Frank Evans was a consultant general surgeon in Liverpool. He was born in Ffynnongrowy, a small mining village in north Wales on 20 May 1910. His father Evan Evans was the local GP, who had originally been apprenticed to a qualified doctor and by the time he started medical training in Glasgow had already delivered more than 200 babies. Evan Evans was frequently called underground to the Point of Ayr Colliery, which ran under the sea, to attend injured miners. Frank's mother, Adelaide Wagner, was an Anglo-German who, with no qualifications, ran the dispensary. The surgery was a wooden lean-to with a corrugated iron roof on the side of an end-terrace house. There was no running water in either the house or the surgery, and his father made house calls with a pony and trap. At the beginning of the second world war Frank's mother became a translator in the censor's office. When Frank was seven the family moved to Liverpool for the sake of his education. He attended Liverpool College until he was 19, when he went up to St Katherine's College, Cambridge, to read medicine. His clinical studentship was at Guy's Hospital. As he was in the Territorial Army, he was mobilised shortly before the war in September 1939 and served for a while in the RAMC on the east coast defences, before being posted to India and then to Burma, where he commanded a mobile surgical unit. During some of that time he was in no-man's land between the British and Japanese lines, operating on both British and Japanese wounded under canvas, with shells from both sides flying overhead. He survived unscathed and was demobilised in 1945 in the rank of Acting Brigadier, with the Military Cross, MBE and Burma Star. He returned to Liverpool and was appointed consultant general surgeon to the Liverpool teaching hospital group at the beginning of the NHS in 1948. He also had sessions at Birkenhead General hospital, where he met Beryl Sheffield, then senior house surgeon to the firm of Oldham, Silverstone and Evans. Before her six months was up he asked her to marry him and they wed in 1952. They had a son and a daughter, neither of whom entered medicine. Frank worked at the Stanley Hospital and later at the Northern, Birkenhead General, Bootle General and the Ministry of Pensions Hospital in Liverpool (on Sunday mornings) until he retired in 1975. He started to claudicate in 1972, and at once gave up smoking 40 cigarettes per day: he found this very hard, and for three months was quite depressed. During this time he underwent a popliteal by-pass, which failed, however collaterals gradually opened up and he returned to golf. He also became interested in computers during his retirement. The dining room became a computer room and guests ate in the kitchen. At the age of 72 he underwent an abdominoperineal resection for carcinoma of the rectum. When asked if he did not find his colostomy a problem, he simply replied that it was a whole lot better than being dead. He was never bored, and maintained his cheerful disposition and equable temperament. He celebrated his golden wedding in June 2002 with all his family. Ten days later, on 3 July 2002, he awoke, felt unwell, and immediately died of a coronary thrombosis.