Frederick Ridley was born in Birmingham, where his father was a schoolteacher. Having graduated BSc at Birmingham in 1922 he took the MB, BS in 1925 and the FRCS in 1928. As a young man he worked with Fleming on lysozyme, and his basic work on purification helped in the subsequent development of penicillin. His publications while mainly concerned in later years with contact lens practice, covered a diversity of subjects such as psychology of vision, measurement of visual acuity, and the disinfection of plastics. He began to take an interest in contact lenses during the second world war. The application of dental techniques to making a model of the eye and then copying it in plastic to form a scleral lens required precision equipment, in his opinion. He developed this equipment and procedure, and the technology is still in use 25 years later. When the NHS began and the Central London Hospital closed to become the Institute of Ophthalmology he was appointed consultant surgeon to Moorfields Eye Hospital at the High Holborn branch. In the early 1950s he developed there a contact lens department primarily concerned with the protection of the diseased anterior eye segment and the correction of high refractive errors. The department now has an international reputation in no small measure due to the sound foundations he laid. The procedure of protecting the anterior segment of the eye by plastic to promote healing instead of sewing the lids together, while not entirely new, was fully developed by Ridley in the early sixties. He gave the Middlemore Lecture in 1951 and the Doyne Memorial Lecture in 1954; was awarded the Edward Nettleship Prize and Medal in 1953; became President of the Section of Ophthalmology at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1963; and received the Sight Foundation award of Baylor University in 1966. Frederick Ridley was a tall, handsome man and had charm that some of his patients and staff never forgot. He was always anxious to help those in need, and as senior surgeon in the few years before retirement he enjoyed the role of father figure to his hospital. He was twice married, first in 1940, to Josephine Rose Ansell by whom he had two daughters. This marriage was dissolved and he married in 1965, Pauline Cartier Bourgeois. He died on 2 February 1977, aged 73 years.