Peter Bewes was a consultant surgeon in Uganda and Tanzania, and then at Birmingham Accident Hospital. He was born on 21 September 1932 in Nairobi, Kenya, to missionary parents, the Reverend Thomas Francis Cecil Bewes and Nellie Sylvia Cohu Bewes née Berry. This was the era in East Africa of long term missionaries who firmly believed that their robust Christian Gospel was to be shared and expressed through their skills and lives in the service of their local community. Peter's birth shaped his life - its foundation in a deep Christian faith, which he lived out in his professional work alongside his abiding love of, and commitment to, Africa. He was educated at Marlborough College and then won an exhibition to his father's old college, Emmanuel, Cambridge in 1950, where he fully demonstrated his abundant intellect. He was one of the stalwart members of the college's Christian Union. He went on to clinical training at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School and qualified in 1956. After house posts and National Service in Malaya, he was a house surgeon at Lambeth Hospital, then a casualty officer at Tunbridge Wells, a senior house officer at the Royal Marsden Hospital and a surgical registrar at Eastbourne. He was subsequently appointed against strong competition as a registrar to Norman Tanner and Andrew Desmond at St James' Hospital, Balham, one of the most sought after posts in London. Having gained his FRCS in 1963 and a MChir in 1966, he had a strong base for the defining phase of his career - his move to Kampala, Uganda, in 1968 as a senior registrar in surgery. He became senior lecturer at Makerere University in 1970 and worked alongside Mulago Hospital's experienced and thoughtful surgeons - Sir Ian McAdam and R L Huckstep. It was the golden era of Mulago and of training young Ugandan surgeons. Peter left Kampala in 1972 and became a consultant surgeon at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) in Tanzania. His work in Uganda and Tanzania from 1968 to 1979 was extremely important for surgery in Africa. A talented surgeon whose skills were much in demand, he flourished in the teaching hospitals. But he especially enjoyed teaching medical students at Mulago and the enthusiastic and able medical assistants at KCMC. They were being upgraded as assistant medical officers for district or mission rural hospitals. He realised that they had to have surgical skills. He therefore set about identifying what could be done inexpensively and without advanced equipment. He was not content that they should feel disadvantaged because the costs of more modern methods were far beyond their budget. He knew that there was no appropriate book for them and so he wrote a text on surgery for medical assistants. I [Sir Eldryd Parry] visited Peter at KCMC, where he showed me that nylon thread, strong enough for fishermen's nets on Lake Victoria, was as good as imported thread thousands of times more expensive, and that Perkins' traction for femur fractures was easily done and of low cost, although he admitted that it might lead to a little shortening. Yet it enabled the victim to return to work without crippling costs or infection. This was the authentic Peter Bewes - imaginative, radical, active. When he returned to the United Kingdom in 1979 as a consultant surgeon at the Birmingham Accident Hospital, the transition was not easy. He had joined a health service which was totally different; the simple yet effective measures that he had used in Tanzania, and which he wanted to use in Birmingham, were not welcomed. He retired from the NHS in 1993, but he was able to return to Africa in 1994, invited by Francis Omaswa, then chief surgeon to the Government of Uganda and head of the Ministry of Health's quality assurance programme. Omaswa wanted him to pioneer a programme of continuing medical education for district hospitals and rural medical officers. For Peter, his return to East Africa was a second homecoming. His work was supported by the Nuffield Foundation through the Tropical Health and Education Trust. With Hilary (née Bryant), his wonderfully supportive wife (and medical colleague), he visited every hospital and set up a programme of education. He took me with him on my regular visits to Uganda. I remember the welcome he received at rural hospitals. A medical officer at a district hospital proudly showed us a man whose gut, strangulated in an inguinal hernia, he had resected. Peter had taught him. So successful was his work, and so relevant, that the Ministry of Health directed every rural hospital to establish and sustain its own programme of education for all the staff. In 2016 Omaswa wrote: 'I first met Peter Bewes when I was a senior medical student at Makerere Medical School in Kampala in the late 1960s and had the privilege to work under him and later with him as his supervisor. Peter was an electrifying teacher, a practical and innovative surgeon, who demonstrated that a lot can be achieved with well-developed clinical skills and minimal technology, and he spread this message round the world with pride.' Michael Cotton, for many years a surgeon in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, was similarly generous: 'Peter Bewes was to me one of the generation of surgical heroes who always believed in appropriate surgical intervention, and as such he was strongly against internal fixation of fraction (unless absolutely necessary) in an unsophisticated African set-up. He was one of the principal contributors to Maurice King's *Primary surgery* (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987 volume one; 1990 volume two) text - well accepted as the Bible of up-country surgery. Thus Peter's contribution to the welfare of thousands of patients has been enormous. … The new edition of volume 1 was electronically published in May 2016 and has reached almost a million downloads! Without Peter Bewes' foundation, this would not have happened. The volumes of *Primary surgery* were to be found in the operating theatres and out-patient departments of hundreds of district and mission hospitals all over Africa.' When he returned home Peter continued to promote surgical opportunities in Africa and appropriate cost effective methods. Quietly spoken and meticulous in everything that he did, his Christian faith and rich family life were an example to us all. He and Hilary had three daughters, Carol, Anna and Helen. The many letters that he wrote home to his parents from Uganda and Tanzania describing his professional and private life were donated by him to the Bodleian Library in 1994. He died on 2 December 2016 aged 84.