Biography
Stanley George Clayton was born in Hankow (Hankou), China, where his father was a Methodist missionary, and was educated at Kingswood School before entering King's College London as a Sambrooke scholar. He qualified MB BS in 1934 from King's College Hospital, collecting undergraduate prizes that already marked him as an exceptional communicator. Through the Second World War he carried a heavy surgical and gynaecological load in the Emergency Medical Service, qualified MD and MS while in uniform, and later served in Germany with the RAMC before returning to London consultant practice.
Until 1963 he combined consultant posts at King's, Queen Charlotte's and the Chelsea Hospital for Women with a growing reputation as teacher, clinician and operator. He then took the full-time chair at the postgraduate Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology linked to Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea—only to become the natural choice when, after prolonged negotiation, the University of London authorised the first Professorship of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at King's itself (1967–1976). Contemporaries remembered him less as a bench scientist than as an intellectual director who identified where research was needed, recruited young investigators, and helped establish fetal monitoring and related perinatal science as mainstream academic medicine.
Clayton's editorial footprint matched his academic leadership. He edited the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology through the 1960s and early 1970s, personally tightening every manuscript and mentoring authors whose papers were rejected. He co-edited Medical disorders during pregnancy (Churchill, 1951) with Samuel Oram and wrote shorter textbooks, but for Edward Arnold his name is inseparable from Gynaecology by Ten Teachers and its companion volumes: the "ten teachers" format—rotating panels of practising consultants under one senior editor—became the ward-side backbone of UK undergraduate teaching for more than half a century. Honours included the RCOG presidency, a knighthood in 1972, election to the FRCP in 1977, and honorary fellowships overseas; he died at King's in September 1986 after more than fifty years' association with the hospital.
Published writings & editorial work
Linked below are volumes and journals in this site's catalogue that carry this name on the imprint, title page, or editorial board. Open any title for the full synopsis, scope notes, and imprint history.
Edited or co-edited
- Gynaecology by Ten Teachers
Edward Arnold
Editor, mid-century Arnold editions
One of the longest-running Ten Teachers series. Each edition is written by a changing panel of ten UK consultants and academics, with a single senior editor. Edited in its mid-twentieth-century editions by Stanley G. Clayton.