Leading authority on tropical medicine who was taken prisoner in Laos in 1962 during the southeast Asian country’s civil war

As tensions grew in Laos in 1962, at the start of the long civil war, two young British doctors attempted to safeguard their lives by playing games — one on a chessboard, the other at cricket — as they were held hostage by communist rebels known as the Pathet Lao.
The doctors, Anthony Bryceson and Colin Prentice, had disappeared on May 27 that year while making their rounds of Laotian villages near Salavan, a regional capital in the south of the country, where clashes between the communists and forces loyal to the Royal Lao government had become increasingly common. They were accompanied by a local nurse, Siane Chounramany, and Bryceson’s red setter Rex.
The doctors were questioned by armed Pathet Lao at a village called Koklakan. Bryceson and Prentice convinced the soldiers they were doctors working in Laos under a Commonwealth project aimed at providing technical assistance to countries in southeast Asia. They were based at the provincial hospital but also ran a mobile clinic.
When another group of about 20 communist fighters joined them, everything changed. “Suddenly, three sten guns were thrust into our chests,” said Prentice later.
Marched from village to village, covering many miles in monsoon rains, with rope around their hands and necks, Bryceson and Prentice feared they would be shot. The Pathet Lao never explained what was happening, which only added to the anxiety.
The nurse, Siane, later disclosed that the doctors were suspected of being American spies. At the time, the United States had a growing presence in the region and was becoming increasingly involved in Vietnam and Cambodia as well as Laos, where communist insurgencies were gathering strength.
The two men succeeded, however, in befriending their captors. Bryceson taught the Pathet Lao how to play single-wicket cricket, using a bamboo pole as a bat, a piece of charcoal as a ball and buffalo posts as stumps. At the same time, Prentice played chess with the local Pathet Lao leader, Major Sithone Kommadam, who was a veteran of the colonial wars in Indochina. Relations improved. Prentice was allowed to send a message to the British embassy in Vientiane, the Laotian capital, via his wife.
Five days after their capture, two British diplomats — Mervyn Brown, first secretary at the embassy, and Major Clark Leaphard, the assistant military attache nicknamed “Spots” — arrived at their camp with a letter from the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, known as the “Red Prince”, ordering the release of the captives. Sithone dismissed the letter as a fake. Brown and Leaphard then became prisoners too.
Over the next 28 days, the group, accompanied by Rex, covered 130 miles walking through jungle and along stony ridges, with porters carrying their luggage on what Brown later described as an “involuntary tour” of southern Laos. The four prisoners slept on mats in different villages and lived on sticky rice and soup, supplemented with chicken and wild pig.
They were released after the formation of a coalition government and flown to Vientiane. There they were met by the British ambassador, John Addis, and Prentice’s then-wife, Jane. They told reporters that they had played some “marvellous” games of cricket and even managed to teach some of their captors the rules of the game. A few hours later, on June 29, 1962, the Daily Express’s headline read: “Cricket and kisses end jungle terror.”
The prisoners turned out to be a remarkable group of men. Brown, later Sir Mervyn Brown, became ambassador to Madagascar, then high commissioner to Tanzania and Nigeria, and recounted his experiences in Laos in a book called War in Shangri-La; Leaphard, who had won the Military Cross as a commando during the Second World War, became a Buddhist and lived out his life in a Thai monastery; Prentice went on to build an international reputation for his research into blood coagulation.
For Bryceson, his work in Laos marked the start of a pioneering and influential career, which led to his appointment as professor of tropical medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and as a consultant physician at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases.
In preparation for his posting to Laos, which was an alternative to National Service, Bryceson had taken a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene in London. The experience kindled a lifelong fascination with the specialty.
According to Sir David Warrell, emeritus professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford, Bryceson became “a giant in his field and the top clinical opinion on tropical and imported diseases”.
He reclassified leishmaniasis, a potentially deadly parasitic disease spread by sandflies, and was a world authority on leprosy and sleeping sickness, as well as several other tropical infections, leading advances in research that have helped millions of people.
After returning to Britain from Laos in 1964, Bryceson became a medical registrar at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. He was then recruited by Professor Eldryd Parry, a charismatic Welsh doctor who was playing a key role in the development of medical services in Africa as a professor at the Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he developed his interest in leishmaniasis.
In 1969 Parry persuaded Bryceson to help him establish a new medical school at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. The main laboratory was accommodated in the spacious kitchens of Kongo House, which was used as a family home by Bryceson and his Danish wife, Ulla, but which became a centre for groundbreaking research into many diseases, including malaria, meningitis and rabies.
Another occupant of Kongo House was Micawber, a 4ft-tall secretarybird (Sagittarius serpentarius) with snake-killing talons. Renowned for his love of animals, Bryceson raised several eyebrows in Zaria when he rescued the bird from Kano market and nursed it back to health, allowing its damaged beak and wings to mend in the safety of his home.
He returned to Britain in 1974 when he was appointed consultant physician at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was appointed professor in 1996.
Bryceson published many influential papers, including a retrospective confirmation in 1988 that he had treated a patient in London who had been suffering from HIV-2, which had been acquired in Guinea-Bissau between 1956 and 1966, long before HIV-1 was identified in the West. Bryceson’s research was proof that HIV-2 was not “new” and that its incubation period was longer than HIV-1. He also published several books.
According to Warrell, Bryceson was a modest and courteous man. “His supreme clinical skills and experience, and his willingness to spend time explaining complex pathogenesis and management protocols, endeared him to generation of students,” he said.
He was awarded the Chalmers Medal, which recognises research in tropical medicine, and the Donald Mackay Medal, which recognises outstanding work in tropical health.
Anthony David Malcolm Bryceson was born in 1934 in a military cantonment in Kohat in the North-West Frontier Province of British India, which is now part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. His father, Donald, was a senior officer in the Indian army; his mother, Muriel, was a nurse. The couple later ran a successful “crammer” at Milton in Oxfordshire.
Anthony was sent to Britain as a boarder at Winchester College, where he played squash and enjoyed chess and stamp collecting. As a boy he was interested in nature, hiking and photography. His father gave him a box camera when he was nine.
He studied natural sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before spending three years at Westminster Hospital Medical School, qualifying as a doctor in 1959.
Ten years later he married Ulla Skalts, a Danish designer and architect, after meeting her over a lunch with medical friends in London. The couple had two children: William, who is an orthopaedic surgeon; and Maia, who is a physiotherapist. They both live and work in Australia, where Bryceson joined them after his retirement and doted on his grandchildren. He is survived by his wife, son and daughter.
After retiring in 2000 he became an adviser to the American company Shoreland Travax, an online medical advice service, and wrote almost 500 critiques that were followed by a range of subscribers, including generals, diplomats and clinical specialists.
Away from work, Bryceson pursued many interests. He was passionate about natural history, particularly bird-watching. He collected artefacts in the countries where he lived and had a large collection of decorated gourds. He enjoyed classical music, rambling and major expeditions, including one to the Sahara in the early 1970s.
Above all, he was a resolute champion of “tropical medicine”, which had its roots in supporting colonial officers throughout the British Empire but eventually brought enormous benefits to indigenous peoples.
During a lively debate at the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 1996 that raised questions about the very existence of his specialty, Bryceson spoke against the motion that “tropical medicine as a formal discipline is dead and should be buried” with its colonial past. He carried the day and took his discipline into the 21st century.
Professor Anthony Bryceson, expert in tropical medicine, was born on November 16, 1934. He died on July 19, 2023, aged 88

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Sir Mervyn Brown obituary
Musically gifted diplomat who was imprisoned during the Laotian civil war and later wrote a history of his beloved Madagascar
Monday October 16 2023, 12.01am BST, The Times

In 1962 two British doctors working in southern Laos were seized by a communist guerilla movement called Pathet Lao and accused of being American spies. Fearing for their lives, Mervyn Brown, head of chancery at the British embassy in the capital, Vientiane, resolved to rescue them.
He secured a letter from a Laotian prince, Souphanouvong, who was allied to Pathet Lao, saying the doctors — Anthony Bryceson (obituary, August 16) and Colin Prentice — should be released (he had been cultivating Souphanouvong with gifts of wine and smoked salmon). Having packed a few clothes in his wife’s tennis bag, he and the embassy’s assistant military attaché then flew south, commandeered a jeep and headed into the jungle in search of the guerillas. They found them, and were immediately arrested. Their leader, Sithone Kommadon, declared the prince’s letter a fake. Using his French and basic Lao, Brown persuaded Sithone to let him write to the prince to request a more formal letter, then waited.
He, the attaché, the doctors and their red setter, Rex, were held for a month. They were moved from village to aboriginal village that had, he said, “changed little since the Stone Age”. They were bound by ropes and slept on floors. There was no electricity and no lighting. They ate rice with their fingers off banana leaves. Though they were not beaten, they had no idea whether they would get out alive.
To pass the time the men played bridge with cards fashioned from an old medical magazine, chess with paper pieces and rudimentary cricket using a bamboo stick and lump of charcoal. They toasted the Queen’s birthday with whisky. When the order for their release finally came through, they were marched another 80 miles to neutral territory and flown back by helicopter to Vientiane, where Brown, stick-thin and afflicted by dysentery, hugged his wife. “This was undoubtedly one of the happiest moments of my life,” he said. “Cricket and kisses end jungle terror,” ran the headline in the Daily Express.
Brown was later appointed OBE for rescuing the doctors, and thrilled to learn that Queen Elizabeth had read his account of his mission. From humble beginnings he had come a long way.
Mervyn Brown was born in the mining village of Murton, County Durham, in 1923. He was the second of four sons of William and Edna Brown, both teachers, and raised in a council house within sight of the pithead. His father had been injured in the First World War but continued to play cricket on crutches.
A gifted musician who mastered the piano, clarinet and saxophone, Brown won a place at Ryhope Grammar School and earned pocket money by playing in dance bands for ten shillings a gig. A county scholarship took him to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1941. There he became friends with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, fellow jazz enthusiasts, and played bridge on the college roof while on watch for Nazi bombs.

After a year he volunteered for the Royal Artillery and served in Italy as part of a counter-mortar battery. In 1945 he returned to complete his Oxford degree and met Elizabeth (Beth) Gittings, a fellow student, while playing table tennis (he represented his university at tennis and table tennis). She too hailed from a mining village, shared his love of music and in later life earned a PhD in biochemistry before becoming a notable pianist and composer. They married in 1949.
From Oxford, Brown went to teach in Monmouth, but his bride persuaded him to apply for the Diplomatic Service. To his surprise he was accepted, and within a year he was posted to Buenos Aires as a third secretary. The Browns arrived with a grand piano and brand new Jaguar courtesy of a legacy from Beth’s uncle, and they blossomed far away from postwar austerity Britain.
Having witnessed the heyday of the Peronista regime and twice met Evita, Brown was moved to the UK mission to the United Nations in New York, where he sought — unsuccessfully — to resist a powerful anti-colonial lobby backed by the Soviet Union. Back in London he was posted to the Africa department of the Foreign Office, where he was soon engulfed by the crisis caused by President Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. He was appalled by Anthony Eden’s military response. At one point he was ordered to investigate whether the waters of the Nile could be prevented from reaching Egypt to punish Nasser. It was an idea that he considered immoral and unworkable and managed to scotch.
In 1959 he was posted to Singapore and witnessed Lee Kuan Yew win power for the first time. Then he was dispatched to Laos just as a civil war erupted between right-wing forces backed by the United States and Pathet Lao, backed by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. At one point the battle raged in the Browns’ garden by the Mekong river. As they lay on the floor of their house their windows were shattered by bullets and mortars. Beth, who had no nursing experience, took charge of a ward full of the wounded at Vientiane’s hospital because the Laotian nurses had fled.
Then came Brown’s detention by Pathet Lao, which he described in retrospect as “a fascinating experience which I wouldn’t have missed”.
He was rewarded in 1967 with the ambassadorship in Madagascar, a country that he adored. He learnt Malagasy, and he and his wife were excellent hosts who enlivened social events with musical performances.
In 1975 he was appointed high commissioner to Tanzania, then a “frontline state” in sub-Saharan Africa’s battle against white-minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He regularly acted as a conduit for messages between successive British foreign secretaries and Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian president. Nyerere came, like Brown, from a modest background. They became good friends.
Brown’s final posting was high commissioner to Nigeria from 1979 to 1983, when he retired with a knighthood.
During the next four decades he and his wife split their time between their flat in Queen’s Gate, overlooking the Royal Albert Hall, and a villa in Andalucia, looking across the Mediterranean to Gibraltar and north Africa. Brown wrote a history of his beloved Madagascar and a memoir, War in Shangri-La: A Memoir of Civil War in Laos. He was still playing tennis at 90.
His wife died in 2013 and he spent his last years in his Queen’s Gate flat with a copy of Nyerere’s Swahili translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on the table beside him. Days before he died he enjoyed a celebration of his 100th birthday, at which he played Gershwin’s Summertime on the piano.
Sir Mervyn Brown, diplomat, was born on September 24, 1923. He died on September 28, 2023, aged 100

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