Obituary: Memories of Ron Britton

When Ron Britton died, aged 93 on 25th August last year, I lost a colleague, a co-writer and a dear friend. We first met at a conference. I remember listening to a paper by Elizabeth Spillius, and when we chatted over tea afterwards, we discovered that we both liked jogging. From that time on, for the next 45 years, we met weekly for a jog, followed by orange juice, later reduced to a walk, and for the last year or two when Ron’s Parkinson’s disease slowed him down, we met for coffee. At first, Hannah Segal disapproved of the running, seeing it as a narcissistic devotion to the body, but she was reassured when she heard that we talked as we ran. In fact, after the usual family issues, we mostly talked about psychoanalysis and rehearsed many of our ideas as we jogged. Often this meant that we were not sure in whose mind a particular idea had originated – we emulated Bermondsey Market where, by an ancient law, the provenance of items could not be established – and we agreed that when mentioned on Hampstead Heath, the ideas were shared between us. Later David Taylor, and for a time Robin Anderson, also joined us. Ron loved watching horse racing and made detailed predictions based on form, but his passion was Manchester United, and he analysed each match with the eye of an expert.

We did write one paper together, when we were impressed by Bion’s description of a selected fact that made sense in observation, while acknowledging that the sense of certainty could be due to an over-valued idea. We each provided a clinical example and we gave this paper at a conference at West Point Military College in New York. We were even confused with each other at times, as when an American colleague came up to me and said he thought that my paper and John Steiner’s were the best of the meeting.

Later, when Michael Feldmann organised the West Lodge annual conferences, Ron and I joined him and gave papers together for over 25 years, latterly joined by Priscilla Roth, whose American, femini