More about Bill Bunting

To add to Nigll Knight's tributee, (see below), Peter Curtis has sent this:

Bill Bunting and I cemented our friendship as we stood in the queue to be vaccinated in the first few days of medical school, and then had to rush off to the pub to cover up the terribly embarrassing pallor and nausea we were feeling. Bill was from Carlyle I think, had a strange accent and was very clever He had been a mining engineer but fell down a mineshaft and broke his hip. His mining career was finished and his orthopedic surgeon told him to go into medicine. I'm pretty sure he got a scholarship to Guys but his funds were always very tight. Bill was often in pain, because of non-union or some residual infection. He never complained. He was very tough. He met Sheila, his first wife, on one of his admissions to casualty where she, a policewoman, had suffered a skull fracture in a car chase.

They had very little money and when Mike Steyn and I for some crazy reason decided to drive my recently acquired 1944 Ford Prefect ( regularly repaired by Chris Bird) all the way to Rimini in Italy, Bill and his wife came along for their honeymoon. As a talisman to ward off evil spirits, hopefully attract curious and luscious girls (insane idea!) and scare the foreigners I fixed the wired bones of my skeleton's foot on the radiator . At the Italian frontier the policeman, sneering at our decrepit car, roof rack piled high with luggage, suddenly noticed the skeletal foot.

"What is that" he asked. "My own foot," I replied in French with a straight face, " It was cut off-coupait- in an accident." He hauled me out of the car and for this stupid remark we were kept for over an hour trying to prove we were medical students at Guy's Hospital and legal permitted owners of 2.5 skeletons. In the end Bill dug into his suitcase and found a letter with his name on it from the Medical School Office. In Rimini Mike and I didn't see the honeymooners until it was time to load up the car again and head back.

The other incident I remember about Bill was the sad episode of his room-mate who turned out to be a con artist; someone who looked for students with whom to share a flat or room, study their textbooks and thereby gather knowledge and the profile of a new person. Bill's roommate spent 5 months learning how to be a medical student and then made off with everything Bill possessed.

After graduation our paths diverged and we only kept in Christmas card touch. He was a good man.