Evelyn Cecil Naylor Strong was born in Birmingham in 1901, the son of a dentist who intended him to follow in his footsteps. Accordingly he enrolled as a student at Mason College, Birmingham, but after completing the three year dental course he continued training to become a doctor; to support himself he did dental locums and helped his father on a part-time basis. He passed the Conjoint Diploma in 1926 and came under the influence of two outstanding ENT surgeons in Birmingham, Musgrave Woodman and Stirk Adams. He then enrolled in the anatomy course at the Middlesex Hospital and became demonstrator at Cardiff University for three years. He returned to Birmingham, passed his Fellowship in 1932 and, in 1934, was appointed ENT surgeon to Selly Oak and Dudley Road Hospital. Three years later he moved to the Birmingham ENT Hospital and successfully combined this post with a large private practice. He was particularly able, in those pre-antibiotic days, at dealing with the mastoid complications of middle-ear infections. Cecil, as he was known, was rejected for military service in 1939 on medical grounds but his workload increased greatly and he helped out in almost all the large hospitals in the Birmingham area. In addition he found time at night to become a valued member of the radio security service, which monitored radio transmissions from all over the world for the government's intelligence. This he was able to do because of a lifetime's interest in electronics, to which he continued to devote a lot of time, despite increasing deafness, after he retired in 1964. His wife of 50 years, Vera, died in 1982 and he married his former theatre sister, Maria, a few months before his death in hospital in Norwich on 4 January 1986, aged 85.