James Robert Holdrich Fisher was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Wallsall Hospitals. He was born on 15 November 1932, in the City of London Maternity Home, the son of Hubert Holdrich Fisher RN, a surgeon in the Royal Navy (FRCS Edinburgh) who latterly specialised in ENT, and Barbara Christobel née Large, a secretary. He was the sixth generation of his family to choose medicine, and his son became a general practitioner in York. He was educated at Marlborough, and then left in 1951 to complete his National Service in the Navy, joining as an ordinary seaman, and reaching the rank of Temporary Acting Sub-Lieutenant RNVR, serving in seven ships in the Mediterranean Fleet. He then spent a year at Torquay Technical College, studying science A levels. He went on to Queen's College, Cambridge, and from there to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he particularly valued the teaching of Cifford Naunton Morgan and Alec Badenoch. After a series of junior posts in Alton, Winchester and Addenbrooke's, he was registrar in general surgery in Wolverhampton before passing the final FRCS. He began to specialise in orthopaedics as a registrar at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham and the Birmingham Accident Hospital. He was appointed consultant orthopaedic surgeon in 1973 to the Walsall Hospitals, retiring in 1997. His professional interests included trauma, tuberculosis of the skeleton and the management of spastic conditions. On 22 October 1960 he married Jessie Neill Baxter, who was a nurse. They had two sons, John Charles Holdrich, a mathematician, and Robert Holdrich, a GP, and two daughters, Catherine Jane, a linguist, and Susan Margaret, a biologist. He was a keen collector of antiques and an enthusiastic campanologist. He died on 12 June 1998.