Walter Charles Gledhill was a consultant ENT surgeon at the Northampton General Hospital. He was born on 10 February 1907 in Lithgow, New South Wales, Australia, the youngest son of Humphrey John Gledhill, a master painter, and Lucy Ann Skinner. He was educated at Fort Street Boys High School, Sydney, and Sydney University. He did his clinical training at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, winning the Craig and Clipsham prizes for surgical anatomy and operative surgery. He was house officer and surgical registrar at the Prince Alfred, before going to England to study for the FRCS. From 1940 to 1945, he served in the RAMC as a surgical specialist with the 50 General Hospital in Iceland and, after commanding the 28 Field Surgical Unit, went as officer in charge of the surgical division of the 33 General Hospital in Italy, Sicily and India, for which he was awarded the MBE. After the war he became a consultant ENT surgeon at the Northampton General Hospital in 1946, serving in due course on the Oxford Regional Hospital Board and as Chairman of the medical staff committee from 1963 to his resignation in 1971. He was a member of the Platt committee on the welfare of children in hospital. He married Jessie Paton Sinton in 1942 and they had two sons, Tony and Michael, who predeceased him. Neither of his sons went into medicine. He published on his experience of gas gangrene in a forward hospital and the two-stage treatment of battle casualties in 1945. Later, in 1962, he published a paper on a large series of stapedectomies. On retiring he returned to Sydney, where he died on 4 August 1999, predeceased by his wife and survived by his son, Tony, and three Australian and two English grandsons.