Robert Hugh Percival was a consultant surgeon at West Kent Hospital, Maidstone and Queen Mary Hospital, Sidcup. He was born in Forest Hill on 1 June 1916, the second son of Franklin Joseph Percival, a flag merchant, and Edith Percival née Knight, the daughter of a goldsmith. He was educated at King’s College School and then went to St John’s College, Oxford and Middlesex Hospital Medical School. He qualified in 1941 with a prize in physiology. He served as a surgeon lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, at home and with the British Pacific fleets. Prior to his consultant appointment, he was a house surgeon and surgical registrar at the Middlesex Hospital, then a surgical registrar at the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford and a senior surgical registrar at Great Ormond Street Hospital. He listed Sir Eric Riches, Arthur Sydney Blundell Bankart, C P Wilson, Lord Webb-Johnson and Sir Denis Browne as the surgeons who had most influenced him. He also served with the St John Ambulance, in the UK, Egypt, Cyprus and Nigeria, among other places. In 1970, he was awarded a Knight of Justice of the Order of St John. In 1941, he married Jeanne Mary Hawkins. They had two sons and a daughter. Robert Hugh Percival died in June 2004 at the age of 88.