Born in Bromley, Kent on 12 May 1905, Gaffer, as he was always known, was educated at Brighton College and St Thomas's Hospital where he was to spend most of his professional life. The second son of a solicitor, perhaps the immense attention to detail which characterised his work was due to his early upbringing. As a medical student he carried off many prizes and in surgery the highest award of all, the Cheselden Medal. After a wide range of training posts he visited Vienna to see Professor Finsterer who at that time was the doyen of gastrectomists and subsequently Professor Gershom Thompson at the Mayo Clinic, who is often described as the father of modern urology. On his return he became first assistant to Sir Max Page on the surgical unit at St Thomas's Hospital. He later became most proficient at resection with the Thompson cold punch and then a founder member of the Urological Punch Club. In 1938 he was Hunterian Professor at the College. With the outbreak of war and the creation of the Emergency Medical Service he was appointed as a surgeon at Botley's Park to which much of the Hospital's work and teaching was transferred. When peace returned he took up the post of consultant surgeon at St Thomas's where he worked as a general surgeon in every sense of the word. His great interest in gastrectomy and the post-gastrectomy syndrome is to be found in the monograph which he wrote at that time; it was as meticulously prepared as everything else to which he put his hand. He set up the first urological unit at the hospital, work in which he was assisted by R H O B Robinson. As a teacher he was extremely popular with the students and most attentive to their needs, but perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to any surgeon, he was always the first choice of fellow surgeons and colleagues when they themselves fell sick. At heart a countryman, he was an excellent shot and his annual holiday in Scotland to fish for the salmon was sacrosanct. He married Joan Innes in 1938 and she survived him with their three children; their elder son became an anaesthetist in Wales.