William Bruce Norris Bomford, known as 'Bruce', was chief medical officer of British Petroleum. He was born in Salford Priors, near Evesham, Worcestershire on 7 February 1919. His father, Benjamin Norris Bomford, was a farmer and market gardener; his mother, Elsie Bomford née Fisher, was the daughter of a market gardener and one-time alderman and mayor of Evesham. Bomford was educated at Woodnorton Preparatory School and then Malvern, where he was head boy and captain of football. He went on to study medicine at the London Hospital Medical School. After qualifying in 1943, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. He landed in Normandy soon after the D-Day landings and worked in a field hospital outside Bayeux. He was later shipped to Bombay and spent time in Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Singapore. He was demobilised in 1947. He was a surgical registrar at the Royal Masonic, Edgware and London hospitals, and then surgical first assistant at the London Hospital and King George Hospital, Ilford. In 1960, he was appointed as surgeon-in-charge of the 120-bed hospital at the British Petroleum refinery in Little Aden, South Yemen. For 12 years he worked as the only surgeon in the hospital and then returned to London as chief medical officer of British Petroleum, finally retiring in 1979. He initially retired to Salford Priors, and then moved to Carlisle. He was married twice. In 1944, he married Jean Galton Upward, a nurse. They had two sons, Adrian (who became a doctor and a specialist in hepatology) and Jonathan. In 1994, he married for a second time, to Sheila Heywood. Bruce Bomford died in Carlisle on 26 December 2004. He was 85.