Andrew Tickell: Remembering a friend who cared so deeply about people

I first met Alison 10 years ago. She’d just taken up her chair in medical law and ethics at Glasgow Caledonian University. I was a newbie lecturer, just learning the ropes. We became fast friends. News of her death has been widely reported, focusing on her important work for the Scottish Government investigating the impact of transvaginal mesh implants, which have caused life-changing harm to the women involved.

I guarantee that Alison would be mortified by the idea of being the subject of glowing eulogies. She’d be mortified to read this too, I reckon. She preferred receiving praise backhanded, preferably with a satirical self-deprecating edge. She hated what she described as “simpering” – and simperers generally. So I will aim to do her justice here – without simpering.

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Alison was a fun, formidable, forward, gusty kind of person. She combined humour, empathy and forthrightness. She had that decent streak of wickedness through her which Scottish culture is right to celebrate. She had an excellent cackle – described by her family as her “braying laugh”.

This charismatic front meant that many people didn’t notice her insecurities – particularly the many younger people she mentored and supported, folk who saw her just as a pillar of strength. It was a privilege to grow to know a bit more about those over our 10 years of friendship, seeing something of her self-doubt as well as the assured performances, watching how impressively she grew into the role of professor as her personal qualities – that sharp eye for people, the gusto, the gab, the emotional intelligence – were recognised and valued by those she worked with.

Alison had a real moral seriousness to her. It is one of my favourite qualities in people. I don’t mean she was solemn. Anything but. But she really thought about people. It is remarkable how few folk you can really say that about. Much of the time, people can be too preoccupied by our own reactions, our own feelings, ourselves, to look and see and reflect on those around us.

I saw first-hand how much it mattered to her to make a success of her two recent reports for the Scottish Government – both focusing on her specialist area of medical law and responses to the women whose lives were ruined by transvaginal mesh implants and subsequent failures by medics and officialdom to recognise the harm they’d done.

She didn’t just want to do right by these women. She understood that it isn’t enough to listen to people – she also wanted them to feel heard, however challenging this might prove, whatever emotional commitment from her was required to make that happen, however unpopular her conclusions might be – with clinicians or the Scottish Government. This took courage. It wasn’t easy.

The role made powerful demands of Alison’s resilience, anxious to get it right, daily exposed to the deeply felt emotions of people whose lives had been irreparably damaged by the NHS treatment they received and the refusal to accept responsibility for those failures. She felt this keenly.

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When news of her death was reported, Elaine Holmes of the Scottish Mesh Survivors group told the Sunday Post that Alison “was an outstanding champion not only for the women whose lives were devastated by mesh, but also for patients everywhere as she fought for change and transparency. Without her fearless examination of the facts, and exposé of what happened, many women today would still not be aware of the truth.”

But it was the second part of this tribute which I reckon Alison would have been proudest of: “Professor Britton was peerless professionally, but at the same time she had a deep concern for patients which was at the centre of everything she did.” Considering how many times women like Elaine Holmes have been let down and left alienated by people notionally appointed to have a care for them and what happened to them, Alison was determined not to.

Alison was only able to make this difference because she was not an orthodox character. This was one of the joys of her personality. She wasn’t peerlessly professional in the ordinary sense of that phrase. She wasn’t proper, or prim, or professorial – in the didactic, pompous meaning of the term.

She only rolled out what I called her professorial voice at graduations when she was reading out the names of new students passing out with their degrees – and unlike many presenters who dial-in this critical moment, fumbling their way unsuccessfully through the diverse names of students now graduating from Scottish institutions, Alison was always anxious to get things right, understanding just what it meant to students and their families to hear their own names ringing out bright and clear as they crossed the stage in the Royal Concert Hall celebrating their achievements. It might seem like a small thing. She understood it isn’t.

With Alison, intense seriousness about what she was doing was seamlessly spliced with frankness and irreverence. We loved her for that. So did her students, generations of whom explored complex, emotive issues of medical law with her, conceiving a passion for the subject, asking themselves big questions about autonomy, choice and consent. In this, she excelled.

I don’t know if Norman MacCaig wrote his poem In Praise Of A Man with inspiring teachers in mind, but for me, the first two verses of the poem have always captured what the best people do in their classrooms.

He went through a company like a lamplighter – see the dull minds, one after another, begin to glow, to shed a beneficent light.

He went through a company like a knifegrinder – see the dull minds scattering sparks of themselves, becoming razory, becoming useful.

I’ve always liked MacCaig’s use of the word “themselves” here. Alison would approve too, I think. Universities talk a lot about impact. In the orthodox version, academics’ world-leading research should shape policy, change society, make law – as if churning out low-circulation publications in specialist journals for specialist audiences is the fulcrum around which human progress really turns.

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But as Adam Tomkins pointed out recently, the biggest impact teachers have is on their students. Reports can moulder on the shelf, unimplemented. Journal articles are published but unread. Too many academics think they’re saying something interesting by saying “teaching is the price I pay for my research”, or imagine their lazy indifference to teaching well is somehow a marker of more elevated minds.

Alison was always more involved in mankind – giving evidence on countless bills, advising MSPs, talking to government, engaging with civic society, making generations of students feel heard, listened to, valued and supported. She was out there – in every sense of the term. As news of Alison’s passing filtered out through our community, it was like watching a slow latticework of cracks blooming across a pane of glass, reaching further and further, across the institution, down the years, bringing back faces and names of students past, who knew her, to whom she made a difference with a kind word, a critical question or simply through the passionate concern she brought to teaching her subject, recruiting the students’ enthusiasm, lighting lamps, shedding sparks.

There is so much more you could say. Alison had a spirit of adventure and physical courage which continues to baffle me – a spirit I know she’s passed on to her daughter Tasha. Alison’s feet carried her over much of Scotland – both running and walking.

They toured her up and down the Lake District – to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and even Everest’s base camp in Nepal just a few years ago. She wore all these physical achievements lightly. If you saw her attacking a cake or uncorking a second bottle, you should be forgiven for forgetting what a sturdy athlete she proved herself to be.

All the euphemisms for death we use in our culture – passed away, passed on, no longer with us – fall indescribably short of the medicalised strangeness of our modern deathways. It feels almost like a kidnapping – as if Death has physically abducted your friend and bodily carried them off, leaving only token aftermaths and painful little mindings of them – a name on an empty office door, undelivered letters, the familiar splash of colour of a jacket, hung up for good.

Professor Alison Britton was a vital spark. It’s this vividness which makes her death so unbelievable, so painful and still so strange. If there are consolations, they’re these – we’ll see her tracks still in the snow of the world for a long time yet. But most of all – as students, colleagues, family and friends – we’ll miss her.