Hugh Bentall was professor of cardiac surgery at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London, and a pioneer in the development of surgery using the heart-lung machine. He was born in Worthing, Sussex, on 28 April 1920, the son of Henry Bentall and Lilian Alice Bentall née Greeno. He was educated at Seaford College, Sussex, and St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, where he graduated in 1942. A natural leader, whilst a medical student he produced a play *Death on the table* at Hill End Hospital, St Albans, to which part of Bart's had been evacuated during the Second World War. His first junior house job was at the North Middlesex Hospital under the senior surgeon/medical director Ivor Lewis, and this initiated his interest in thoracic surgery. After further junior posts at the Gordon Hospital and London Chest Hospital, he joined the Royal Navy in 1945, serving on the hospital ship *Empire Clyde*. After leaving the Navy in 1947, he taught anatomy for six months at Charing Cross Hospital and obtained his FRCS qualification in 1950. In 1959 he was appointed as a lecturer and then, in 1962, as a reader at the Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital under Ian Aird, where, in association with Dennis Melrose, the first successful heart-lung machine in England was developed. In 1959 the Hammersmith cardiac surgery team was invited to Moscow. The group, led by Bill Cleland (surgeon) and including Melrose (physiologist), Bentall (assistant surgeon), John Beard (anaesthetist), Arthur Hollman (cardiologist), a theatre technician and a buxom theatre sister much admired by the Russians, successfully operated on five children with congenital heart disease under cardiopulmonary bypass. It is reported that Cleland said afterwards: 'Well, the good Lord had little else to do in Moscow, so he looked after us.' A donation from his father's successful department store in Kingston-on-Thames financed Hugh's appointment to a personal chair of cardiac surgery at Hammersmith (the first in England). In 1965 he successfully operated on a patient with Marfan's syndrome and replaced a leaking aortic valve and a dilated ascending aorta in a single operation, an operation which subsequently became known as the 'Bentall procedure'. Later he concentrated on the treatment of patients with the heart conduction abnormality known as the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. He was a founder member of Pete's Club, where there was just one rule - that 'no case should throw credit on the presenter'. Only errors of judgement were discussed, and the members subsequently learnt a tremendous amount from these meetings, much more than at other national and international surgical meetings. He was technically a good surgeon, but would never accept responsibility for any technical problem which might develop in an operation - and his assistants found it difficult to accept this situation. After his retirement in 1985 he taught anatomy at the Royal Free Hospital for five years and developed an interest in horology at the Greenwich Observatory. In 1944 he married Jean Wilson (who died early in 2012), a medical student he met at the North Middlesex Hospital. They had three sons and one daughter. Sadly in his late eighties he developed Alzheimer's disease/dementia. He died on 9 September 2012 at the age of 92.