'Dare' Watkins was born in Bristol on 29 December 1925. His father, Henry Herbert Watkins, and mother, Brenda Florence née Taylor-Milton, were both dentists. He was educated at King William College, Isle of Man, where he was an enthusiastic sportsman. Later, he went to Liverpool University Medical School, where he qualified in the minimum time with a distinction in pharmacology. He did house jobs at the Royal Southern Hospital under Cosbie Ross and Sefton General Hospital in Liverpool, and for six months in the neurosurgical unit at Frenchay, Bristol. He then did a four year commission in the Royal Australian Navy, which started with a training course at Portsmouth, where he became a keen sailor. Once he arrived in Australia he chose to specialise in tropical medicine and was posted to HMAS *Tarangau* and found himself responsible for the health of Japanese prisoners of war on Manus Island. He returned to England as a demonstrator of anatomy in Liverpool, and to sit the FRCS. From 1954 to 1955 he worked as a surgical registrar at Broadgreen. He returned to Australia and set up in private general practice in Mildura. He was a Rolls-Royce enthusiast, and once discovered a 1912 Silver Ghost abandoned in the outback, which he retrieved and rebuilt. In 1952, he married Janet ('Cat') Margaret Stanley née Wild. They had two sons, Andrew Mark Colston and Simon Mark Colston, and two daughters, Fiona Mary Stanley and Sophia Elizabeth Stanley. Their elder son, Andrew, became director of paediatrics at the Mercy Hospital. In 1996 Dare was fitted with a pacemaker and was later found to have a carcinoma of the lung from which he died on 19 August 2000.