Was Alexander Fleming a coward ?

FLEMING avoided this ....

Hard to say --  but he definitely didn't have a chivalrous bone in his body.  And twice - while still a young man - when given a chance to be brave,  he fearlessly declined.


Fleming joined an infantry unit when he was 19 and the Boer War was a year old and despite being a crack shot , he never volunteered to go and fight.

He remained with that infantry regiment, the Scottish London Rifles, enjoying laying at war until 1914 when a real war broke out.

He quit the regiment in 1914 (April, apparently) and thus avoided going into battle with them on October 1914 at Messines Ridge.

His regiment is forever remembered for being the first  ever Territorial Army unit to go into general war action : but Fleming wasn't among them.

Aged 33 when war broke out, Fleming was young enough to be conscripted but unexpectedly got married - shocking his friends.

(Marriage among lifelong bachelors is always very popular in wartime.)

As a married man ,he needn't fear conscription -- at least until after December 1916, when the marriage exemption was ended. Later the upper limit for conscription was raised from 41 to 51 , but in any case he was well under those limits and healthy as an ox.)

In any case, Fleming was already in military uniform, working at a desk job in a medical lab, well behind the front line.

Fleming and Florey : what a pair !

Howard Florey was equally (not) brave : a first rate, highly competitive athelete, he claimed health reasons for why he didn't join his fellow students in the Australian Army in WWI.

Like Fleming, in WWII now that he was safely too old for combat, Florey was a real chicken hawk on conducting an aggressive war policy when it came to rationing penicillin away from dying civilians and towards unfaithful soldier husbands with a dose of the clap...

Scots wha hae wartime penicillin : chase Fleming's synthetic chimera or save lives with Dawson's shovel-ready ?

Dawson vs Fleming decided wartime PENICILLIN 

The battle over the direction of wartime penicillin can be presented, semi-accurately, as a showdown between two Scots with widely different concepts of the continuing value of chivalry in a Modernist Age.


By unlikely coincidence , our two Scots, Alexander Fleming and Henry Dawson, were both born on August 6th, albeit 15 years apart (1881 and 1896).

Fleming was 18 when the Boer War broke out but refused to go and fight - he loved being in the London Scottish Rifles and was a keen marksman but was not really up for dying and discomfort and all that real chivalry stuff.

Dawson was also 18 when WWI broke out but only joined up in October 1915, after nurse Edith Cavell was murdered by the Germans in Belgium.

Dawson started off in the medical corps as a private and orderly  but became a junior officer in the infantry and trench mortar artillery, was wounded twice and got the MC with citation for displaying bravery, chivalry and command despite being badly wounded.

Now it is widely claimed that Modernity repudiated Chivalry, after the horrors of the battles of Somme and Arras during World War One.

Modernity repudiates Chivalry : Chivalry repudiates Modernity right back

But a few writers - like Raymond Chandler and Howard Koch - claim that in World War Two, Chivalry repudiated Modernity and this is a thesis that I also hold - pointing to the Henry Dawson and Patty Malone stories as my prime examples of proof.

Fleming and his ilk : Florey, the NAS/OSRD/MRC et al , were seemingly contend between 1928 and 1945 to keep on polishing a turd, to still chase the chimera of synthetic penicillin for a few years more, while the world all around them burned.

Dawson passionately believed that if impure natural penicillin could save lives now , he had a moral duty to do so - Now !

His penicillin might be quick and dirty and a pain in the butt* for doctors and hospitals to keep in supply but it was shovel-ready, with its sleeves rolled up, ready to save lives : anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Fleming's synthetic chimera won all the early innings but Dawson's shovel-ready came from behind to win the race , in the late months of 1943.

Just as Chandler's Big Sleep had proved an unexpectedly massive hit with the general public and voters, so had Howard Koch's Casablanca and Henry Dawson's shovel-ready attitude of using existing natural - albeit impure - penicillin to save lives of 4F civilians today !

Chivalry - it turns out - was far from dead....

* and often , a literal 'pain the butt' for the patients too !