The annual Shrove Tuesday Final Year Dinner (STFYD) returns to its place in the spring calendar in 2022.

The Dinner is a shared experience and important memory for both alumni of the current Imperial College School of Medicine (ICSM), and alumni of the constituent undergraduate schools: Westminster Hospital Medical School, Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, the merged Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School, and St Mary’s Hospital Medical School.

Cancelled in person in 2020 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and with many of its expected final-year medical student attendees graduating early to join the NHS early, the 2021 dinner went ahead late in the summer rather than its normal – though now unrelated to Shrove Tuesday itself – late March or early April date.

Working within the confines of the government guidance in place at the time, the student committee organising the dinner managed to bring together an evening to remember, enjoying good food and a variety of speeches and entertainments in the surroundings of Syon Park in West London, echoing the goal of the very first dinner: to bring together and to cheer the students during difficult times.

Blitz spirit

The dinner tradition began at the Westminster Hospital Medical School, one of the constituent schools that came together to form the Imperial College School of Medicine we know today.

The first dinner in 1940 was the idea of the Westminster Hospital Chaplain, the Reverend Christopher Hildyard. The aim was to brighten the existence and raise the spirits of trainees working in (and sleeping in the basement of) Westminster Hospital during the Blitz, and to evoke a sense of camaraderie amongst the students and staff amidst the difficulty of the Second World War. Shrove Tuesday offered the perfect opportunity to host a celebration on the eve of Lent, and gave the dinner its name.

Celebrating guest speakers

This first dinner was well attended by both trainees and educators. One of these, Sir Stanley Woodwark, was asked to give a speech to those assembled as part of the evening’s entertainment. During the speech, in which Woodwark claimed to have perfected the cure for sciatica, a talented student named Ian Bartholomew began to draw on the paper tablecloth, producing a fine cartoon of Woodwark himself. Each of those present at the dinner signed their name around the picture, which was torn from the cloth, saved, dated and framed, and a tradition was born, with today’s speakers still being drawn and celebrated by the student attendees.

The caricatures from these now 82 years of events hang predominantly in the education centre of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, though most from the last ten years reside in the medical school’s Reynolds Building at Imperial’s Charing Cross campus. The portrait of Dr Sohag Saleh, from 2020, is the only one to remain unsigned by the relevant class, though Dr Saleh still gave his speech online to the 2020 cohort, who dressed up in their homes and attended a digital version of the event – “STFYD(IY)” – to mark the occasion. 

In 2021, a Westminster Medical School alum (and artist of the 1964 portrait of Mr George Henderson Macnab), Mr Neil Weir OBE, published an archive of all the portraits and biographies of all those featured. The book has proved popular with alumni from many years and from all of the constituent schools, and copies are available directly from Mr Weir for those interested.

A digital version of the archive has also been produced, and an updated version with the portraits from 2021 and 2022 will soon be available.

Mr Weir is now bringing together an archive of the Westminster School’s pantomime tradition, and any alumni with memorabilia from these are urged to get in touch. 

Enduring tradition

The Dinner tradition is the only one to have continued without interruption (including 2020’s digital event) throughout the joining of the constituent medical schools that form today’s ICSM.

Westminster’s merger with Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in 1984 brought a new group of students into the fold. Later, the union with St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in 1997 (the final merger that created ICSM) joined the Shrove Tuesday Dinner with the St Mary’s tradition of a Final Year Dinner, where students approaching the end of their training came together to celebrate their achievement, giving the event its ‘Shrove Tuesday Final Year Dinner’ title.

Celebrating in person

Under the eye of this year's committee chair, medical student Nicole George, this year's Dinner returns to its current favoured venue, the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in London. It will take place with all its normal traditions, including music and speeches and the now famed Final Year Video, where students create a montage of themselves, including the STFYD organising committee, their Student Union committee, their clubs and societies, and a variety of staff lip-syncing to a soundtrack of re-written songs that reflect their time at medical school.

The student-chosen guest speaker is Dr Wing May Kong, a consultant endocrinologist and medical ethicist, who leads medical ethics and law teaching for the undergraduate medical curriculum as well as a module on the intercalated BSc in Humanities, Philosophy and Law. She is the first woman to give the speech in a decade, following Dr Fey Probst in 2012.

The group of some 300 final-year medical students are looking forward to celebrating the event at the expected time of year once more. The date is chosen to coincide with the end of their final exams and before their departure for their electives and the new Pre-Foundation Assistantship the School now offers, which supports the transition and development of final year students between being a medical student and their commencement of Foundation training in August.

The students will return once more together to the College for their formal graduation in the Royal Albert Hall in October.

You can read Mr Neil Weir's alumni profile here.