125 stories for 125 years

F.C. Kent

Francis Claude Kent had been C.L. Butchers’ assistant since 1913. When Butchers died in 1941, Claude took over Butchers’ role as secretary of the society, registrar of the Pharmacy Board of Victoria as well as editor of The Australian Journal of Pharmacy. He resigned from many of these roles in 1965.

Like Butchers, Kent was not a pharmacist but had been working for the Victorian establishment since 1920. He initiated a number of improvements – financial rewards commensurate with responsibility, specification of requirements for premises, training of apprentices, liaison with associated professions and the improvement of professional pharmaceutical services.

In July 1962 a dinner was held to commemorate Claude’s 50 years in pharmacy. Three years later, he retired. At his retirement dinner Nigel Manning said, ‘Claude had this ability to see the good in you and not the bad.’ He admired Kent’s simple and trusting view of human nature.

Some 230 pharmacists and their friends gathered for this celebration, held at Melbourne’s Hotel Windsor. Those present had come because Claude had just retired from a number of important positions – Secretary of the Pharmaceutical Society of Victoria, Registrar of the Pharmacy Board of Victoria and, among other offices, secretary of the Pharmaceutical Association of Australasia. Although it was intended he should continue for one year, he did not retire as editor of the AJP until the end of 1968. In 1965 he had been working for pharmaceutical organisations for more than 52 years.

When he spoke he said, ‘Pharmacists are a peculiar people. I do not mean that in the sense of their being queer or odd – not all of them anyway – but somehow different. From the beginning of time they have been beset by problems. The profession always seems to have been at the cross-roads or meeting a crisis or facing some emergency. Pharmacy has experienced its days of triumph and its days of defeat … Among pharmacists there have always been those who have been prepared to dedicate themselves and this devotion to a cause is, I believe, that almost indefinable something which attracts people to pharmacy and binds them to it.’