Douglas Macmillan

Douglas Macmillan was born on 10 August 1884, in Castle Cary, Somerset, the seventh of eight children of William Macmillan (1844–1911) and his wife Emily, formerly White (1843–1937). His father became managing director of John Boyd & Co. (manufacturers of horsehair-based products), was a Somerset County Alderman, and for 15 years edited and published the monthly Castle Cary Visitor. Macmillan was educated at Sexey's School, Bruton (1894–1897), the Quaker Sidcot School, Winscombe (1897–1901), and then at Birkbeck, University of London in 1901. ==Career==

Macmillan entered the civil service in London in 1902. He worked as a civil servant for more than forty years – in the Board of Agriculture and later in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. He specialised in public health and was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene. He was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He edited the Society's journal, the Somerset Year Book, from 1921 to 1932 and was Director of its London-based publishing arm, Folk Press Ltd. Among Folk Press's numerous publications in the 1920s were several monographs on historical topics by Macmillan and two volumes of his poetry (Sea Drift and By Camel and Cary) which contain verses celebrating some of the districts that lie along the route now known as the Macmillan Way West. ==Founding cancer charity==

Macmillan was a Baptist but also influenced by Quakerism. In founding the Society, Macmillan "wanted to see homes for cancer patients throughout the land, where attention will be provided freely or at low cost, as circumstances dictate... [and]... panels of voluntary nurses who can be detailed off to attend to necessitous patients in their own homes." Macmillan's Society was strictly anti-vivisectionist. In the Society's first publication, Macmillan stated that the new organization "had no connection or any sympathy whatever with existing systems of cancer research, the representatives of which appear to be persuaded that "research" means "vivisection". In 1922, the Society's journal folded and there was only limited financial support. The Society failed to obtain new members and through deaths and resignations its member list declined. Although Macmillan remained a vegetarian in his personal life the Society's early campaign for anti-vivisection and vegetarianism was dropped and it was now supporting poor cancer patients with meat extracts. The old emblem was also discarded. The new emblem in 1931 was a picture of a distressed woman standing outside an occupied bedroom used to reflect the pain and despair of cancer. The Society became known as the National Society for Cancer Relief, and often shorthand, Cancer Relief. Macmillan retired from running the organisation in 1966, in which year he moved from Sidcup back to Castle Cary. The organisation he founded has since flourished and is today known as Macmillan Cancer Support. ==Personal life==

Macmillan married Margaret Fielding Miller in 1907, and the couple afterwards lived in her parents' house at 15 Ranelagh Road, Pimlico, which provided office space for the Folk Press operation and served as the first headquarters of the Cancer Relief charity. Margaret was a vice-president of the charity and organised its annual sale of work. She died, from cancer, in 1957 and in the following year Macmillan married Nora Primrose Owen. == Death and legacy ==

Macmillan died of cancer on 9 January 1969 at his home Carylande, Ansford in Castle Cary, aged 84. A blue plaque was erected to honour him at his former residence of 15 Ranelagh Road, Pimlico, in 1997 and another in 2019 at his birthplace in Castle Cary. In October 2010, The Bexley Civic Society invited the Mayor of Bexley, Cllr Val Clark, to unveil another plaque on his house in Knoll Road, Sidcup where he lived for 30 years. ==Selected publications==

• Shall We Slay? (1909) • The Better Quest (1911) • On the Use of Violet Leaves (1913) • The Tea-Habit in Relation to Cancer (1913) • Cancer Research and Vivisection (1919) ==Notes==