LORD WALTON of Detchant, plain John Nicholas Walton when a bit bairn at Middlestone Moor primary school, has died, aged 93. He was one of the most remarkable men I ever met.

Detchant was the north Northumberland hamlet where he and his wife Betty lived in The Old Piggery – the 2001 headline was “Lord of the sties” – but it was around Spennymoor, and before that around Consett, where he grew up.

His parents were devout Methodists, young John forbidden even to ride his bike on the Sabbath. He’d signed the pledge at nine, honoured it until discovering at a New Year party 12 years later that not all ginger wine was non-alcoholic.

Ever clear headed, ever driven, he went on to become one of the world’s leading neurologists, specialised in muscular dystrophy, helped raise tens of millions of pounds for medical charities, had more degrees than a Fahrenheit thermometer and more high offices than the penthouse of the Shard.

“The most difficult lesson in life is how to organise your time,” he liked to tell his students, and there was a story about how Lord Walton didn’t always achieve it.

He’d unavoidably had to miss an important meeting. “Apologies for absence,” it was announced, “from the President of the Royal Society of Medicine, the President of the British Medical Association and the Warden of Green College, Oxford. He’s busy.”

For all his medical eminence, however, his profile in the North-East remained relatively low. A local newspaper headline after his knighthood in 1979 particularly amused him. “Golf club captain is knighted,” it said.

HIS grandfather had started as a ten-year-old down the pit, an uncle was at the ironworks, another managed Blackhill Co-op.

His father was headmaster of Hobson Colliery school, near Consett, before taking a similar role at Middlestone Moor, on the edge of Spennymoor. After passing the 11-plus, John went to Spennymoor Grammar School where he won a Kodak camera for an essay called “Why I like grape nuts” and finished fourth in the senior cross country.

“None, not even his educated father, had much more medical knowledge than the instructions on the side of a bottle of syrup of figs,” the column observed 15 years ago.

As a young medic at the Royal Victoria Infirmary he also played cricket for the Victorians against a Durham University side that included future England fast bowler Frank Tyson, remaining undefeated despite the accustomed barrage. Lord Walton dined out on that one ever since.

He became Dean of Medicine at Newcastle University, President of the World Federation of Neurology and a frequent contributor in the House of Lords where, to his amusement, the peg “Walton of Datchett” was next to “Wales, Prince of”.

His brother Ernest was a consultant pathologist at North Tees hospital, his sister Mary a GP, medical missionary in Sierra Leone and medical director of the Runcie Hospital in St Albans. “I think Ernest and Mary saw my enthusiasm for medicine,” he said.

He’d contemplated becoming a surgeon, decided against it. “I soon realised that I was too clumsy. I didn’t have the manual dexterity, but also, perhaps I didn’t have the patience. You have to be very patient with a knife in your hand.”

Sir John was ennobled in 1989, was a Freeman of both London and Newcastle – the latter, to his delight, conferred simultaneously with Jackie Milburn and Cardinal Basil Hume. The Roman Catholic Church leader had enjoyed the occasion, too. “It was one of the most exciting days of my life. I always wanted to meet Jackie Milburn,” he said.

Lord Walton was also a celebrated after-dinner speaker and a frequent contributor to Lords debates, chiefly on medical ethics, until four weeks before his death.

Among other contributions, however, was involvement in a debate sparked by Lady Harris of Richmond on train catering to London during East Coast’s stewardship of the main line.

Lady Harris thought it deplorable, Lord Walton agreed. “I am unable,” he told his peers, “to get my fruit juice and tuna sandwiches any more.”

THE Old Piggery had been just that. “Even as old piggeries go,” the 2001 column began, “the house at Detchant had seen very much better days. The windows were long shattered, swallows colonised the beams and the shepherd’s dogs had taken over the living quarters. The pigs, for whatever reason, had moved out.”

Lord Walton, we added, might have been the only peer of this or any other realm not just to live in an old piggery, but to proclaim on the nameplate the building’s proudly porcine past.

Lady Walton, the former Betty Harrison – “Harrison’s the Bakers,” said her husband, a reference which Spennymoor folk would still savour – had been in the year above at Alderman Wraith Grammar School.

“I never thought she’d look at someone like me, but one day she let me carry her music and I’ve been carrying it ever since,” he said.

Lady Walton remained a talented musician, an ability which utterly eluded her husband despite several years of lessons. “I can’t play a note,” he confessed, though their Blaydon Races duet was much appreciated and reflected his passion for North-East England.

“His accent in telling a Geordie joke is so genuine as to be incomprehensible,” noted an otherwise academic biography in the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine.

We talked of medical developments. “When I qualified in 1945, the things that have happened since were never even envisaged” – and of work as well as medical, ethic. “I have striven to put everything I can possibly give into what I do. I have to have challenges, my mind needs something to occupy it. I regard myself as a dedicated patriot. Despite all this country’s problems, I love it.”

We spoke also of Newcastle United, where he held a season ticket, but for whom his high hopes were misplaced, of cricket – “England are deeply depressing” – and of golf, which still he enthusiastically pursued at Bamburgh, declining a buggy until his final years. His autobiography was called The Spice of Life.

Lady Walton died in 2003. In 2014, the world leading John Walton Muscular Dystrophy Research Centre was established at Newcastle University. A service of remembrance for Lord Walton of Detchant will be held at St Aidan’s church, Bamburgh, at 1.30pm on Thursday.