Neil Hamilton Fairley - Later Life

Later Life

After the war Australian medical research was substantially reorganised, but Fairley joined the ranks of senior Australian medical scientists who spent the remainder of their professional lives in Britain. In London he became consulting physician to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and Wellcome Professor of Tropical Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His early post war research was a continuation of his wartime work on malaria. He became seriously ill in 1948 and his health steadily declined thereafter, forcing him to resign his professorship. He retained his practice and membership of numerous committees, becoming an "elder statesman" of tropical medicine. In recognition of his service to tropical medicine, he was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 8 June 1950.

Fairley's declining health prompted him to leave London and move to The Grove, Sonning, Berkshire, where he died on 19 April 1966, and was buried in the graveyard of St Andrew's Church, Sonning. He was survived by his wife and their two sons, who were both medical doctors, and also by the son of his first marriage, who had become an Australian Army officer. His son Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a renowned oncologist, was killed by a Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb on 22 October 1975.

Sir William Dargie painted a portrait of Fairley in 1943, which is in the possession the Fairley family. A later 1960 portrait by Dargie, together with a 1945 one by Nora Heysen, is in the Australian War Memorial. Neither is on display, although the latter can be viewed online. A 1954 Dargie portrait of Queen Elizabeth II painted while Dargie was staying at Fairley's home at 81 Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, in London, and subsequently given to Fairley, was sold at auction to the National Museum of Australia in 2009 for $120,000. Fairley's papers are in the Basser Library at the Australian Academy of Science. He is commemorated by the Neil Hamilton Fairley Overseas Clinical Fellowship, which provides full-time training in Australia and overseas in areas of clinical research including the social and behavioural sciences.