Born on 29 August 1911 in Bury, Lancashire, John Charnley was the son of Arthur Walker Charnley, pharmacist, and Lily, née Hodgson, a nurse, he was educated at Bury Grammar School and Manchester University. He was persuaded to read medicine rather than dentistry, his first choice, by L R Strangeways, headmaster of the Grammar School. Having been undistinguished academically at school, he had a brilliant undergraduate career taking prizes at the end of each year. He passed the 2nd MB examination in March 1932 and three months later, the Primary Fellowship graduating BSc in anatomy and physiology and passed the Final Fellowship Examination in December 1936. He was house surgeon at Manchester Royal Infirmary and resident surgical officer at Salford Royal Hospital from 1937 to 1938. Early in 1938, he went for nine months to the department of Professor R J S McDowall at King's College in the Strand, as lecturer in physiology, and investigated traumatic shock. He returned to Manchester Royal Infirmary as Resident Casualty Officer at the end of 1938 and volunteered for service in the RAMC in May 1940, serving first as Regimental Medical Officer in ships from Dunkirk. He became a 'graded' orthopaedic specialist in August 1940, until he went to Cairo in March 1941 to do traumatic and orthopaedic surgery, and characteristically noted that the Thomas walking calliper allowed the patient's toes to touch the ground and so was not weight bearing. By matching the geometry of the ring of the calliper to the geometry of the bony pelvis he produced the 'Charnley calliper' a device officially adopted by the Army. From 1942 to 1944 he was OC No 2 Orthopaedic Centre attached to No 63 Military Hospital, Cairo, with the rank of Major and returned in May 1944 to the Military Hospital in Shaftesbury, Dorset. Temporary attachments to the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Hospital, Oswestry, and to the Biddulph Grange Orthopaedic Hospital were arranged by Professor Harry Platt and he became lecturer in orthopaedic surgery in 1946. He was appointed visiting orthopaedic surgeon to Park Hospital, Davyhulme, and assistant orthopaedic surgeon to Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1947, visiting orthopaedic surgeon to Wrightington Hospital in 1949, and consultant orthopaedic surgeon to Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1952. Two orthopaedic papers and one on experimental shock were published whilst he was on active service, and he delivered a Hunterian Lecture at the College in 1946 entitled *The mechanics and treatment of fractures of the femoral shaft*. His first independent appointment after the war was at Park Hospital and there he found the familiar orthopaedic conditions, low back pain, arthritic joints, fractures and joint injuries. All were subjected to critical analysis and he was often in the anatomy and pathology departments, sometimes giving extempore tutorials to the students. He also designed and built a complex lever system in the basement of the medical school, with which he applied carefully graduated stresses to a variety of joints. He published papers on the cause of herniation of the nucleus pulposus, an approach to the medial semilunar cartilage, the Smith-Petersen guide wire and intramedullary nailing of fractures, but his significant work was on compression arthrodesis on which he lectured to the Canadia, American and British Orthopaedic Associations in Quebec in 1948. 1950 saw the publication of the first edition of *The closed treatment of common fractures*, a masterpiece of experience and imagination for which he is remembered by generations of orthopaedic surgeons, worldwide. He resigned from Park Hospital in 1961 and from Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1962, concentrating his work at Wrightington. He tried all the methods of arthroplasty of the hip and had found them unsatisfactory. He had a workshop in his house in Hale, equipped with a lathe and William Thackray, of Charles F Thackray Ltd, said that Charnley was an excellent draughtsman and bench worker who struck up instruments in the rough to be finished later by his firm. The lubrication of joints, methods of fixing metal and plastics to bone and the biomechanics of hip joint movement were all studied, as were the causes of failure of earlier operations. He noted that post-operative infection tended to arise late often due to common skin organisms. He enlisted the co-operation of Howorth Air Engineering and produced the first clean-air operating enclosure. Attention was also directed to the prevention of venous thromboembolism. A biomechanical laboratory was opened at Wrightington by Sir Harry Platt in 1961, and the clinical unit became the Centre for Hip Surgery, opened in 1962 by Field Marshal Lord Harding, an old patient. He was appointed consultant orthopaedic surgeon to King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, Sussex, and performed his first hip replacement there in 1969, by 1982 he had performed 1400 operations at that Hospital. He became CBE in 1970 and was knighted in 1977. He was appointed to a personal Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery in the University of Manchester in 1972 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975. The *Biographical memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society* noted that 'Charnley made other valuable contributions to orthopaedics - it was, however, his work on arthroplasty that earned him the distinction of being the first practising orthopaedic surgeon to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, and will ensure him a place in history as a surgeon-scientist in the tradition of John Hunter and Joseph Lister'. He became a Freeman of Bury in 1974, Lister Orator at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1976 and he was honoured by universities, institutes and associations in most parts of the world. In his younger days, he was a keen rock climber and a devotee of fast cars, especially Aston Martins. He met his wife, Jill, on a ski slope in Austria in 1957 and they were married three months later. She was introduced to high speed driving early and quickly realised that John drove himself professionally in much the same way. She made a home of distinction, entertaining colleagues and visitors from far and wide. John Charnley was the least pompous of men. His many honours did not change his open and sunny disposition nor divert him from his tasks. He was tenacious in pursuit of the highest standards, quick to anger, and sometimes ruthless when he met carelessness or incompetence. He was a perfectionist and was preparing material for a meeting of the British Orthopaedic Association in Manchester when he died on 5 August 1982. He is survived by Lady Charnley and their two children, Henrietta, an actress, and Tristram, who produces medical and scientific films.