Peter Shires was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Royal County Hospital, Guildford, Surrey. He was born in Huddersfield, the son of Frank Shires, a wool merchant, and Marion née Eastwood. He was the nephew of Bertram Shires, a radiologist at St Thomas' and Great Ormond Street hospitals. He was educated at Terra Nova School, Holmes Chapel, Cheshire, from which he won a scholarship to Winchester. He went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1948 with an exhibition in natural sciences and qualified in 1954. He was a casualty officer at St Thomas' and a house surgeon to R H O B Robinson and T W Mimpriss. He did his National Service in the RAMC, as a junior specialist in surgery in Germany, returning to be a surgical registrar at Fulham Hospital. He then specialised in orthopaedics, starting as a registrar at the Rowley Bristow Hospital and at St Thomas', continuing there as a senior registrar, before being appointed as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Royal Surrey County Hospital. He married Irene Margaret Ann Hyde, a St Thomas' nurse, in 1955. They had three sons (Peter, Richard and Nicholas), none of whom went into medicine. His hobbies included golf, swimming and watercolour painting. He died on 28 July 2010.