Douglas Macmillan

Douglas Macmillan was born in Castle Cary, Somerset, in 1884, one of a large family, and went to London to work as a clerk in the civil service. He was a quiet, serious man: a vegetarian, a Christian and a campaigner against cruelty to animals, with no medical training and no money to speak of.

In 1911 his father, William, died of cancer. What stayed with Macmillan was not only the illness but the ignorance and fear around it, the lack of anywhere to turn for plain information, and the loneliness of the dying. That year he founded the Society for the Prevention and Relief of Cancer. Its aims were modest and practical: to give people honest information about the disease, to provide voluntary nurses to help patients at home, and to set up homes for those who could not be cared for by their families.

For years it was more a hope than an organisation. He ran it from his own home, paid its expenses from his salary, wrote its pamphlets and answered its letters himself in the evenings. Doctors were sceptical about a layman taking on cancer. Slowly, though, subscribers came, and in 1924 it was renamed the National Society for Cancer Relief.

He stayed in charge until the 1960s and died in 1969. The Macmillan nurses who now bear his name, going into homes to look after people with cancer and their families, were established in the 1970s, after his death, but they are exactly what he had asked for in 1911.