Doris Ridley was a consultant orthodontist in Inverness and later in Romford, Essex. She was born on 12 August 1930 in Mitcham, near Croydon, the daughter of James William Ridley, who had been an Army officer in the First World War, and Winifred Jamesina Ridley née Bain. Her early education was complicated by the death of her father when she was 11 and the outbreak of the Second World War, requiring evacuation from her home close to Croydon Airfield. Despite this, she gained entry to the Royal Dental Hospital and qualified in 1952 and had already decided to specialise in orthodontics. It was fortunate that by this time one of the two postgraduate courses in the UK had been established at the Royal Dental with lectures shared with the newly established orthodontic department of the Eastman Postgraduate Dental Institute in Grays Inn Road, London, where Clifford Ballard had recently been appointed by the University of London. After her postgraduate training, Doris gained a Fulbright scholarship, which enabled her to travel to New York to spend a year at the Eastman Dental Institute, University of Rochester, studying their treatment methods. Returning to England in 1956, she was appointed as a senior registrar in orthodontics at Great Ormond Street, a post linked with the Royal. Here Doris became interested in the treatment of cleft lip and palate patients and wrote the first of several papers on the subject, delivered to both the British and European orthodontic societies. Now determined on a hospital career, she achieved her FDSRCS in 1960 and, in the following year, became the first NHS regional orthodontic consultant to be appointed in Scotland and only the second woman to be appointed as an orthodontic consultant in the UK. Here she was based at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, but with outlying clinics serving one third of Scotland. This rudimentary service had begun to be established by Frank Jones, the first orthodontic specialist in that region. At Raigmore her one chair surgery was initially housed in what had been a 1939 emergency hospital with her technician located elsewhere in an old air raid shelter. Later a second surgery was acquired when a registrar appointment was created, but initially this was in another part of the hospital, which made supervision difficult. Nevertheless, her second registrar records that her caring attitude to patients was matched by her demand for high standards from herself and her staff. Not surprisingly, she travelled extensively to her outlying clinics on the mainland at Dingwall, Nairn, Golspie, Wick and Fort William and later to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis and Broadford on Skye. Initially this entailed taking much of her clinical equipment with her, including a collapsible wooden dental chair. In 1979 Doris moved south with her mother to become a consultant orthodontist at Romford in Essex with clinics at Epping and Basildon. This was a new post and initially there were no orthodontic facilities at even her base hospital, however, her oral surgery colleague Leila Prasad generously shared her outpatient unit with her and in due course Doris was able to move to a large and well-equipped unit when a children’s ward was relocated. Here she continued to provide an excellent service for the local population until her retirement in 1990. In all her endeavours she was sustained by her Christian faith. She was a member of the Christian Dental Fellowship and at Inverness was a Bible class leader and taught in Sunday school. She was very much involved in the running of the church in Clacton-on-Sea, where she sang in the choir and was greatly appreciated for her careful flower arranging. During her time in Scotland, she achieved a BA from the Open University in modern European history. She enjoyed painting and travelling and, in her retirement, was able to visit some of the world’s great gardens. Devoted to her profession and her mother, Doris never married and was by no means idle in her retirement. Now within easy reach of central London, she was soon a volunteer at the British Dental Association’s world-famous museum and devoted considerable time to cataloguing the records of the library and museum collection of the British Society for the Study of Orthodontics, acquired since its foundation in 1907. This became the archive of the British Orthodontic Society in 1994. Doris Ridley died on 1 January 2013. She was 82.