Few in our 70s and 80s would submit willingly to detailed intelligence testing. However, my friend Lawrence Whalley, who has died aged 78 after a heart attack, persuaded hundreds of such older Aberdonians to do so, some even under simulation of their childhood examination conditions, invigilated by a gowned dominie. The results of this research were to prove groundbreaking in the field of age-related mental decline.
In the late 1980s, when Lawrence was made professor in mental health at Aberdeen University, his first wife, Patricia (nee McCarthy), a teacher, told him about a forgotten archive of about 150,000 IQ tests that had been performed in 1932 and 1947 on all Scottish 11-year-old schoolchildren.
