Brian Bagnall

I was the smallest and probably youngest member of the class, certainly the most immature. During my two years at Fort Street OC my parents separated and I had major surgery over Xmas 1952 to repair a congenital hernia. These painful misfortunes were offset by the joy of being in this wondrously happy class of boys and girls who had somehow answered two days of “intelligence tests” the right way to be selected for the undefined “opportunity" of being quarantined from ordinary school kids at the exclusive sports-free Fort Street fortress, surrounded by a massive curved moat hewn out of sheer sandstone.

Despite my poor Leaving Certificate results, I somehow got a scholarship to go to “Uni” where I studied veterinary science for five years and had a lot of fun. In 1964 I went into clinical practice in Wollongong but returned to Sydney University to get the higher education I had previously resisted by teaching in the blood and guts veterinary surgery department. I then went to the UK in 1967 to see more of the world and told my mother I’d be away just a year. I never returned to work in Australia again. I was lucky to get another clinical teaching job in the vet school at Cambridge University and soaked up music and beauty in the historic city. I got married there in 1969 to a vivacious English girl and in 1971-72 we spent a year in Vienna where I did some irrelevant graduate study in veterinary dermatology and learned to speak passable German. I returned to Sydney in 1972-75 to do a Ph D at the university and there we had our 4first son. We went back to the UK and, after some postdoctoral work and the birth of our second son, I got a job in the pharmaceutical industry.

I spent 27 years with the company, now GlaxoSmithKline, in a wide variety of intriguing technical, marketing, government affairs and public relations jobs in both animal and human health that took me all over the world. In 1980 they relocated me to the USA in the Philadelphia area where I still reside and am now a US citizen. I retired at the end of 2003 and have finally rediscovered my Fort Street creative side by singing in a men’s choir and a G&S operetta.

My 20-year marriage ended in 1989 after I told my wife, who I adored, that I thought I was really gay. After a year trying to cope with this marital bombshell, we ended with an acrimonious divorce and much needless family estrangement. We only reconciled when she got a brain tumor and then died in 1999. My 32 year-old son Clive lives in the area with his young wife and my 30 year-old son Peter lives in Indianapolis as a single parent with three kids aged 4 –10, who I rarely see. For the past 15 years I have lived with my partner Michael, also a foreign-born veterinarian, and we have enjoyed the best of domestic suburban life with many exotic travel vacations.

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