorant medical student in the mid 1970s.

I first encountered Peter in 1976 when I embarked on a Sociology BSc course as part of my medical degree. This was the first time that a UK university had offered a medical sociology course, and Peter was one of the principal tutors, together with David Armstrong and Margot Jeffreys. After two years of rote-learning of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry, this came as rare and refreshing fruit.
I think Peter and I took to one another almost immediately. We both came from the Manchester area, although he went to a posher school and his background was essentially managerial middle class. Peter seemed to regard his relatively privileged origins as a grave impediment to his acceptance as a radical political thinker. If Peter could have renounced his bourgeois origins as Anthony Wedgewood-Benn renounced his title, I have no doubt he would have done so.
As a medical student I volunteered at USHP during the time that its book on the NHS and the media was produced, and I was privileged to become acquainted with several thinkers who went on to make a significant contribution to the development of the NHS: John Dennis, Gordon Best, Jenny Griffiths, Jenny Popay, James Partridge, and others.
I qualified MB BS in 1979, and thereafter pursued a conventional career in medicine, eventually becoming a consultant psychiatrist and medical director of an NHS Trust.
Peter's influence has never left me. He had a keen sense of social justice, and would step out of line to defend the vulnerable. Once, I was with in an underground station when two policemen wrestled a drunken man down a staircase. Peter immediately stopped them in their tracks, announced that he was a doctor and that they could be causing spinal damage. Such was his authority, they immediately complied!
Peter was also very good fun. He had bipolar affective disorder - which most of his friends recognized before he did. When high, he was full of new ideas, could work twelve hours a day, and was a great pleasure to work with. When low, he was withdrawn and pessimistic.
Peter never abandoned his radicalism. I met up with him only once in later years, when he lived in Greenwich. I attended a sort of soiree which reminded me of Bertie Wooster entertaining Bingo Little, Comrade Butt and the Sons of The Red Dawn. “

I hope that Peter’s influence lives on, I rather suspect it will. At a time when debate about the NHS ignores some of the elephants in the room, political discussion is constrained by an agenda of one leaders unelectability or another’s dress sense and the self-imposed wall of Brexit draws ever closer we need visionaries who can make incisive contributions to public debate. It is our responsibility.

John Dennis