Born on 29 March 1872 in Victoria, Australia, the third child of J Erskine Cunning, farmer, and Annie May, his wife. He was educated Ballarat College and at Melbourne University, where he took first class honours in physiology and final honours in medicine and surgery. He was house surgeon and house physician at Melbourne Hospital 1895-9. Coming to England he studied at St Bartholomew's Hospital, took the Fellowship in 1901, and was appointed senior resident medical officer at the Royal Free Hospital the same year. He became assistant surgeon in 1905 and was senior surgeon 1919-31. He was also surgeon to the Royal Cancer Hospital and the Victoria Hospital for Children. Cunning excelled in the surgery of the upper abdomen and once described himself as an "ardent gastrectomist". He was an inspiring teacher, and a man of personal charm, kindly and debonair. Cunning kept up his Australian connexion, served as president of the Association of Australian and New Zealand medical men in England and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1932. He married in 1909 Annie Broomhall Thin, MB London 1903, daughter of E C Thin, and at one time honorary director of the open-air school in Regent's Park, who survived him with two sons and a daughter. Another son had been killed in action in 1941. Cunning died at the Walt House, Yorke Road, Reigate, on 29 July 1948, aged 76. He had retired completely in 1931, and devoted himself to gardening, particularly the growing of irises. His other recreations were golf and ski-ing. He lived at first at Walton on the Hill, and then at Broome Park, Betchworth, Surrey. He and Mrs Cunning gave this house and its beautiful gardens in 1946 to the Electrical Industries Benevolent Association to be a home for old people, in memory of their son James Erskine Cunning, who was killed in the war. Publication:- *Aids to Surgery*. London, 1904, 3rd edition, 1913.