George Desmond Cribb was born on 14 August 1917 at Northwood, son of a dental surgeon, and educated at Sherborne and University College Hospital, where he qualified with the Conjoint Diploma in 1939. At the beginning of the second world war he joined the RAMC. Taken prisoner at Dunkirk, he was medical officer to other ranks' prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Austria. After the war he obtained the FRCS and was in Australia for a number of years. Whilst there he was, for a time, surgeon to the Launceston General Hospital, Tasmania. He returned to England in 1966 and the following year settled in Canvey Island, where he will be remembered for his love of his 18-foot dinghy, in which he spent many happy hours under canvas on the River Crouch. For his patients nothing was too much trouble, and his gentle kindness endeared him to all who knew him. Only those closest to him realised that he suffered almost constant pain from an old riding accident to his hip. He married in 1954 and there were three sons. He died suddenly on 3 May 1975.