Alec Daws, neurosurgeon at Royal Preston Hospital, was born on 26 July 1922 at Goadby Marwood, Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, the son of Walter Arthur Daws, a severely disabled Canadian war pensioner, and his wife, Ruth Anne. His early school days were spent at the Victoria School, Montreal, but he returned to England with his parents in 1934 and attended the Church of England School, Ashford, Middlesex, and Kingston Technical College. He entered King's College, University of London, in 1941 and the medical faculty in 1942. His medical school was St George's Hospital, London, where he won the Brackenbury prize for medicine. He qualified in 1946, doing his house appointments at St George's and its country branch in Wimbledon. In 1947 he was a resident medical officer at Atkinson Morley's Hospital, Wimbledon, under Sir Wylie McKissock and Valentine Logue, and became a registrar, and later acting first assistant, in the same unit in 1948. His National Service, starting in 1949, was in the Army at the neurosurgical centre at Wheatley, Oxfordshire, under Sir Hugh Cairns and J B Pennybacker. He obtained the fellowship of both the English and Edinburgh Royal Colleges of Surgeons in 1953, before being appointed as a senior neurosurgical registrar to Charles Langmaid at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary and also at Swansea, with Norman Whalley. He was appointed as a consultant neurosurgeon to the Royal Preston Hospital in 1958, at a time when it had neither beds nor operating theatre of its own. With his colleague, Kenneth Tutton, he developed the department into a subregional neurosurgical unit. He had a special interest in the treatment of subarachnoid haemorrhage and intracranial aneurysms and wrote on this subject, as well as on intraspinal dermoid cysts, hypopituitarism due to sarcoidosis and carotid thrombosis in head injury. He was a member of the Society of British Neurological Surgeons, a founding member of the North of England Neurological Association, an active member of the BMA, and was involved in administrative committees in the National Health Service. He married, in 1954, June Hawkins, a nurse. They had two sons, Christopher Mark and Andrew Peter. His outside interests included music and he was a keen yachtsman. He died on 29 September 2009, having suffered from Alzheimer's disease for some time.