George Allen Dalton was an ENT surgeon in Birmingham. Born in Coventry on 15 June 1924, he was the son of George Thomas Dalton, a farmer, and his wife Elsie Emily née Hence. He attended Walsgrave Colliery School from 1929 to 1935, Bablake School in Coventry from 1935 to 1940 and King Edward VI School in Nuneaton from 1940 to 1942. He then spent seven years at the University of Birmingham Medical School where he qualified MB ChB in 1947. During house jobs at the Birmingham General Hospital, the Queen Elizabeth and the Children’s Hospital he was influenced by Arthur James Moffett and Norman Lloyd Crabtree. On national service from 1950 to 1952 as a captain in the RAMC, he was in charge of the ENT department at the Commonwealth Military Hospital in Japan. This was during the early years of the Korean War. When he returned he became a senior ENT registrar at the United Bristol Hospitals where he worked with Jack Angell James. In 1961 he was appointed a consultant in ENT at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth but took a year’s sabbatical to complete his research and visit other centres in the USA and Europe. On his return he took on a huge workload especially in the treatment of head and neck cancer. With Sir Geoffrey Slaney he had the reputation of holding the world series in surgery for postcricoid carcinoma and was instrumental in introducing various ground breaking surgical techniques. He was secretary of the Midland Institute of Otology from 1966 to 1972. He married Elizabeth Mary Wood (Mary) in 1952 and they had four sons. Favourite pastimes were foreign travel and sailing at his second home in the Scilly Islands. In 1984 he retired on health grounds and he died from ischaemic heart disease on 20 February 2016 aged 91. His son Bob (who also qualified in medicine) predeceased him in 2003 and he was survived by Mary, three sons (one of whom was a general practitioner) and nine grandchildren.