Gwyn Roberts was a consultant general surgeon at the Hastings group of hospitals. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, on 26 April 1929, where his father, Clifford Ellis, was a surgeon and his mother, Lydia Flay, a nurse. He was educated at the Prince of Wales School, Nairobi, and Millfield, in Somerset, before entering the London Hospital Medical College, where he qualified in 1955. He did his junior house jobs in Plymouth and at Chase Farm Hospital and went on to be casualty officer at the Hammersmith Hospital, which was followed by senior house officer posts at the West London and the Royal National Orthopaedic hospitals. He then did his National Service in the Royal Air Force as a junior specialist. On leaving the RAF he was a registrar at the Birmingham Accident and the Luton and Dunstable hospitals, before becoming a lecturer on the surgical unit at the London Hospital under Victor Dix and David Ritchie, a time when he devised a balloon catheter with an eye downstream of the balloon which he claimed provided better drainage, and did a good deal of research into the precursor of selective vagotomy in the treatment of peptic ulcers and vascular ligation for oesophageal varices. This was followed by two years at the Connaught Hospital under J Thompson Fathi. He then obtained his consultant post in general surgery at the Hastings group of hospitals. There he found himself faced with a heavy surgical load in a district over-supplied with elderly patients, carrying out the full range of general surgery with minimal junior help, but still found time to describe a new physical sign in the diagnosis of disorders of the thyroid, and a new device for decompressing the bowel. In addition to papers on his catheter, he published extensively on the management of stab wounds to the thorax and abdomen. He married Mohini Ranchandani and had two sons, Michael and Peter. He died on 4 August 2006.