that all future candidates for the service who had attended training programmes in Liverpool would be given preference when applying. Apparently the Liverpool School was nevertheless still unsuitable for doctors joining the Colonial Service since the letter continued: 'I propose that Officers already in the Colonial Service should be allowed to receive their instruction in Liverpool instead of at the School in London, but newly appointed Officers will always be sent to the latter School'. Liverpool did not accept this compromise and continued its pressure for full recognition. At last, on 12 July 1900 the Colonial Office finally acquiesced and the school was placed on the same terms as London with regard to newly appointed Officers. Similar recognition was given by the Foreign Office, which was responsible for Britain's protectorates. Thus, although the Liverpool School came into active being six months before the school in London, it took another year to persuade the Colonial Office to recognise it officially. It was not long before the school, helped largely by private donations from individuals like Mary Kingsley (the author of "Travels in West Africa" and an expert in African culture), began to flourish. The school soon recruited the eminent physician Rubert Boyce as its inaugural dean. Boyce then set about the business of appointing teaching staff and secured the services of Ronald Ross as the school's first lecturer in Tropical Medicine. The department was based in the Thompson Yates Laboratory until 1903 when the Johnston Laboratories opened. In 1902 Ross became the first British recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on malaria transmission and in the same year a separate department of Tropical Veterinary medicine was set up with a dedicated laboratory at Crofton Lodge in Runcorn to allow for the study of large animals. Other notable staff of the time included Joseph Everett Dutton who discovered one of the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness, Harold Wolferstan Thomas who developed the first effective treatment for the disease, and his collaborator Anton Breinl, who later became 'the father of tropical medicine' in Australia. When Alfred Lewis Jones died in 1909 he left a large bequest to the school. Thanks to this and other donations that it received the school was able to set up its own laboratory and teaching premises in Pembroke Place, separate from the University of Liverpool, upon whose facilities it had previously relied.