Alan Graham Apley was born in London on 10 November 1914, the youngest son of a Jewish immigrant tailor from Poland, Samuel Apley. His mother was Mary Hilda, nee Tandos. He attended St Ethelburga's school where he came top of all London in the eleven-plus equivalent of the day. He subsequently attended Regent Street Polytechnic and then University College Hospital, whence he qualified MRCS LRCP and graduated MB BS in 1938. He was awarded the gold medal in anatomy in the second MB. After early resident appointments at UCH he passed the Fellowship of the College in 1941. In the second world war he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a surgical specialist and served in West Africa, India, Gibraltar and England as a major. In 1947 he was appointed consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Rowley Bristow Hospital, Pyrford, and worked with the pioneering orthopaedic surgeon George Perkins. A year later he started his orthopaedic course for the FRCS which became renowned internationally: hundreds of postgraduate students came to benefit from his exceptional teaching and never to forget 'listen, look, feel, move; then x-ray'. His course lecture notes were subsequently published as the '*System of orthopaedics and fractures*', reaching the seventh edition in 1995. The later editions incorporated the innovative diagrams and groups of teaching x-rays which made understanding and remembering so effective on his course. In 1972 he was appointed Director of Orthopaedic Surgery at St Thomas's Hospital and further enhanced its international reputation. He was elected by a large majority to the Council of the College in 1973, surely with the support of the thousands of surgeons who had passed their FRCS through his teaching. He served and became Vice President. In 1976 he attended the ASIF course in Davos, Switzerland, to take an active part in the course to learn AO techniques - and to indulge his hobby of skiing in the free periods. He subsequently introduced the AO system to the United Kingdom in practical courses at the RCS. Always interested in trauma, he designed one of the first purpose-built accident and emergency departments at St Peter's Hospital, Chertsey - a department to which orthopaedic support was readily available. On retirement from the NHS in 1979 he became editor of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. His rejection letters were always instructive, constructive and encouraging, and were of great assistance to an otherwise disappointed author. An excellent skier, he was a founder of the orthopaedic ski club whose meetings combined travel, work and pleasure. He was a President of the Orthopaedic section of the Royal Society of Medicine, and was elected an honorary Fellow of the Society in 1996. Naturally he was a past President and treasurer of the British Orthopaedic Association. An accomplished pianist, he listed music as his main recreation; playing jazz as a student, in later years he was particularly devoted to the music of Bach. In 1939 he married Janie Kandler who died in 1986 after a long illness. They had a son, Richard, and daughter, Mary, who are not in the medical profession. In 1988 he married a second time to Violet, who survived him.