Ernest was born in 1899, the son of Mary Hannah SYKES (daughter of Edwin Sykes) and Charles CHAMBERLAIN, a druggist/chemist in Warrington.
The above picture shows him in 1917, apparently at the time of his having qualified at Cranwell as a Royal Navy pilot, with the rank of Sub-Lieutenant.
In 1921 qualified as a physician at Liverpool University and later became medical registrar at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary. By 1925 he held a senior appointment at the Royal Southern Hospital, Liverpool, as physician to outpatients and to the cardiology department.
In 1929 he married Jane Theresa HUGHES and they had one son, Anthony.
In 1933, he returned to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary and with his colleague, Wallace Jones, developed the Heart Department and was instrumental in the naming and development of Sefton General Hospital, in 1948. He also developed and became the first director of the Liverpool Regional Cardiac Centre.
Ernest went on to a distinguished medical career (MD, MSc, FRCP) at the Royal Southern Hospital in Liverpool and was the author of numerous, influential medical books. His entry in Munk’s Roll (a list of obituaries of former Members of the Royal College of Physicians, London) records that he ‘was a man of great tolerance and courtesy, diffident in manner, fastidious to a fault’ and that his personal and professional life were combined in his ‘gracious hospitality, the Bentley car, the foreign visits and holidays, the love of nice things and distaste for the second rate’.
He died on 9th February 1974 and was buried at Ffestiniog churchyard, a town he had loved and where he had had a weekend farm retreat.
His former home, a Georgian townhouse, at 72 Rodney Street, Liverpool, now operates as a private medical practice in what is described as ‘the Harley Street of The North’.
