Arthur John Cleveland was born at Brighton, Sussex, the youngest son of Henry Cleveland, solicitor to the Government of Bombay, and his wife, Madeline, daughter of Major General Charles Malcolm Barrow, C.B., Indian Army. One of his brothers was Sir Charles Rait Cleveland, chief of the C.I.D. for India, 1914-18.
Cleveland was sent back to England from India at an early age. He was educated at Clifton College and thence proceeded to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital, where after qualifying he was appointed from July to December 1898 house physician to Dr Goodhart, from March to June 1899 obstetric resident to Mr Targell and from 1899 to 1901 medical registrar and tutor. In 1902 he settled in Norwich in general practice; in 1904 he was appointed the first radiologist and electrotherapeutist to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital; in 1905 he became assistant physician and in 1919 full physician. He was also for some years physician to the Jenny Lind Hospital for Children and to the Norwich City General Hospital, and consultant neurologist to the Ministry of Pensions and the Ministry of Health.
During World War I he served as physician to Thorpe War Hospital, Norwich, being unfit for service overseas owing to varicose veins. For his services he was awarded the O.B.E. From 1937 to 1947 he was a director of the Norwich Union Insurance Societies.
Cleveland was a tall, handsome man, gifted with a logical and far-seeing brain, but with self-confessed streaks of laziness and impatience. He was a sound general physician with special interest in neurology and dermatology, but in the annals of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital he will be remembered most for his services in committee and administration. During the critical years, 1938 to 1943, he was chairman of the Board of Governors of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, and it was largely owing to the outstanding qualities of this chairmanship that, although not allied to either political party, he was, at the age of seventy, elected in 1942 Lord Mayor of Norwich.
As chairman of the Board he consistently supported the views of the medical staff and was insistent on the influence which the staff should have on hospital policy. To him was largely due the inauguration of a private patients’ department, combined with a scheme of insurance whereby those of moderate means were able to obtain private medical and surgical treatment for themselves and their dependants.
He wrote A History of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital from 1900 to the end of 1948, a continuation of the history of the Hospital from 1770 to 1900, by Sir Peter Eade, F.R.C.P. He married in 1900 Evelyn Mary, daughter of Edward Jackson, M.I.C.E., of Blackheath, by whom he had a son and a daughter. Mrs Cleveland died in 1955.
Richard R Trail
[Brit.med.J., 1957, 2, 1001; Lancet, 1957, 2, 851-2 (p).]