Herbert Lightfoot Eason

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Herbert Lightfoot Eason CB, CMG, MD, MS, FRCS. (15 July 1874 – 2 November 1949) President of the General Medical Council from 1939 and was Knighted in 1943 for his services to medicine.

Early life He was born on 15 July 1874 in Lewisham, the son of Mary Ann Moore and Edward Henry Physick Eason, an auctioneer and surveyor of Bishopsgate.

War service During the First World War on 13 September 1915 he was commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel into the Royal Army Medical Corps, and was appointed as Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon to Forces in the Egypt and Mediterranean Theatres of War from 1915 to 1919.

On 1 January 1917, he was created a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, for his distinguished services rendered during military operations in the Mediterranean Theatre at Gallipoli.

On 31 January 1918, he was further made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (Military Division), for his valuable services rendered in connection with military operations in Egypt.

On 1 July 1919, Eason relinquished his commission and retained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

While serving in Egypt he formed a life-long friendship with General (later Field-Marshal and 1st Viscount) Edmund Allenby, who Eason was to later describe as the greatest man he ever met in his long life of many distinguished contacts.

Personal life He married twice, firstly on 22 December 1908 at Bangor Parish Church in Ireland to the Honourable Harriette Ierne Maude Bingham (b.1882), the eldest daughter of John Bingham, 5th Baron Clanmorris. She died 11 January 1917 when Eason was away at war in Egypt, leaving a daughter, Diana Clare Eason, who was born on 11 March 1912 in Hanover Square, London.

He married, second, on 10 April 1920 at Southwark Cathedral, London to Margaret Wallace, the daughter of Robert G Wallace, an Estate Agent of Quidenham, Attleborough, Norfolk and they had two daughters.

Throughout the 1920s and 30s they lived at Guy's Hospital in the Superintendent's eighteenth-century house, although after its destruction by German Luftwaffe bombing in 1941, the family moved to their home at Newbridge Mill, Coleman's Hatch in Sussex.

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Herbert Lightfoot Eason died on 2 November 1949 at Nuffield House, Guy's Hospital. A memorial service to him was held in Guy's Hospital chapel on 11 November 1949, which was announced in the (London) Times. He also had a four-page obituary published in the British Medical Journal in January 1950, as well as his obituary appearing in numerous other medical publications in the UK and also widely in the USA.