Reginald Cyril Bell Ledlie was born in 1898 in Cape Town, and shortly afterwards his father, a business man, moved back to England and the boy went to Whitgift Grammar School with an open scholarship, and when he left school won a scholarship to Guy's Hospital. He was then only 16 and when he qualified with the Conjoint Diploma in 1919 he was one of the youngest students to qualify from Guy's. It is noteworthy that his father, who abandoned his business career for medicine, was a student at Guy's at the same time as his son. Reginald had a brilliant record as a student, gaining distinctions in physics and anatomy in the London preclinical examinations, winning the Treasurer's Gold Medal at Guy's in 1919, and passing the final MB BS in 1921 with distinction in surgery. He held house posts at Guy's and a clinical assistantship at Lambeth Hospital while working for the London degree, and then became a demonstrator of anatomy and physiology in the school. After a further two years as a medical officer at Lambeth he passed the FRCS in 1924. In the same year he was appointed resident medical officer at the Miller General Hospital where he came under the influence of Cecil Joll to whom he became clinical assistant in 1926. Later in the same year he was appointed to the staff of the hospital, and there is no doubt that the training he received under Joll's direction had a lasting effect upon his surgical technique, which was meticulous as well as rapid. The next significant step in his career came in 1928 when he was made surgical registrar to the Cancer Hospital and proceeded to make valuable improvements in the system of record-keeping. Ledlie held this post for five years instead of the usual three, and in 1933 he became assistant surgeon and in 1940 full surgeon to the hospital which became the Royal Marsden. His long association there gave him ample opportunity to develop his interest in the treatment of malignant disease, and especially in the use of radium for cancer of the breast. His dextrous and speedy technique enabled him to make a success of gastric and rectal surgery, and the large number of cases under his care could have been the basis for a significant contribution to surgical literature had he been more inclined to write. Yet he did write, with Cecil Joll, *Aids to surgery* published in 1951, and with Michael Harmer *A handbook of surgery*, published in the same year. His hobby of bird-watching gave him much pleasure, and as they had a cottage near Tring, close to a reservoir which was a favourite resort of ornithologists, he and his family spent many a happy week-end there. In 1940 he married Dr Elspeth Kaye, who became a consultant in research radiotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research, and they had two sons. He was given a laryngectomy in 1951, but he recovered well from that, and died suddenly in London on 19 January 1966; his wife and sons survived him.