Benjamin William Fickling was a distinguished oral surgeon and a past president of the British Association of Oral Surgeons. The son of Robert Marshall Fickling, a dentist, he was born in London on 14 July 1909, in a house in Sloane Street where there had been a dental practice since 1840. His mother was Florence Isobel née Newson. By agreement with the deans of St George’s and the Royal Dental Hospital, he studied both medicine and dentistry at St George’s Hospital, having won the William Brown senior exhibition by examination at St George’s and a senior entrance scholarship to the clinical teaching hospital. These paid all his fees until he qualified. He also received the Johnson prize in anatomy, the Pollock prize in physiology and passed the primary FRCS after three months leave of absence from dentistry – all before his 21st Birthday and under three years after entering medical school. In March 1932 he qualified LDS RCS and subsequently became house surgeon in the prosthetics department whilst starting dental practice using the second surgery in the family home. He said that he spent most time providing cheap dentures at £2 each. In 1934 he qualified MRCS LRCP and was appointed senior house surgeon at the Royal Dental Hospital, which had beds in Charing Cross Hospital. At the age of 36 he was appointed assistant dental surgeon at the Royal Dental Hospital and a year later assistant dental surgeon to St George’s Hospital. It was at this time that on the advice of Wilfred Fish he visited the established figures of the day in Vienna. He studied in the private surgery of Gottleib Bohler and the highly acclaimed Hans Pichler, who had treated Sigmund Freud’s oral cancer with a wide local excision that included the floor of the mouth and a large portion of the right mandible, all under local anaesthetic. He subsequently made an obturator, which Freud called his ‘monster’. In November 1938, Fickling returned to London and passed his final FRCS. The road to promotion and a successful career lay through research and so in 1938 he attended the Hampton Hill research laboratories to study salivary secretion, where he was the first to show that bacteriostatic drugs could be excreted in saliva and was rewarded with a publication in *The Lancet*. At that time discharging sinuses on the face persisted for years and osteomyelitis was not uncommon. In 1933 Wilfred Fish established the first periodontal department at the Royal Dental Hospital, but later (1937) he resigned to concentrate on his research at St Mary’s Hospital. Fickling was placed in charge of the department and continued this until well after the war. At the outbreak of war, he was drafted into the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) at St George’s Hospital and served there throughout the Blitz. An Army Council report in 1934 had recommended that in the event of war maxillo-facial injuries should be concentrated in specialist hospitals, and Fickling joined the plastic surgeon Rainsford Mowlem at Hill End Hospital in St Albans 1941. In 1939 there was no up to date English language text on facial injuries and so, with his senior colleague Warwick James, he wrote *Injuries of the jaws and face* (J Bale & Staples, London, 1940). After the war, Fickling returned to dental practice in London and remained part-time at Hill End hospital, which later moved to Mount Vernon, where he was joined by Paul Toller. Fickling was present at the introduction of the NHS and continued in part-time general dental practice. In 1957 he joined the board of the Faculty of Dental Surgery (FDS) of our College and was elected dean in 1968. He was a founder member of both the British Association of Oral Surgeons (president in 1967) and the International Association of Oral Surgeons in 1962. He was an examiner for the FDS (from 1959 to 1972) and in 1978 was appointed chairman of examiners for the Membership in General Dental Surgery (MGDS) and continued until 1981. In 1980 he retired from general dental practice after 58 years, handing over to his son Clive. His contributions to surgery were recognised by the award of the Charles Tomes lecture in 1956; the first Everett Magnus lecture in Melbourne in 1971 and the Webb Johnson lecture in 1978. He was awarded the Colyer gold medal of the Faculty of Dental Surgery in 1979 and his services to dentistry were recognised by the award of the CBE in 1973. He was a meticulous surgeon, devoted to detail. His Fickling forceps are still in standard use in most oral surgery sets today. He described a procedure for closing oroantral fistula and was instrumental in the development of the box frame and maxillary and mandibular rods and pins. He enjoyed travelling and skied until he was 75. In the third year of the war he offered a nurse from Bartholomew’s Hospital a lift home from a bus stop. They married soon after and Shirley (née Walker) was his companion for nearly seven decades and bore him three children (Julia Margaret, Paul Marshall and Clive Anthony). Benjamin Fickling died on 27 January 2007.