Doctor Lark

Doctor Lark is Bill Larkworthy, a man with a sharp eye for the humorous side of the human condition. He has had two careers as a doctor, the first a twenty-year stint in the Royal Air Force, the second an equally adventurous and eventful time in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Doctor Lark combines humour with astute observation and comment for an insider’s view of military, social and medical developments of the last half century.

Doctor Lark is Bill Larkworthy, a man with a sharp eye for the humorous side of the human condition. He has had two careers as a doctor, the first a twenty-year stint in the Royal Air Force, the second an equally adventurous and eventful time in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. In more than forty years and a variety of countries, he has treated the great and the good, the fit and the fat, heroes, villains and a fair assortment of life’s oddballs, many of whom enliven the pages of his memoir, Doctor Lark. Characters such as the gnome-like undertaker’s assistant in Belgium, the stoic Gurkhas in Malaysia, the retired RAF air vice-marshal who carried the Queen’s head in his stomach, ‘Betty Boobs’ who caused mayhem by jogging around the staff compound in Riyadh, the American doctor who enlisted Russian Mafia help to disappear in Moscow… Doctor Lark combines humour with astute observation and comment for an insider’s view of military, social and medical developments of the last half century.

Bill Larkworthy was born in 1933 in Plymouth, UK, and spent much of his early childhood growing up in the exciting and threatening times of the Second World War. Although from a relatively poor background, he made it to university and became a doctor. He spent nearly twenty years in the medical branch of the Royal Air Force and then almost a quarter of a century in the Middle East. He specialised and achieved such a reputation that he was headhunted to work in the Royal Hospital in Saudi Arabia where he experienced the zenith of his career, as a physician to the King and Royal Family, and the nadir, when he was thrown in jail by the megalomaniacal medical director of his hospital. His last fifteen years were spent in the Persian Gulf, in Sharjah and Dubai. He retired to France in 2001 and lives contentedly with his wife, Maria, amid the vines of Provence