Born at Worcester on 12 October 1878, the third child and eldest son of Tom Bates, MRCS 1868, and Alice Mary Davis, his wife. Tom Bates senior died on 3 April 1916 (*Brit med J*. 1916, 1, 574; *Lancet*, 1916, 1, 837); his younger son Mark was also a Fellow. Tom Bates the younger was educated at Worcester Cathedral King's School and at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he served as house surgeon to C B Lockwood and as clinical assistant in the orthopaedic department. He then returned to practice at Worcester, where his father was surgeon to the General (later Royal) Infirmary from 1879 to 1909, when he succeeded to the post. In 1921 he became senior surgeon and chairman of the medical staff committee. His brother Mark was also on the infirmary staff, and when they both volunteered for service during the 1914 war, their father returned from retirement to active surgical duties in Worcester. The elder Tom Bates died early in 1916 and Tom Bates, FRCS, was then recalled from the RAMC to the infirmary. Bates' career was bound up with the Worcester Infirmary, to whose interests he was devoted. He had looked forward to celebrating its bicentenary in 1946, and was proud to claim that the British Medical Association had originated there in 1832. He was at work to within a week of his death. During the second world war he was Chairman of the Worcester medical war committee and was a group adviser under the Ministry of Health's emergency medical service for parts of Worcestershire and Herefordshire. He had served on several committees of the Voluntary Hospital Association and had been president of the Worcester and Hereford branch of the BMA. Bates married in 1908 Gertrude Maitland Sherwin, who survived him with two sons and a daughter. One son, Michael, qualified MRCS LRCP 1941 and was surgical registrar at St Bartholomew's in the emergency medical service chest unit at the time of his father's death. Bates practised, as his father did before him, at 44 Foregate Street, Worcester, where he died, after a short illness, on 21 November 1943, aged 65. A memorial service was held in Worcester cathedral on 25 November. He was a man of direct speech and ready wit, and though outspoken, a good committee man. He was a keen bridge player and a member of the Hadley bowling club. He was high master in 1927-28 of the Worshipful Company of Clothiers in the City of Worcester, a guild dating from 1590, in which he served as a weaver.