Fighting for the lives of local people

Jan 8 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

The North West Cancer Research Fund celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.Emma Pinch finds out how it all began

CONTRACTING cancer in 1948 was grim news on every front. Before you survived your disease, you had to survive your cure. Sufferers faced a crude scalpel job on the affected area, or basting big chunks of bone, skin and organ in radioactive rays.

It was early days, but scientists were excited about their breakthroughs with radium, an extract of uranium ore. They could see themselves mastering this rapacious disease within the decade, and their optimism lit the imagination of a group of altruistic Liverpool city professionals.

With perfect timing, it was announced that Bevan’s fledgling NHS was going to provide funds for hospitals, so the Friends of The Radium Institute, on Myrtle Street, which included treasurer Curig Roberts, decided to direct their fundraising towards research.

Roberts, manager of the Westminster Bank, on Castle Street, started raising money for a cancer cure, and enlisted the help of judge and former Army colonel Graeme Bryson to iron out wrangles from traditionalist Friends, who wanted the money spent on gifts and books for patients.

It wasn’t long before Bryson, too, became an evangelist for the charity.

“We were full of confidence that we would find the cause,” remembers Col Bryson OBE, who lives in Formby. “That was our thing – ‘let us find the cause of cancer’. So many wonderful things had been discovered over the past years, like penicillin, that we thought it was just around the corner. We all worked with tremendous confidence.”

The influential pair, along with Francis Goodacre, advertised in local press, wrote to doctors, churches, libraries and banks in an appeal for funds.

Whenever someone showed an interest in their cause, the two men would head off with their wives to mount a charm offensive and turn curiosity into enthusiasm.

“At the time, the only thing we could have was radium or the saw, but the trouble with radium was that it wasn’t very successful, because it killed off the cancer and everything else as well,” says Jackson. “As often as not you died from it because it wasn’t specific.”

Their fundraising missions ranged from Lancaster down through the Lune Valley and on through Southport, Wirral and Cheshire to Bangor in North Wales.

“The charity’s mission captured the imagination of people after the war,” explains Bryson. “People wanted to fund the charity’s cause.”

Their dedication saw them create 30 branches of the NWCRF, which incorporates the Friends of the Radium Institute, knots of volunteers raising awareness of the charity’s work and money in their areas.

Life President Col Bryson OBE, also life president of Liverpool’s British Legion, has personally raised thousands of pounds, and much more via his expansive sphere of influence.

He has organised a concert at the Philharmonic with Ken Dodd, which raised £12,000 and £3,000 from a volume of family poetry he compiled. Judi Dench has long been a supporter, as was the 18th Earl of Derby, and the Gladstones, who received the committee for tea every year.

To date, the charity has donated £400m to research. There are normally 30 projects under way at any one time, with each receiving an average of £95,000 for a three-year study.

Recently, it funded the installation of eminent scientist Francis Barr as chairman of molecular oncology at Liverpool University, formerly of the world- famous Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, in Munich.

Key to the charity’s appeal is its focus on keeping close to grass roots local givers and fund raisers, and a steadfast focus on giving money directly to scientists in regional university labs. Anne Jackson, who has just been appointed the new chief executive, and was formerly marketing chief for the charity, said those tenets distinguished NWCRF from some sprawling national and international charities.