EWINS, Arthur James 1882-1957. Chemist. Dr Ewins helped cure Churchill of pneumonia during WW2. He lived in Herne Hill and in East Dulwich as a boy and attended Alleyn’s School.
Born in February 1882, the eldest of two boys, Arthur James Ewins was the son of a labourer and signalman. The family lived in Herne Hill before moving to East Dulwich, first to Pellatt Road and then to Crebor Street. In 1894 he won one of the first LCC scholarships to Alleyn’s School where he was given the nickname ‘Uncle’ and captained the Second XI football team. While still at school he was recommended by Dr Baker, then Chemistry Master at Dulwich College, later Alleyn’s headmaster, to become a technician at the Wellcome Research Laboratories, then newly located at Brockwell Hall in what is now Brockwell Park. Dr Walter Dowson, Wellcome’s director, was keen to recruit high-calibre secondary school boys to be laboratory technicians to work alongside his qualified staff while studying for a degree at night school. Many of these boys were from Alleyn’s and Baker must have had a keen eye as several like Ewins and his contemporary, Alexander Glenny, also an LCC scholarship boy, both went on to have illustrious careers in medical research.
When Ewins joined Wellcome in 1899, it was chiefly concerned with immunological research. However, the calibre of people Dowson attracted, together with the freedom he gave them, meant that Ewins obtained a BSc in 1906. He then worked for Dowson’s replacement, Sir Henry Dale, and secured a doctorate in 1914. That year Dale went to run what is now the Medical Research Council. Ewins followed in 1916 and in fact Dale hired so many Wellcome staff that his replacement made a complaint. One researcher talked of the ‘academic poker’ played by his current and prospective bosses - higher salary, better equipment, bigger labs were all on the table until, at the end, a bedroom-study was offered for late nights. Dale trumped this by offering ‘breakfast in bed’ and Ewins duly made the move to Dale’s team.
During WW1 Ewins was working on quebrachine, isolated from the quebracho bark, when an urgent message came through from the Front in Flanders, asking for information about the possible impact of quebracho bark on the water supply. Ewins’ team knew that quebracho bark, stripped of its toxicity, was used in the tanning industry in that area of Flanders and found that the Germans had commandeered some barges and tipped the bark overboard. It was Ewins’ chemical identification which reassured the military top brass that the men at the Front were not about to be poisoned.
The war created additional fields of research for the team. Salvarsan, the ‘magic bullet’ treatment for syphilis and the most widely prescribed drug in the world at the time, had up until then only been produced in Germany. Dale and Ewins were charged with producing a synthetic equivalent and manufacturing it in large quantities. They also developed new standards for its safe use, standards which were enshrined in law after the war.
Ewins’ research interests brought him into contact with another chemical and drug maker, May & Baker, and he went to work for them in 1917, eventually becoming their Director of Research. It was at May & Baker that he and his team discovered sulphapyridine, the first effective treatment for acute pneumonia, of which the British Medical Journal said, ‘It is to Ewins that we owe the important step of making the first chemotherapeutic substance effective in this prevalent disease, the successful treatment of which has probably done more to increase the span of life than any other therapeutic measure.’ Known originally as M&B 693, sulphapyridine was credited with cutting the death rate from pneumonia from 70% to under 20% and was also used in the treatment of gangrene in war wounds, meningitis and other diseases. The name M&B 693 caught the public’s imagination, and any similar drug became known simply as M&B. It was used to treat Winston Churchill’s pneumonia during WW2 and in a wartime broadcast Churchill acknowledged its efficacy, saying ‘this admirable M&B, from which I did not suffer any inconvenience, was used at the earliest moment; and after a week's fever, the intruders were repulsed.’ When Churchill found that the drug could be taken with alcohol, he commented to his nurse, ‘Pray remember that man cannot live by M&B alone.’
Ewins worked at May & Baker for the rest of his career and another of his discoveries there was pentamidine, which is still used against African sleeping sickness. In 1942 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in finding a cure for pneumonia - but no prize was awarded that year. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1943 and Sir Henry Dale recalled his ‘special thrill of satisfaction’ when Ewins and Glenny (both Alleyn’s boys) were made Fellows. Ewins retired to Leigh-on-Sea in 1952. He was described as a man of retiring disposition, modest and simple in his tastes and habits and straightforward in his dealings. He died on Christmas Eve, 1957, aged 75.
Sharon O'Connor