Charles Malcolm Phillips, the only son of Sir Charles Phillips, CBE, a company director, and of Sylvia Maud Phillips (née Schunke), was born at Nairobi, Kenya, on 5 July 1918. He was educated at St. Clare Preparatory School in Walmer, Kent, and at Sherborne School where he secured an Open Science Prize to Caius College, Cambridge, before moving onto St Thomas's Hospital and qualifying in 1942. There is no record of his resident appointments though lie may well have been ophthalmic house surgeon at St Thomas's Hospital because lie recorded his indebtedness to Mr Harold Ridley there. In 1943 he joined the Colonial Medical Service, Northern Rhodesia and, after taking the DOMS in 1948, he was appointed ophthalmologist to the Northern Rhodesia and Zambian Governments, from 1949 to 1971. He took the ophthalmic FRCS in 1953 and became a foundation fellow of the newly formed College of Ophthalmologists in 1989. In his early years he was a keen hockey player and represented the University of Cambridge, the County of Norfolk and the South of England. Later, in Africa, his hobbies included flying, cinephotography (in which he won international awards) and crocodile hunting. He married Mary Evelyn Russell in 1961 and they had two daughters and one son. When he died on 17 June 1990 he was survived by his wife and three children.