Clement-Jones family 12/22 - Person Sheet
Clement-Jones family 12/22 - Person Sheet
NamePatrick Dacre TREVOR-ROPER, 7018
Birth1916
Death2004
Notes for Patrick Dacre TREVOR-ROPER
Patrick Trevor-Roper (7 June 1916 - 22 April 2004), British eye surgeon and pioneer gay rights activist, was one of the first people in the United Kingdom to "come out" as openly gay, and played a leading role in the campaign to repeal the UK's anti-gay laws. He was born in Northumberland, the son of a doctor, and the brother of historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. He was educated at Cambridge University and the Westminster Medical School. During World War II he served in the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps in the Mediterranean. After the war he became a specialist in ophthalmic surgery, and divided his working life between work in public hospitals and a lucrative private practice in London.[1]
In 1955 Trevor-Roper agreed to appear as a witness before the Wolfenden Committee, which had been appointed by the British government to investigate (among other things) whether male homosexuality should remain a crime. He was one of only three men who could be found to appear as openly-gay witnesses before the Committee. The others were the journalist Peter Wildeblood (who had been convicted of a homosexual offence) and Carl Winter, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Trevor-Roper told the Wolfenden Committee that the majority of gay men led normal and well-adjusted lives, posed no threat to children or public morality, and that homosexuality was not a physical or mental illness. He pointed out that the existing laws did nothing but encourage blackmailers. He argued that the age of consent should be lowered to 16, and told the committee that many young gay men committed or attempted suicide because of isolation or depression induced by homophobia.

These were highly controversial views in the 1950s. Trevor-Roper's testimony helped persuade the Committee to recommend that male homosexuality should be decriminalised, which was finally done, after a long political struggle, in 1967.

Trevor-Roper remained an active gay rights activist, campaigning in particular for the abolition of the discriminatory age of consent laws. (The 1967 law set the age of consent for male homosexuals at 21, while the heterosexual age of consent was 18.) When the AIDS epidemic appeared in the early 1980s, Trevor-Roper was one of the founders of the Terrence Higgins Trust, the United Kingdom's leading AIDS service organisation, which held its first meeting at his home.

The other cause to which Trevor-Roper devoted himself was better access to ophthalmic medicine, both in the United Kingdom and in African countries. He campaigned successfully for the repeal of British laws which prevented the sale of cheap spectacles, against the resistance of the opticians' lobby. In 1983, he helped finance Peter Risdon in his successful challenge to the opticians' monopoly in the UK, a challenge that led directly to the legalisation of the sale of reading glasses without prescription. He founded the Haile Selassie Eye Hospital in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, and assisted in the founding of similar hospitals in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. He was also active in heritage conservation causes in the United Kingdom.


From the Telegraph

Patrick Trevor-Roper

12:01AM BST 29 Apr 2004

Patrick Trevor-Roper, who has died aged 87, was a leading ophthalmic surgeon with wide-ranging interests and a social reach unusual in a modern doctor.
Long associated with Moorfields Eye Hospital, the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers and the Westminster Hospital in London, Trevor-Roper was not a pioneer of new methods or treatments; but he was a leader of his profession, the author of a standard work on ophthalmology and an influential teacher.
He was also the author of a beautifully written book, The World Through Blunted Sight (1971). This looked at the way artists' eye defects and illnesses have affected their work; he examined El Greco's astigmatism, Durer's squint and Turner's cataracts as well as Renoir's myopia.

Professional scientists had their reservations, suggesting that Trevor-Roper had not considered how painters with eye defects compensated for what they saw when they executed their work; they also pointed out that the artists whose spectacles Trevor-Roper had examined had worn them only in later life.
Nevertheless, his handsomely illustrated book, enriched by stimulating talk over the tables of the Athenaeum and Beefsteak clubs, ran to three editions and has continued to exercise fascination.

Trevor-Roper never made any secret of his homosexual inclinations, even at a time when homosexuality was still a crime. He and his Suffolk neighbour, Angus Wilson, gave evidence to Sir John Wolfenden's Home Office committee on homosexual offences and prostitution in the mid-1950s.
Trevor-Roper's claim that homosexuality was innate, and not the result of "seduction" or "recruitment", helped to persuade the committee, and thus the government, to agree to the decriminalisation of homosexual activity between consenting adults. Later in life, however, he was no campaigner for the homosexual cause.

Patrick Hugh Dacre Trevor-Roper was born on June 7 1916, the son of the Duke of Northumberland's general practitioner at Alnwick and the younger brother of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who became Lord Dacre of Glanton. Young Pat went to Charterhouse as a senior classics scholar, then won an exhibition to Clare College, Cambridge, before going to the Westminster Hospital.

During the Second World War he specialised in eye surgery after sharing an air-raid shelter with a celebrated eye surgeon who told him that he was not clever enough to succeed in some branches of medicine, "but you'll get to the soul of a person through his eyes".
Trevor-Roper joined the New Zealand army in the Mediterranean, and was wounded during the Italian campaign. He had the satisfaction of being one of the first Allied soldiers to step off a landing craft on to St Mark's Square in Venice.

On returning home, he steadily built up his practice, serving on the ophthalmology committee of the BMA and becoming a founding member of the International Committee of Ophthalmology. He produced a much-translated textbook for students and The Eye and its Disorders; he also gave the Sir William Bowman Lectures on eye operations.

All this went with an anarchic streak which led him to be an influential critic of the opticians' monopoly over spectacles; he emphasised his opposition by attending spectacle-makers' dinners.

Being free of the encumbrances of family life, Trevor-Roper was able to travel widely, often combining lecture trips and consultations with expeditions around the world. He made several visits to Borneo and Nigeria, as well as to Malawi, where he called on the former London GP Hastings Banda, who had made a second career as his country's president.
Trevor-Roper helped to set up an eye hospital in Abyssinia for the Emperor Haile Selassie, and many years after Selassie's fall was asked back. Among his companions were Ian Fleming's widow Anne, who travelled with him to Africa, and the Marchioness of Dufferin, who shared a journey with him to the Falklands and up the Amazon.

When a Washington gallery mounted an exhibition of pictures by a chimpanzee, Trevor-Roper's sense of mischief led him to organise, with artist Mervyn Levy and zoologist Desmond Morris, an exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall. This contained pictures by two chimpanzees, an orang-utan, a boy of three and a boy of 15 months.

Despite its derisory treatment by the tabloids, Trevor-Roper also had a serious purpose: he was interested in the role which consciousness played in art. This led him to experiment with the drug LSD under close medical supervision; afterwards, he described the experience as a trip down to Hell and then up to Heaven.

At the same time, Trevor-Roper was keenly interested in his ancestry. When he heard that Plas Teg in Flintshire, the 17th-century Trevor family home, was to be pulled down, he bought it, did some restoration work, then sold it.

For many years he kept his consulting rooms in a large house in Regent's Park, just north of Harley Street, and it was said that some of his older patients went for check-ups not out of clinical necessity but for the excellence of his conversation.

After some years enjoying a weekend cottage in rural Suffolk, he moved to Dorset, taking the place of Eardley Knollys, of the National Trust, in the foursome that included Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Raymond Mortimer, at Long Crichel House, Dorset.
This handsome former rectory housed a well-balanced quartet, with their staff but no personal companions, in some elegance. Its air of congenial bickering over facts is well caught in the diaries of Frances Partridge.

Pat Trevor-Roper, who died on April 22, was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Zoological Society. He discouraged patients from having operations whenever possible, joking that he agreed with Christian Scientists in disapproving of hospitals and medicine.
Share:
Last Modified 18 Feb 2012Created 4 Mar 2023 using Reunion for Macintosh