Krogman, Director and my mentor, said to me ''Jim Tanner is on his way to San Francisco to the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development where he'll deliver the SRCD's first Harold E. Jones Memorial Lecture (Tanner, 1963). He is in Philadelphia today and will give a lecture this afternoon. Do you want to come with me?'' I of course said yes. After the lecture, as Krogman and I walked out into a cold, drizzly winter afternoon, I said to Krogman: ''I'm going to spend a year in London with him.'' Krogman agreed that would be an excellent thing to do. It took almost 4 years to get funding and make arrangements for a postdoctoral fellowship but in early September, 1966, my wife, three children, and I were met at Heathrow by Bill Marshall, Tanner's deputy at the Institute of Child Health, and taken to the house in Harpenden we had rented.
The year at the ICH was a transforming one. Professor Tanner had assembled what was the most comprehensive and outstanding department of growth and development in the world, one not likely ever to be surpassed. His department included, among others, Bill Marshall, pubertal development; Nick Blurton-Jones, ethology of children; Harvey Goldstein, statistics; John Dobbing, neurochemistry; Phyllis Eveleth, anthropology; Derek Gupta, endocrinology, and, of course, the inimitable Reg Whitehouse, Tanner's right hand man. Reg took all of the anthropometric data, plotted by hand all of the growth curves-individuals and groups-and played a major role in the development of the 1966 British growth standards along with his successor, Noel Cameron.
In addition to the research carried out the Institute of Child Health, Jim held a growth disorder clinic at the adjacent Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, every Wednesday in the 60s and early 70s, twice weekly afterwards. There he saw children and youth whose growth and/or maturation were failing or otherwise abnormal. In the majority of cases, the cause was endocrinal, most often pituitary. The interplay between the Institute's database of growth records of normal children and youth and the long-term records of others with developmental abnormalities provided an unexcelled opportunity to understand the range of variation that was observed, analyzed and, where necessary, treated.
James Tanner died on 11 August, 2010, at the age of 90. His death signaled the end of a career that led from Marlborough College, in Wiltshire, to a unanimous recognition as the world's foremost authority on human growth and development. The breadth and depth of his contributions to this area of knowledge are unexcelled and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.