Michael Hession obituary

The Guardian

19-03-2025

My friend Michael Hession, who has died aged 85 of cancer, wrote a short biographical account in 2023 called A Sort of Life. He said that he had never aspired to be a Renaissance man, but he had been an individual of many parts: medical and political activist, publisher, photographer, light aircraft pilot, skier, cellist, farmer, concert promoter and more.
The title was a homage to the novelist Graham Greene, who used it to describe his painful, traumatic childhood. Michael's anger and hurt at his own childhood remained with him throughout his life.
Born in Blackheath, south-east London, he was the only child of Roy Hession, who described himself as a Christian evangelist, and Revel (nee Williams). He was educated at St Lawrence College, in Ramsgate, Kent, where he had been sent to board at the age of six; he said that he was beaten there.
After studying medicine at Christ's College, Cambridge, Michael went on to Barts hospital, London, and qualified as a junior hospital doctor in 1964. He was paid £28 a month for working more than 120 hours a week, and found this unbearable. He and a few others formed the Junior Hospital Doctors Action Committee.
He organised the first NHS protest against abysmal pay and working conditions in 1964-65. Perhaps enjoying representing doctors more than practising medicine, in 1966 he founded what became the British Journal of Hospital Medicine, an independent magazine funded by advertisements from pharmaceutical companies, to enable clinical doctors to keep up with research. This became a money earner, with a staff of 20, and Michael was persuaded in 1969 to sell up to the Thomson Press, who offered him more than 100 times the annual salary he paid himself. The BJHM is still published.
Making up for lost time, he and his wife, Mary (nee Coope), a solicitor whom he had met at a student 'hop' in 1960 and married the following year, enjoyed the money in spectacular fashion. He bought a Rolls-Royce. Then he learnt to fly, bought a Piper Aztec light aircraft and, in 1969, completed the BP England-Australia air race.
He became involved with politics and stood for Labour in the Bromley constituency of Ravensbourne in the February 1974 general election. Continuing to lobby government, he campaigned successfully for changes to the proposed legislation that became the Mental Health Act 1983, improving the rights of patients who had been sectioned.
In 1978 Michael and Mary, with their young family of three, moved to Dorstone House, in the Golden Valley, Herefordshire, on the Welsh border. They bought a 114-acre farm and Michael applied successfully for a senior post at the Mid Wales psychiatric hospital above Talgarth.
He was a first-class photographer, commissioned by the Hay festival to photograph celebrity speakers, one of whom was Lauren Bacall. Allegedly, the famous film star was tardy coming for her shoot, so the manager rang her room and announced that a psychiatrist was waiting to see her. This had the desired result.
Michael and Mary were self-confessed ski nuts. Tiring of the Alps, they took up heli-skiing in the Canadian Rockies.
He is survived by Mary, three children, Lloyd, Rowena and Ruth, and seven grandchildren.