Kenneth Edgar Bond spent much of his career as a surgeon working in India. The son of Edward Vines Bond, the rector of Beddington, and Rose Edith née Bridges, the daughter of a landowner, he was born on 24 October 1908 and was educated at Mowden School, Brighton, and Haileybury College, before going on to Peterhouse Cambridge and St Thomas’s Hospital to study medicine. As an undergraduate he became interested in comparative anatomy, which led to a special study of reptiles, and in later life he kept snakes, which he exercised on his lawn in Bungay. He held junior posts at St Thomas’s, the Royal Herbert Hospital and Hampstead General Hospital. During the first part of the war he served in the EMS, in London, working as a surgeon at North-Western Hospital, Connaught Hospital, and New End Hospital. In October 1942 he joined the Army, first as surgical specialist at Queen Alexandra Hospital, Millbank, and later in India, where he was officer in charge of a surgical division in Bangalore and then in Bombay. Following demobilisation, he was appointed as a senior surgical registrar in abdominal, colon and rectal surgery at St Mark’s Hospital, London. In 1948 he returned to India, where he was honorary consulting surgeon at the European Hospital Trust, the Masina Hospital and Bombay Hospital. Following his retirement in 1970, he returned to Beddington as patron of the parish, a duty which he took very seriously, fighting one vicar who unlawfully removed and sold six fine medieval pews, and going to endless trouble to interview prospective candidates for the parish. He had a lifelong love of Wagner, regularly visiting Bayreuth. He was twice married. His first marriage to Wendy Fletcher was dissolved. He later married B H M Van Zwanenberg, who died in 1970. He died on 1 July 2003.