Peter Bevan was professor of surgery at Birmingham and a former vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He was born in Birmingham on 13 December 1922, of Welsh and Yorkshire roots, the elder son of Thomas John Bevan, a Congregational minister who served as a chaplain at Gallipoli, and Norah née Gilroy. He was educated at King Edward's High School, where he excelled at athletics and cricket, and was deputy head boy. His Higher School Certificate was in modern languages, but he decided to become a surgeon and entered Birmingham University Medical School in 1940. He enlisted in the Home Guard, and his duties included taking theodolite bearings of fires from the 300-foot Chamberlain Tower during air raids. In his last year before qualification he became a house surgeon to H H Sampson at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. His duties included triaging batches of up to 30 wounded soldiers transported from Europe each morning. His National Service was spent in occupied Germany, where he met his first wife in the course of administering a Schick test for diphtheria. After an anatomy demonstratorship in Birmingham, he became one of two casualty officers dealing with 55,000 patients a year at Birmingham General Hospital. He devised a method of treating painful chest wall injuries with intravenous procaine, which led to his first publication, in no less a journal than the *Lancet*. After registrar posts he became a lecturer in the academic department of Alan Stammers and Bryan Brooke. He shared an office with a fellow lecturer, Geoffrey Slaney, future president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and obtained his mastership for a thesis investigating pulmonary complications of abdominal surgery. He did not obtain the academic appointment he aspired to, and in 1958 he joined the staff of Dudley Road Hospital, Birmingham, built in 1889 to Nightingale Ward design, with 1,000 beds and a main corridor a quarter of a mile long. He was the junior of six surgeons and was given an all-day operating list and fixed emergency call day, in each case on Saturday! He had a house surgeon but no registrar. His initial surgical practice was extraordinarily wide-ranging, including treatment of hip fractures, and specialised clinics for clubfoot and the hand. With the development, led by him, of departments of orthopaedic surgery and urology, he was able to concentrate on introducing vascular surgery to the hospital, and developing gastro-intestinal surgery, particularly pancreatic. He produced approximately 65 publications and countless presentations, attracted registrars and senior registrars, and trained many future consultants. Early in his career he introduced teaching rounds for final year medical students, started the Saturday morning FRCS course, and was the main driver behind the first postgraduate centre, opened in 1959. The current third generation building commemorates his name in the Bevan Library. Dudley Road, renamed City Hospital, is now a full teaching hospital of the University of Birmingham. In 1977 he was a natural choice to become postgraduate dean, and his efforts led to the conferment of a personal chair from the University of Birmingham with the title 'Professor of Surgery and Postgraduate Medical Education'. In the early 1960s Peter Bevan became the first Royal College of Surgeons surgical tutor in the West Midlands, and started the regional network. In 1971 he was elected to the College Council, where his eloquent speaking and multitude of ideas made him a perfect chairman of the board of surgical training. He was vice-president from 1980-to 1982, joined the Court of Patrons and was a trustee of the Hunterian Collection. In 1980 he came up with idea of 'surgical workshops', and in 1981 started a series of annual four-day College workshops, using models and animal tissue. This was well ahead of his time, and led ultimately to the present skills unit in Lincoln's Inn Fields. In 1974 he published an article in the *Annals* of the College entitled 'The surgeon as teacher, counsellor, and politician' (1974 Sep;55[3]:143-6). This advocated national political involvement, and was again prescient. Peter Bevan took numerous other national leadership roles. He was president of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, the British Association of Surgical Oncology, the Pancreatic Society and the National Association of Theatre Nurses. He was an adviser in surgery to the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health, also to the Royal Navy, somewhat ironically for a man whose nautical experience was confined to his much-loved canal long boat! In 1975 he was one of the first ever representatives from the UK to a European Community institution, joining the monospecialist section in surgery, in Brussels, where his French learnt at school proved useful. This was not his only foray abroad - in 1969 he was World Health Organization visiting professor in Burma. Peter's first wife Pat, whom he met when doing National Service in Germany, died in 1985 of a rare spinal tumour. There are two children of the marriage, a son who is a chartered accountant, and a daughter who is a solicitor. Happily he contracted a second happy marriage in 1990 to Beryl, a professional pianist. Together they gave many joint presentations on 'the melodies and maladies' of some of the great composers, with Peter lecturing and Beryl illustrating by playing their works. His younger brother David was a Conservative Member of Parliament for a Birmingham constituency for many years. Peter Bevan was a man of remarkable charm and personality, tall, and with an infectious sense of humour and a loud laugh. He was devoid of enemies, being immensely polite and charming to everyone he met regardless of rank or position. He turned his institution into one of the best-known and respected district general hospitals in the country. In it he treated many thousands of patients in a state of the art manner and produced a stream of publications. He held every possible local and regional office and was a major national figure, maintaining a full clinical commitment throughout. He described election to the College Council as the greatest honour a surgeon could aspire too, and was proud to have been a vice-president. This was reflected in the award of the CBE, although many felt he merited higher recognition. He died on 11 September 2011.