Geoffrey Newton was an orthopaedic surgeon in Derby and one of the pioneers of knee replacement surgery. He was born on 17 July 1930 in Salford, Greater Manchester, one of three children of a sheet metal worker and his wife. From Stockport School, he won a state scholarship to read medicine at Manchester University, where he met his future wife Pat, a fellow medical student who would become a GP. He was a keen sailor, and founded the university's yacht club and the Association of Northern Universities Sailing Clubs. After he qualified as a doctor, Geoff did his National Service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Malaya. At the end of their three years there he and Pat drove home overland, through Burma, India and the Middle East. He had to reline the clutch in a field in Kashmir. Geoff was appointed as a medical officer to the Australian Antarctic National Research Expedition in 1960. In addition to his medical duties, he was also the official photographer, based at Mawson. Mount Newton, a peak in the Prince Charles Mountains mapped by the expedition, is named after him. After this, he and Pat worked for a time as doctors, driving a camper van around Australia, and then around New Zealand. Geoff then did his surgical and orthopaedic training in Manchester and Oswestry. While there in the early 1970s, Geoff developed and tested his own knee replacement, which became the 'Manchester knee'. In those days the early artificial knee joints, the Shiers and Waldius joints, were simple hinges fixed to the bone, and they tended to come loose, because they didn't allow for the small twisting movements of the normal knee joint. The Manchester knee which Geoff developed was a novel 'multi-axial' design. It resurfaced the weight-bearing parts of the knee joint, but allowed unrestrained bending and twisting movements. The knee depended for its stability on the patient's own knee ligaments, which were retained intact. This was a great advance and gave good results with much less loosening. The Manchester knee of the 1970s, although it has been superseded by later designs, remains one of the key stepping-stones to the success of knee replacements today. Geoff was appointed as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in Derby in 1974. He was a great innovator. He developed a new halo and harness for treating patients with unstable neck fractures, which allowed them to come off traction and to walk about. He introduced the new braces to Derby for treating healing fractures of the legs, which allowed the knees and ankles to move, and he introduced new alternatives to plaster. As an orthopaedic surgeon, he was not only extremely bright intellectually, but was also very dextrous with his hands, quick, neat and accurate. It was a joy to assist him in the operating theatre, where he used to get through huge numbers of patients in his operating sessions. Surgeons came from across the country to watch him operate. When they first went to Derby, Geoff and Pat were living in one room of the former schoolhouse at Bretby, together with their dog, and Sarah their daughter, who'd recently arrived. Geoff had started converting the schoolhouse into the beautiful home in which they lived. Soon after he went to Derby, he arranged for a clean air enclosure to be installed into the operating theatre at Bretby Hall Orthopaedic Hospital, where most of the joint replacements were done. This transformed the infection rate. The NHS wasn't able to pay for this clean air enclosure, so he re-started the Bretby Hospital League of Friends, which had been dormant for some years. In 1989 Geoff, with his registrars, reviewed the results of one of the largest series of knee replacements ever reported in the UK at that time, just under 1,000 operations done in Derby and Bretby. It had been known for some time that it was important to make the bone cuts accurately, so that the artificial joint should be at right angles to the line of load-bearing, to minimise the chances of it loosening, and they confirmed this. But they also showed for the first time in this study that it was just as important not to have undue tightness in the soft tissues and ligaments on either side of the knee joint, as this might predispose the knee to bow inwards or outwards, which also predisposed to loosening. As a result of this study, they developed a beautifully simple jig to use at operation, before the artificial joint was installed. This jig stretched the bones apart, to see if there was any residual tightness of the ligaments, which might need further release. This has been another milestone in the success of knee replacement surgery today. Geoff was an inspiring person to work with. Many of his trainees became leaders in their field - two became professors of orthopaedic surgery, while others became presidents of the British Orthopaedic Association, the British Association for Surgery of the Knee and the British Orthopaedic Foot Surgery Society. He was immensely proud of all 'his boys', as he called them, and they were all very loyal to him. They always speak warmly of him. After he retired in 1992, he taught himself metalwork, and built a steam launch with which he won the amateur boat building competition at Greenwich. He joined the Steam Boat Association of Great Britain and sailed with his wife throughout England, and in France, Switzerland and Ireland. Two years before he died he was diagnosed with the lung pleural disease mesothelioma, thought to have been caused almost 40 years previously, when he removed a boiler packed with white asbestos. During his last illness he and his wife were very touched by the many messages and good wishes that were sent to him. He died peacefully on 16 May 2012, aged 81, and was survived by his wife and daughter.