Charles Clyne was born in Huddersfield on 3 February 1946, the son of a Czechoslovakian immigrant who had come to Britain in 1939. His early education was at St Bee's School in Cumbria, just five miles from the nuclear processing plant at Sellafield. He trained at Liverpool University Medical School, qualified in 1969 and after junior appointments in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary and Alder Hey Hospital passed the FRCS in 1974. He was surgical registrar to John Younghusband at Portsmouth from 1974 to 1977, and at Hammersmith Hospital from 1977 to 1978; deciding that vascular surgery was his métier, he pursued this whilst a lecturer in surgery at Southampton from 1978 to 1984. He was appointed as Research Fellow to the Department of Neurology and Vascular Surgery at the Tufts New England Centre in Boston in 1982, and the work he did there gained him an MS from Southampton University on his return in 1983. In 1984 he was appointed consultant surgeon to Torbay Hospital, where he soon made his mark with his delightful personality and impressive surgical skills. He was Hunterian Professor in 1988, and was made the first Medical Director of the South Devon Healthcare Trust in 1991. Sadly he developed adenocarcinoma of the stomach with bony metastases. He died on 1 July 1992, and in his own obituary in the BMJ wrote 'I feel somewhat cheated by my early departure from life and question the role of the proximity of Sellafield to the school I attended in the 1960s'. He was a keen sheep breeder, ran a medical video company, and enjoyed tennis and sailing. He married his wife Elizabeth in 1970, and she and their children Alex, Jonathan and Suzie survived him.