Sid Watkins - Early Life

Early Life

Sidney Watkins was born in Liverpool to Wallace and Jessica Watkins. Wallace was originally a coal miner from Gloucestershire, but had moved to Liverpool during the Great Depression of the 1930s where he started a small business initially repairing bicycles before progressing to motor vehicle repairs. Watkins worked for his father at the garage until he was 25. He had two brothers and a sister. Watkins gained a scholarship at Bootle Grammar School. He told his father that he wanted to become a doctor, an idea of which his father disapproved.

Watkins graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Liverpool in 1956; during his time there he carried out research on the effects of heat stress on performance, finding that increased heat greatly affected intellectual performance. This research would later prove useful as part of his work in motor racing. Following graduation, he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in West Africa for four years. There he competed in his only motorsport event, driving a Ford Zephyr Zodiac in the 1955 West African Rally, retiring from the event after the first stage. He returned to the UK in 1958 to specialize in neurosurgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, and it was in 1961 when he took up his first motorsport event in a medical capacity at a kart race at the Brands Hatch circuit. During his free time he acted as race doctor at the Silverstone Circuit.

Upon receiving an offer to be professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York in 1962, Watkins moved to Syracuse, New York, and continued his interest in motorsport at the Watkins Glen circuit. Watkins took four members to the circuit and his own medical equipment due to the lack of supplies provided by circuit officials. He returned to England in 1970 to act as head of neurosurgery at the London Hospital, and was invited to join the RAC medical panel the same year.