Francis Wilfred Peter Dixon was born in Australia and educated at Newman College and Melbourne University where he graduated in 1930. He joined the Royal Air Force Medical Service in the same year. After serving abroad in Iraq and Aden as medical officer to 33 and 101 Squadrons he was posted to Abingdon where he qualified as a pilot and later often flew himself between clinics. He served throughout the second world war and latterly was surgeon in charge of RAF general hospitals in Caen, Brussels, Germany, and later in the Pacific. Following the war he passed the FRCS and was appointed as senior surgeon to the RAF, becoming responsible for the higher professional training programme under the guidance of Sir Stanford Cade. Then it was that he recruited qualified surgeons to head surgical departments and secured the admission of civilian as well as service patients to broaden the experience of the trainees. He himself was a skilled, sympathetic and versatile surgeon who instilled confidence in his patients and their relatives and who provided an admirable second opinion. He had a gift for recognising important advances in surgery and had a particular interest in malignant disease. Thus, with Sir Stanford Cade, he was an early proponent of chemotherapy for cancer, forging close links with the Westminster Hospital and King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, for the practice of oncology within the RAF. As director general of the RAF Medical Service he had been honorary surgeon to both King George V and Queen Elizabeth II, and was appointed KBE in 1959. He retired from the service in 1966 but continued as civilian consultant in surgery for another ten years. Peter, as he was universally known, was a very warm and companionable individual and with his wife, Pamela, was a splendid host to a wide circle of friends both in and outside the Service. He had met his wife in Aden and after a romantic elopement they had two sons and a daughter. An accomplished sailor he retired to Woodbridge, in Suffolk, where he died on 22 November 1988, survived by his wife and children.