Owen William Roberts was born on 8 March 1894 at Colwyn Bay, North Wales, the eldest son of a builder, John Thomas Roberts. He was educated at Ruthin Primary School, Whitgift Middle School and the Croydon Polytechnic. He began his medical course at King's College, London, in 1914 and won the Rabith Scholarship in 1915. He then joined the RAMC and served as a private until 1916 when he returned to his studies in 1916 when he was awarded the Berry Prize and the Warnford Scholarship to King's College Hospital Medical School, subsequently winning the Huxley Prize in 1918. On qualification in 1920 he was house surgeon and casualty officer at King's College Hospital and then assistant medical superintendent at St Giles' Hospital, Camberwell, in 1924, medical superintendent of Dulwich Hospital in 1930 and also of St Francis Hospital, Dulwich, in 1932. Though he published little there was an important paper in 1927 on carcinoma of the prostate which included evidence of an intraspinous route of dissemination 13 years before Batson's description of the role of the vetebral plexus of veins. During the second world war Roberts took on added duties as medical superintendent of three large refugee centres, the Deaf & Dumb School at Crystal Palace; Anerley House and the Norwood Children's Hospital and Norwood House. Following the war, in 1949, after the inception of the NHS, he was appointed consultant surgeon at Dulwich Hospital. On retirement in 1959 he served as a lecturer and examiner for the Surrey branch of the British Red Cross Society and was an examiner for the St John Ambulance Brigade in the engineering department of the General Post Office. He was also honorary secretary of the Farnham branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution as well as organiser and treasurer of the BRCS old age pensioners' club in Farnham. Outside his professional work, Owen Roberts was a keen gardener, a collector of books and fossils and much interested in jurisprudence. He married Winifred Eileen Blood in 1933 and, when he died on 16 July 1976, he was survived by her and their three daughters.