Stanley Wilson Drinkwater was born on 11 March 1899 in Manchester. He was educated at Manchester Central High School and Manchester University where he graduated MB ChB in 1921. His father was James Wilson Drinkwater, MPS, a pharmacist, and his mother, Phyllis Leach, was American. His early childhood was spent in Long Island, New York. He registered as a medical student in Manchester in 1916 and was later posted to an OTCU at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was commissioned into the Northumberland Fusiliers when he was 18 years of age and was on embarkation leave when the war ended. He was house surgeon to Professor A H Burgess at Manchester Royal Infirmary and was later resident casualty officer and surgical registrar there. He became FRCS in 1927 and in 1930, the year of his marriage, he was appointed honorary surgeon to Nuneaton General Hospital. He moved from Nuneaton to become surgeon to Hale Hospital, Cornwall, and at the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the Ministry of Pensions, working in military hospitals in Cornwall. In 1944 he joined the RAMC, serving in troopships in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. He then became acting Colonel in charge of the hospital in Malta and spent the latter part of the war in a field surgical unit in Italy. He was demobilised in 1948 and he abandoned surgery on financial grounds. He became a general practitioner at Hingham, Norfolk, in 1950 and remained in practice there until his retirement in 1967. He became an expert rose grower. He won the National Rose Society's Lindsell Cup in 1965 for the best roses in the country and later became a horticultural judge. He died from myocardial infarction at the wheel of his car near his home, on 9 July 1981, and is survived by his wife Phyllis, daughter and two sons.