Lawrence Dulake was born in Hampstead on 3 January 1901 the eldest son of William and Emma, née Prestoe, both of whom lost their fathers at the age of five. William was a self-made man and an authority on housing the working class, becoming chairman of Rowton Houses (now hotels) and the Artisans, Labourers and General Dwelling Company, while Emma was at one time English governess at the Court of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. This explains why Lawrence was trilingual but spoke French with a German accent. He was educated at King's College School, Wimbledon, King's College, Strand and King's College Hospital, collecting many prizes and graduating MB BS in 1924 with honours in surgery and pathology and winning the University Gold Medal. He had already passed the MRCS in 1921 but was under age so had to wait until 1922 to qualify. When studying for the FRCS he became severely ill with septicaemia, and in 1925 he entered practice as a general practitioner surgeon and did not became a Fellow of the College of Surgeons until 1970, by election, four years after he retired in 1966. At the beginning of the second world war he was appointed surgeon (third class) in the Emergency Medical Service, but then volunteered for the RAMC, being graded as a surgeon and promoted Major, surgical specialist, serving in Gibraltar and later in Bengal, becoming acting Lieutenant-General IC surgical division 62 Indian General Hospital. He returned on demobilisation to Reigate and after much argument succeeded in being graded SHMO to the NHS in 1948, continuing to perform a wide range of surgical procedures including routine general surgery, orthopaedics and gynaecology, while in obstetrics he performed over 1000 deliveries and also Caesarian sections. He had set up a fracture clinic in 1936 and in 1938 was the first to pin a fractured neck of femur in that area. Even after retirement from general practice in 1961 he continued surgical work. His published work mostly related to general practice but of special interest is his book *The doctor's tale - 1662-1975* which was a history of medicine in the Reigate and Redhill area. The practice which he joined was the oldest in the area (1800) and the practitioners in that area had a hand in the school that became Epsom College. He presented to the RCS a full-length painting of one of those eminent Victorian doctors, Dr Thomas Martin of Redhill, and also a posthumous portrait of Lord Lister, painted by his father-in-law, Charles Key Robertson, derived from the frontispiece of Rickman Godlee's biography of Lord Lister. He married Nina Robertson, a fellow student at King's, in 1926. She became an ophthalmologist who practised extensively in the area until aged 70. Their two sons, Michael and Christopher, became consultants and their daughter, Anne, trained as a nurse at King's. He died on 20 July 1987, survived by his wife and family.