he was the anonymous contributor, and strenuously denies the accusation.

James Wisheart says he never got the chance to view the completed audit until two years after it was completed.

But many senior figures - including the chief executive - knew of its existence, and yet its apparently damning results were never openly discussed.

After the scandal broke in 1995, Steve Bolsin tried to get jobs elsewhere in the UK, feeling that, as a whistleblower, he could no longer work on at Bristol.

But, failing to secure one, he decided more drastic measures were needed.

In something close to a "moonlight flit", he secretly applied for, and landed, a job at Geelong Hospital in Australia.

Here his career has been revived, but he is never far from the shadow of Bristol - giving evidence"the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the