Soham Grammarians - Reunion Talk 2017 - Professor Geoff Fernie

A big influence in my life was my Dad.

Many of you knew my Dad, actually, Roy.

This is one of my trips to the Netherlands, I do quite a bit of work there. This is the field where his bomber crashed.

That's my Dad, he was a hero of mine.

The arrow, that's the groove in the ground made by the bomber as it slid across the ground and ended up against the front door of the house next to it.

It has been wired off ever since. There is a plaque there. Many of you have parents and other friends who fought in the Second World War and who ended up in Europe.

You'll know how carefully they tend their graves and memorial sites [scroll down the page in that link to Halifax crash remembered 70 years on].

It's quite impressive.

[Frank adds: 15 Oct 1942: target Cologne:
Halifax W1108 NP-E of 158 Sqn. The Navigator, Sgt RB Fernie RAFVR, alone survived. (inset: post-1942 photo, Roy Fernie, Caterpillar badge on his tie)]

This of course was the next big influence in my life. Looked at better from this angle.

Now there were only two bad things that happened to me at Soham. One was on almost the first day. There, where that star is. I was bullied. I don't remember who it was ... but if I could find out (laughter) this would be the time to sort it out.

The second was ... at that time, Edward Armitage, who I loved very dearly, had his office there [where the arrow is] - later it was a classroom ... I had to go and see him and I walked into his office very nervously ... and farted (laughter).

Rod, please extend my apologies to the family.

Eventually, Edward, as we know, moved up to The Turret where he could watch all of us. Properly.

So there we are.

There is Ted. You notice that all of the nicknames are kind nicknames, they are affectionate names. You remember many of them.

I always used to read the sign at the entrance to the school. I didn't have to look this up. This is from memory after 58 years. It read 'Headmaster E.A. Armitage B.Sc (Lond), M.A. (Cantab), J.P.' I think. And that was when I decided I needed to get some letters behind my name (laughter).

Of course they were tough. Although I was privileged to see a softer side. Charlie Ford had a pretty intimate relationship with our family because Charlie and Sid Saunders used to meet with my Dad every Friday night for Bridge.

RAT - just his initials. We all adored RAT. These guys were really dedicated to the job. They believed in what they were doing. The nickname was an affectionate name, it was RAT (laughter).

Punch Lawrance had this aura of ... (someone calls out 'sadism' - laughter) ... aura of dominance ... but nevertheless he never hit anyone, and he was very, very devoted. He actually campaigned hard for his students, some people thought over-hard, but every student got top marks in the O Level exams with him. I admired that man greatly. He went on to be a Principal here at the Village College.

Then of course there is Slug Riley, a very wise man - he often came out with terrific wisdom, just such a genuine person.

Now Mr Tabraham didn't have a nickname as far as I know, he was much too correct (cries of 'Tabby') - Oh, he didn't for me. He was always in a suit. He loved technology. He always had a sharpened pencil in his top pocket. The mark of an engineer was the sharpened pencil in the top pocket. It was through him I grew to love technology and I grew to love that culture and discipline of technology, the precision of technology. Tabby would talk to us about the different uses of British Standard and Whitworth threads for ever and it was close to his soul.

Gordon is missing from this photo [he wasn't here then], Gordon Hemmings. He also had a big influence on my life, we'll talk about him later.

ACADEMIC STAFF 1953-54

Back: ACV Foster - CR Waller - KD Drake - G Phythian - L Kitchen - EH Tabraham
Middle: FK Webb - AF Pusey - E Quinn - AE Lawrance - RN Joiner - SR Saunders
Front: RA Taylor - TL Riley - E Armitage - CJ Ford - RL Thomas
source: School History

This guy wasn't a teacher but he had a huge influence on my life. John Dimmock.

Do you know what he did? He taught me how to put a plug on.

I'll explain to you. We used to do the lighting here in this hall.

He's reminded me we had a ladder and it wasn't quite tall enough and we used to put a box on top of it to reach the lights!

If you look on the third post back from the stage in here, there are still marks on the third post back on each side.
That's because Edward Armitage hated people to have shadows under their eyes so we had to put lights low down to demolish the shadows under their eyes. So we did that.

John had a big impact on my life because when we left here and I went to university at Sussex I was never a very good student, I really wasn't - I loved theatre lighting. I couldn't do theatre myself because I couldn't remember any lines, but I loved theatre and I loved lighting.

While at university, with two other guys that I studied with, we formed Gnome Lighting and we got the contract to do the special effects for Top of the Pops, which was the biggest audience show.

So for two years we used to go up to Shepherd's Bush every Wednesday and do the lighting for Top of the Pops and that was at just the time when they were starting to get psychedelic lighting.

We think we were the first people to do lighting tied automatically to the music and stuff.

We also did a thing called the Simon Dee Show and I also did lighting with Pink Floyd and Procul Harum in concert.

I was a roadie, right, I did the lighting and it used to take most of the week to prepare, so the marks suffered a little.

My sister, you may remember, was Head Girl at Ely High School when I was Head Boy here. Her name is Judie.

We both got places at Sussex University. Like most brothers and sisters, we did not always get on perfectly with each other (laughter). We are now the best of pals.

We went off to the same university, in the same Department, with the same personal tutor, amazingly. And the coincidences go on, run through our lives.

I won't mention all of them but at one point for a variety of reasons she ended up in apartment next door to me in Toronto and then she was offered a job in Los Angeles in the Cardiac Centre there which was a leading Centre for Cardiac Research.

My best friend was the Head of Cardiac Instrumentation there and I was offered the job of Head of Cardiac BioMechanics. The three of us would have worked together and none of us could tolerate it. We each had to be The Boss. The coincidence was quite extraordinary.

But anyway, coming back to this picture.

These are our graduation pictures. Despite all the lighting you'll see my sister has an 'arrow' through her head. The lighting for the photography was pretty awful. But you will notice that even though it was taken with the same set-up I did not have an arrow through my head.

And that's because my mother had the photograph doctored by a photographer who not only took out the arrow through my head but also shortened my hair. My hair was down to my shoulders (laughter).

I was rescued.

I had a personal tutor who thought my life was going to be wasted.

He sent me to a place called Chailey Heritage for my last Summer. It was a school for kids with disabilities, in the Sussex countryside. It was a school, cum hospital, cum home. At the time it was quite a shock to go there. There were kids with hydrocephalus, before we had shunts, they had huge heads. Kids were there as a result of Thalidomide, about 7 years old, their mothers had taken it.

I adore children. I became very attached to the Thalidomide kids. My job was to help develop artificial limbs for them. I was the first student there. There was one technician, one engineer, they had just started a laboratory there. There was no accommodation so they cleared one of the nursing unit offices on a ward as a bedroom for me. I'd be up in the middle of the night to help change the kids.

It was glorious there and I thought this is what I want to do. I want to use technology to try and work with these kids. So I went off to Glasgow [to do a PhD]

You may remember when I was here I wasn't very good at school sports. I couldn't catch a ball and I couldn't run. I used to love sailing. I used to sail at Ely with Stuart Porter and I continued to sail.

I found a six metre with some friends that was wrecked in Belfast at the time of the Troubles. We dragged it into the water and sailed it up the Clyde. We did some work on it, it was a famous boat. Then we sailed it across the North Sea up the Norwegian coast and up Hardanger Fjord, had some real adventures and then came back to the Shetlands.

It could have been the end of my life actually, twice by then, but by good fortune we survived these various adventures.

Ely Sailing Club

Our 6 metre boat

I went on to do high speed racing and was the North American Champion
- for one day - in the 505 Class (laughter).

A 505 Class race

I love sailing.

I now have a cottage in Toronto, which Alan Hill [also over from Toronto] will tell you is one of the good things about Toronto.

There are tough things about Toronto. There are eight months of winter, two of indifferent weather and two like a Chinese Laundry.

But what's great about it is that you can get away, not very far, about an hour and a half.

I get up there most weekends.

So this is my bay. That's my dock, my beach. You can't do that in Europe. And I have 13 old boats there.

A view of the dock from my cottage

And that's the Fall, the Autumn.

The colours there are just magnificent, really red, bright red.

And that's the Winter.

That's from a drone. I like to play with things that fly, as well.

So that's what it looks like in the Winter there.

I also like to build models. This is why I am not going to retire because for me retirement would be pretty dangerous. I love building models.

This is about an 8 foot wing span, it weighs 30 something odd pounds.

I'm not very good at flying but I spend a lot of time fixing them up. It's good that Dick [Bozeat] taught me some things to do with woodwork and stuff.

I fly them off the lake.

I even for while decided to learn hang-gliding, running off hills and cliffs.

Then I had kids and decided not to do it any longer because every single person in my class was in hospital except me. And I'd had a crash, sort of hurt myself a bit.

Now I do it in a much more sedate way. I'm taking my Pilot's Licence in a little Cessna.

I take it at an airport, this is Toronto, the Island Airport.

Here you are looking back from the Island Airport towards the city.

I live on the left hand side of this picture at the top of one of the buildings right close to the water.

by day

and at night

Not all of my life has been happy.

I had two children. One of them, Jason, had a playground accident at the age of eight. He had a serious head injury. He eventually graduated from university.

He was at home with us one day - there he is with my Mum, a very big guy - he had a seizure which we didn't witness and he died. So that was sad.

Many of you knew my sister. She lives in Maui [one of the Hawaiian islands] now.

This is from her house, looking over some of the best windsurfing water in the world.

That's her.

She has to decide every day whether she's going to paddle board, or windsurf and whether she'll windsurf with a foil on the bottom or not.

That's her [on the left] foiling about 20 inches above water height in a very, very high sea.

She's 67. She's the only woman that I know of in Hawaii who does windsurfing on a foil.

This is where I am. It's one of four hospitals that form part of the University Health Network [UHN] in Toronto.

I started the research there in 2003. We are now the top rehab research centre in the world - that's on the basis that we publish more than anywhere else, we are cited more than anywhere else.

We have grown very quickly.

My main concern is about growing old.

All the adverts talk about the joys of growing old, but you all know that growing old is crap (laughter).

It's not nice at all.

There are a lot of things we have to put up with.

It's better to celebrate it than not to grow old, but it is still hard work.

So I call them my customers. I don't call them my patients. Because I look after them as hospital patients but I am much more concerned not only about them but about preventing people from ever becoming patients, helping people to stay out in the community, living successfully on their own.

So the kind of people that I look after worry about things like What if I break my hip like my mother did? Who has a had a mother or father that broke their hip? Raise your hand. Look around, it's very common. Did any of those get back to walking normally? Well I can see one hand raised. You really don't want to fall over and break your hip.

I don't want to be a burden on my kids. No one wants to be a burden on their kids. At the moment I am particularly worried about the women in families. They are giving up their social lives, giving up their financial lives, giving up their freedom to look after their parents and their husbands.

In Toronto at least 29% of our population are caring for someone in need of care. This is not just looking after a kid, this is looking after a senior or a person with a disability, and that's going to grow.

I worry that they'll take my car keys away. People dread that.

I don't want to live in a nursing home. What we fear is that we live in a nice house, we've gathered together the mementoes of our kids, we are friendly with the neighbours, people come and visit us, we might golf or something - and we are scared that one day we will end up in a hospital and from hospital we'll end up in a nursing home.

We'll find ourselves in 200 square feet of a room sitting in the middle, in a wheelchair, waiting for someone to take us to the toilet. That's not what we want, right?

So that's really what I am about, what my Institute is about trying to prevent.

So in very large measure,
continued independence depends on the ability to
remain mobile,
independently mobile,
safely mobile.

In my Unit we explore balance, we explore hazards and how to help to keep people mobile.

This is one of the labs. It has a big flat floor that can move unexpectedly in various directions and we have studied how people cope with being put out of balance.

We can simulate a trip by pulling back suddenly, a slip by coming forward.

We can build structures on it and test various methods of preventing falls.

So there are various things which we have to do.

We worry about stairs, we worry about bathrooms, how we stand up, how we sit down, slipping on floors and certainly where I am, we have to worry about Winter.

There's a gerontologist in London, Professor Anthea Tinker, she sent her graduate students to older people living in their homes in England to ask them what they worried about.

What do you think they worried about? You should have a clue (laughter).

The first thing was they were not worried about their health, and it wasn't their money.

It was their stairs. More people were worried about their stairs than their health or their wealth.

They knew if they couldn't cope with them they would probably have to move into a bungalow or do something.

Stairs are the most common site of accidental falls.

One of the things my team has done, we have recently provided the evidence for changing the Building Code in Canada, making the steps a little bit deeper, only an inch and three quarters, but it trebles the safety of stairs. That doesn't affect you directly but all Building Codes eventually follow each other around the world.

We know in our little country, which has a third of the population of the UK, that will save 29 lives and 13,000 serious injuries in the first five years and 100,000 serious injuries by 2040.

So you can do big things, have a big effect, if you work on prevention.

We do a lot of things by modelling, we call it Biomechanics these days.

Bathrooms are very dangerous places, stepping in and out of bathtubs and showers.

So here is one of the platforms set up as a bathroom. This lady is holding on to a grab bar and she's able to get in if it is a vertical one, safely, and able to get out safely.

Here she is going to try and reach for the grab bar on the other side
.... and she falls.

So we are busy providing the evidence to change the Building Code in 2020 to make it mandatory to put in bathroom grab bars, in Canada and say how much strength they should have and where they should be.

I have 120 graduate students and postdocs.

They lead a fun life but they are sometimes a little adventurous.

They are doing their Masters and PhDs.

We model the various circumstances to produce the evidence we want to make these practical changes.

This is one of my labs. We have got 8 simulators.

This is HomeLab, it's on the 12th floor, built out of regular house materials.

We have hidden all sorts of things in the walls because in the future homes are going to become smarter, they are going to watch you all the time and check our health and call the right people and stuff.

While we are taking about mobility, this was many years ago - this wasn't my invention, it was invented in a province in the middle of Canada - but I commercialised it so you people could buy it.

It is simply a pole that wedges between the floor and the ceiling, like you see on construction sites. But it has got a gauge so you put the right pressure on and it doesn't damage the ceiling. You can put it anywhere.

It has turned out there's 150,000 to 200,000 of these (and knock-offs) sold a year now which make a huge difference to being able to get up and move around, because you don't have to have a grab bar against the wall.

You want to get up from your chair or you want to get down on the toilet and there was no easy way of putting in something to grab.