John Hawkes Pendered was born on 7 September 1888 at Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. He was educated at Wellingborough School and Caius College, Cambridge where he gained first class honours in the Natural Science Tripos in 1909. He then proceeded to the London Hospital where he did well in all his examinations and won the Sutton Prize in pathology. He qualified with the Conjoint Diploma in 1912, got the Cambridge MB in 1913 and the FRCS in 1914. After holding a number of junior hospital posts at the London Hospital he joined the RAMC at the outbreak of the first world war and was soon sent to France where he served for the rest of the war, at first in a Field Ambulance and then as DADMS. In 1916 he was awarded the French Silver Medal of Honour, and in 1917 was mentioned in despatches and won the Military Cross. He remained in the Army till 1923, serving as a Major in Malta where he wrote a thesis on infective hepatitis for which he was awarded the MD degree. When he left the Army he went into general practice in Southampton. In 1939 he was called up for army service and was in France until Dunkirk. He was then sent to the Middle East as Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of the surgical division of various hospitals, in one of which, in 1943, King Farouk was admitted with a fractured pelvis. After caring for him Pendered was awarded the Order of the Nile, Third Class. In 1944 he was released from the RAMC and returned to Southampton where he continued to practise till 1967 when he retired at the age of 79. He was a dedicated doctor, respected for his diagnostic skill and warm sympathy. He was also a cultured person with a particular interest in European history and Shakespearean theatre. He had been a first class tennis player, and kept up his fishing and bridge playing to the end. In 1921 he married Margaret Singer, a nurse at King's College Hospital, and they had two sons and three daughters; one son became medically qualified at the London Hospital, and a daughter became a nurse at King's College Hospital. John Pendered died on 30 July 1972, a week after a fall in which he fractured his skull. His wife and family survived him.