Frank Ashton was a consultant vascular surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham. He was born in Birmingham on 26 April 1925. His mother died when he was two, and he moved to Manchester to live with relatives. He returned to Birmingham at the age of 11, when his father remarried, and attended Saltley Grammar School. His father was works manager and director of an engineering company and Frank wanted to become an engineer too, but did not have the necessary mathematical ability. His practical engineering skills however were demonstrated when he repaired the door of the headmaster's study damaged during an air raid. He entered Birmingham Medical School in 1943, where he underwent infantry training and carried out nocturnal fire watching from the university buildings. He qualified in 1948 and was house surgeon to Scott Mason at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. After the usual registrar posts, he became a research fellow at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, employing his engineering instincts on the design of early cardiopulmonary bypass equipment. His ChM thesis was on this topic. His medical student romance with his future wife Joyce, a student nurse, was helped by his ownership of a motorcycle and sidecar. After a seven-year courtship and a three-year engagement, they married in 1951. By then he was doing his National Service, attached to the Royal Engineers in Malvern Worcestershire, where his married quarters had been converted from the mortuary. They then moved to King's Heath and had four children, whose future careers included radiology, physiotherapy and engineering. In the late 1950s Frank Ashton was a lecturer in surgery in a department dominated by peptic ulcer surgery, with Frank Stammers, and inflammatory bowel disease, with Bryan Brooke. Excited by the developing field of arterial surgery, on his own initiative he arranged a clinical post in Houston, Texas, with Michael DeBakey and Stanley Crawford. He arrived in 1960, just in time to see the election of John F Kennedy to the presidency. On his return he was the only trained vascular surgeon in the West Midlands and, in 1963, was promoted to consultant/senior lecturer at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where he spent the rest of his career. With his friend and colleague Geoffrey Slaney, he built the academic unit into the regional vascular centre, and when Slaney took the Barling chair in 1971, Ashton became reader and was subsequently appointed to a second chair. Frank's research interests were inspired by his engineering background and inclinations, leading to him to form, with non-medical university colleagues, the Midlands Medical Engineering Group. He spent much time on the design and development of a silicon rubber arterial prosthesis. With the benefit of hindsight this was a blind alley, but this was not apparent at the time. He was the head of the department of surgery laboratories and provided unfailing help, advice, encouragement and constructive criticism to many senior lecturers, lecturers, research fellows and technical staff. Frank Ashton was a gifted technical surgeon with the wide repertoire usual in his generation. His practice was based on sound clinical instincts, and he had great rapport with his patients. He finished operations quickly by moving unhurriedly and with economy of effort. He was an outstanding teacher and trainer to many generations of junior surgeons at the Queen Elizabeth, many of whom set up their own vascular units in the West Midlands and elsewhere, and look back on their time with Frank as one of the happiest times of their surgical careers. He taught methodically and spent many hours patiently assisting his trainees. He was also able to let go and allow trainees to operate solo, but had an uncanny knack of appearing at the theatre door when he was needed. He did not find operative surgery difficult and did not see why his trainees should either. Frank Ashton was a soft-voiced, somewhat diffident man, but possessed of steely determination and self-confidence when required in the best interests of his patients. He was also a man of great personal integrity, truly without enemies. He was content to bear a very heavy undergraduate teaching and administrative role in the department of surgery, which dovetailed well with the national interests of his colleague Geoffrey Slaney. Nevertheless, his standing in the profession was recognised in 1984 by the presidency of the Vascular Surgical Society. Frank and Joyce moved out of Birmingham to a farm with 40 acres of land in Worcestershire. They kept sheep and some heifers, and did their own lambing. He did not go in for expensive cars, and parked his mud-stained vehicle in the consultants' car park without embarrassment, at least to him. They also had a house in St Mawes in Cornwall, where he kept a boat called *Innominate*, after the notoriously fragile and temperamental artery. In 1982 he was knocked down by a car and sustained a fractured pelvis, complicated by a pulmonary embolism from which he nearly died. He recovered and returned to work, but with permanent lung damage, which helped him to give up his long-term pipe smoking. In 1986 Geoffrey Slaney finished his term as president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and returned to full-time work. Frank, in the light of his accident, promptly retired, a typically sound decision that gave him 25 years of happy retirement. He carried on with his farming and his engineering workshop. Above all, he enjoyed his family, including 11 grandchildren. He was increasingly unwell in his final two years, but remained active until his death on 13 November 2012 at the age of 87. Frank Ashton was an inventive surgical researcher, a first-rate clinician, an outstanding technical surgeon and a surgical teacher who inspired a generation of surgeons who revered him. He was a devoted husband, rewarded with a long and happy marriage, and a much-loved father and grandfather.