Richard Harrington Franklin, or 'Dick' as he was always known, was born in London on 3 April 1906, the son of Major P C Franklin. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St Thomas's Hospital Medical School. He qualified in 1930 and proceeded to a house post at St Thomas's, taking the Fellowship in 1934. In 1935 Grey Turner was appointed as the first Professor of Surgery to the new British Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith. In an inspired choice he appointed Dick as his first assistant and senior lecturer. They formed a productive and happy team whose influence is still present in surgery, particularly that of the oesophagus. Dick's world reputation is soundly based on his pioneering contributions to oesophageal surgery. The second world war changed surgery and Dick joined the Emergency Medical Service, taking charge of surgery in the Hammersmith sector. These years called on his skills and powers of endurance in managing the large numbers of casualties from Blitz and doodlebug and at the same time keeping the hospital open despite the constant risk of bombing. In 1946 he succeeded Grey Turner on the staff and in the following year was appointed, in addition, to the Kingston Hospital group. These years saw a renaissance of London as a world centre for postgraduate training with Hammersmith in the van. Dick performed the first successful repair, outside the USA, of congenital atresia of the oesophagus, reported when he was Hunterian Professor in 1947 and subsequently in the *Annals* in 1948. Anastomotic dehiscence was the prime cause of death in oesophageal operations and he demonstrated that sound healing was best achieved by full-thickness interrupted silk sutures, commencing with four such sutures posteriorly. This measure was the critical factor in reducing mortality in oesophageal surgery which in his time changed from being one of occasional success to that of a routine safe procedure. His writings on the oesophagus were crowned by his 1953 monograph *Surgery of the oesophagus*. To the *Annals* he made eight contributions, including an important joint paper with Barrett on cardiospasm in 1949 and his 1978 Hunterian Oration. From 1955 to 1965 he was a member of the Court of Examiners and during that decade was the acceptable face, in the eyes of the candidates, of that maligned body. He was elected to Council in 1964, where his voice was one of reason and conciliation, reinforced by his habitual dry humour and laced with the odd short pithy remark. In 1974 he became Vice-President. Of particular pleasure to him was his appointment as honorary consultant to the Royal Navy, a post which he held for twenty years. The award of the CBE in 1973 was a fitting reward for a full life's work. He gave good service to many surgical bodies including the Association of Surgeons, and the Section of Surgery of the Royal Society of Medicine, becoming its President in 1969. His first love, however, was the Grey Turner Surgical Club, of which he was a founder in 1951 and later President. Among the many lectures he delivered by invitation, pride of place goes to the Grey Turner Memorial at Newcastle in 1971 and the Ivor Lewis in 1975. He retired from surgery in 1971 and moved home from Twickenham to Aldeburgh to indulge his two great loves of swimming and sailing. Unlike the many lucky surgeons who have never had to submit to the knife, Dick required surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer, but was fortunate to have the closure performed by an old friend and colleague from the Hammersmith. He married Helen, second daughter of Sir Henry Kimber, Bart., in 1933, and she predeceased him after a long illness in 1987. They had two sons, Richard, and Peter, who died from complications of measles encephalitis which struck when he was only 14. As Dick would have wished, he died while still enjoying an active retirement, having taken his usual swim in the sea on the very day of his death, 17 September 1991.