Obituary: Sir Brian Warren

Brian Warren was one of the most prominent and fashionable London general practitioners of his day. It was his wit, warmth and no-nonsense wisdom (to which as his son-in-law for 15 years, I was privy) that made him so popular a doctor among his largely well-to-do patients, many of whom also inevitably became his lifelong friends.

Not least among them was Sir Edward Heath, who first became his patient as a young post-war Tory MP, and with whom Warren travelled the world a quarter of a century later as personal physician to the prime minister for four heady years. When Heath visited China in May 1974 it was his doctor and close friend whom he left behind to supervise the safe passage to London Zoo of two giant pandas, in the vain hope that they might breed in captivity.

Political soulmates, who differed only over Heath's need to lose weight, prime minister and physician also shared a profound passion for music - happily symbolised during the Downing Street years by the after-dinner madrigals laid on by Warren's other son-in-law, Martin Neary, organist and choirmaster of Winchester Cathedral, then Westminster Abbey. The Martin Neary Singers recently made a nostalgic return to Downing Street at the dinner hosted by John Major in honour of Heath's 80th birthday.

Born in Toddington, Bedfordshire in 1914, the elder son of an East Anglian gentleman farmer, Warren inherited from his mother a lifelong love of the countryside in all its aspects. A countryman at heart, forced to live, work and garden primarily in the city, he could always identify the rarest bird and the most obscure flower. His knowledge of literature and music was as formidable, combining with his personal style to create an elegant gentleman of an unasham-edly old school, proud of main- taining immaculate standards in every department of his life.

He might well have been a soldier or a politician rather than a general practitioner. From Bishop's Stortford School he went to University College, London, to read History, only later transferring to Medicine at University College Hospital. At this time he met the talented young doctor whom he married in 1942, Josephine Barnes (now Dame Josephine, one of Brit-ain's most distinguished gynaecologists), with whom he had two daughters and a son. She was to be the first of Warren's two wives; after their divorce in 1964 he married a fellow Westminster councillor, Anne Marsh, with whom he had two more sons before her untimely death in 1983.

The majority of Warren's distinguished war service, which earned him a mention in despatches, was spent on active service as medical officer to the 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards. Among the first troops to enter Berlin in 1945, he was then transferred to Bonn as Deputy Director of Medical Services with the Guards Armoured Division.

But his first child had already been born, and the following year he reluctantly left the military life he so relished, bought and restored a tumbledown house in Belgravia, and set up the consulting rooms which soon became the hub of a fast-growing, highly successful practic. Never too much of a health fanatic, he was more of a common-sense doctor, believing quite literally that a little of what you fancy does you good. His tirelessly sympathetic bedside manner also helped to turn demanding patients into friends.

As well as Heath, his early patients included the then editor of the Times, Sir William Haley, and other rising young Tories such as Enoch Powell. With the arrival of the National Health Service in 1948, Warren's political convictions led him to remain in private practice, as well as running for Westminister City Council, which he served with distinction for 30 years, many as chairman of the health committee. In 1959, after four years as a local councillor, he made his one attempt to become an MP, with an inevitably doomed assault on Marcus Lipton's Labour stronghold in Brixton.

By the 1970s, when his old friend Ted Heath was elected to Downing Street, Warren was already a familiar and popular figure at senior Tory gatherings. On Heath's first day in office, he was summoned to attend to a cigarette burn inflicted by a dissident in the crowd as the new Prime Minister arrived at Tory Central Office. In Brussels, 18 months later, he was again on hand when an assailant threw a pot of printer's ink at the prime minister as he arrived to sign the Treaty of Accession. Knighted in Heath's farewell honours in 1974, Warren remained characteristically loyal to his old friend during the trials of the Thatcher years, while also maintaining friendships with other senior Tories who survived the transition, notably Lords Whitelaw and Pym.

Not until the late 1970s did Warren begin to wind down his practice, gradually returning to his first loves of reading and music, gardening and travel. As a doctor with long experience of elderly patients, he knew all too well the signs of his own failing powers. Over the last few months, with typical style, he bid a series of fond, unsentimental farewells to friends and family.

Anthony Holden

Harold Brian Seymour Warren, general practitioner: born Toddington, Bedfordshire 19 December 1914; Personal Physician to the Prime Minister 1970-74; kt 1974; married 1942 Josephine Barnes (marriage dissolved 1964; one son, two daughters), 1964 Anne Marsh (died 1983; two sons); died London 18 August 1996.