Fenton Braithwaite was born on July 28 1908, the third of four sons of Abraham Braithwaite, farmer, of Marton in the Fylde, Lancashire, and of his wife Ann. He attended Baines Grammar School before entering Manchester University to read for an honours degree in mathematics. He then proceeded to research, and was awarded the MSc before he was 21. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, with a scholarship to read biochemistry with subsidiary anatomy and physiology, in which he obtained a first. The obituaries in *The Times* and *British medical journal* both say that he got a "double first". He did not. He got a first in both of his Tripos, nowadays often erroneously called a double first. A true double first is rarer still: a first in each of two entirely different disciplines, taken simultaneously e.g. history and mathematics. Realising that a career in biochemistry would not be complete without a medical qualification, he entered St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College. He took the MRCS, LRCP in 1935 and the Cambridge MB BChir in 1936 and 1937. He held house physician and house surgeon appointments before gaining further experience in neurosurgery, ENT and thoracic surgery. By this time he had become fascinated by surgery and gave up the idea of a career in biochemistry. He became first assistant to Harold Wilson and was influenced by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Sir James Paterson Ross and Sir Harold Gillies. The last particularly aroused his interest in plastic and reconstructive surgery. He took his FRCS in 1939 and then joined the RAF for the duration of the war. He rose to Officer in Charge of the Surgical Division at the RAF Hospital, Ranceby, Lincolnshire with the rank of Wing Commander. He was awarded the OBE (Military Division) for his work. After the war A H Mclndoe, later Sir Archibald, who had been adviser in plastic surgery to the RAF, invited him to join the East Grinstead unit. As a result of his experience there and at Ranceby he produced a classic paper demonstrating for the first time the importance of blood transfusion in the management of severely burned patients. In 1949 he was appointed plastic surgeon to the Royal Victoria Hospital, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and adviser in his speciality to the Newcastle Regional Hospital Board, with a brief to organise a hand service in the teaching hospital and a plastic surgery service in the region. This he did with great enthusiasm and industry: within a few years he had established centres in Shotley Bridge, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Carlisle, and also one at the Fleming Memorial Hospital for Sick Children to deal with one of his main interests, the treatment of hare-lip and cleft palate. He also collaborated in developing a combined radiotherapy and plastic surgery clinic for patients with neoplasia of the head and neck, and of the skin. In spite of his numerous practical commitments he found time to continue with research and publications, notably on the anatomical changes in the blood supply of the skin in tube pedicles. It was his intention to produce clinical and academic papers alternately, but the project was stopped when he was reminded that his brief was to develop a regional plastic surgery service. His laboratory investigations, for which his biochemical training so eminently fitted him, had to cease. He continued to write on clinical subjects, and was the President of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons in 1968. Fenton Braithwaite was a man of wide reading, with a prodigious memory, as well as a kindly and skilful surgeon, devoted especially to his child patients. He was a witty and popular lecturer. His interests outside surgery were in antique furniture, about which he was most knowledgeable, and association football, at which he had been proficient as a young man. He related with enthusiasm that he might have become a professional footballer if his father had not burned his boots. He was director of Newcastle United AFC for over twenty years, and was made life president, to his greatest pleasure, in 1983. In 1944 he married Nan Hunter, his theatre sister at Ranceby, who survived him when he died on 25 August 1985, aged 77.