John Templeton was a professor of trauma and orthopaedic surgery at Keele University. He was born on 13 June 1937 in Ballyclare and grew up in Northern Ireland. He qualified in Belfast. After house jobs at the Royal Victoria Hospital, he moved to Saskatoon, Canada in 1962 and Montreal in 1966. After a year as a research fellow in Oxford, he was appointed to a consultant post in Montreal in 1970. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1978 and was appointed to the first chair of trauma and orthopaedic surgery at Keele University in 1988 and became the dean of postgraduate medicine. John retired from clinical practice in 2002 and then spent three years as medical director at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford. He was instrumental in designing and implementing the Major Trauma Centre network in the UK and was renowned as an excellent teacher and an unflappable surgeon whose calm demeanour was much admired. He was married to Patricia and had three children (the eldest of whom, Peter, was also an orthopaedic surgeon and predeceased him) and seven grandchildren. John died of renal failure after a long illness on 30 April 2018. He was 81.