Hubert Bond Stafford Kemp, known as ‘Hugh’, was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH), Stanmore. Born on 25 March 1925, the son of John Stafford Kemp and Cecilia Isabel née Bond, he was educated at Cardiff High School, the University of South Wales and St Thomas’ Hospital. After various junior appointments, he received his orthopaedic training at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital in Oxford and was appointed senior lecturer at the Institute of Orthopaedics at the RNOH in 1965 with honorary consultant status. In 1974 he relinquished the senior lectureship to become a full consultant at the RNOH, a post he held until his retirement in 1992. With the incorporation of the RNOH into the Bloomsbury Health Authority in 1984, he became a consultant at the Middlesex Hospital. He was honorary consultant orthopaedic surgeon to St Luke’s Hospital for the Clergy between 1975 and 1990. His main surgical interest lay in the treatment of musculo-skeletal tumours and, between 1985 and 1991, he was a member of the MRC working party on osteosarcoma. He was chairman of the London Bone Tumour Unit from 1985 to 1991. He contributed to *Orthopaedic diagnosis* (Berlin/New York, Springer Verlag, 1984), *Postgraduate textbook of clinical orthopaedics* (Bristol, Wright, 1983, second edition Oxford, Blackwell Science, 1995), *Ballière’s clinical oncology* (London, Ballière Tindall, 1987-8) and *Essential surgical practice* (third edition, Oxford/Boston, Butterworth-Heinemann,1995). Hugh Kemp was a fellow of the British Orthopaedic Association and was awarded the Robert Jones prize and gold medal in 1969 for a dissertation on Perthes disease, winning a Hunterian professorship in the same year. He was also a member of the British Orthopaedic Research Society and the International Skeletal Society. He was an accomplished artist and enjoyed fishing. He died from heart failure on 25 November 2004, leaving a wife, Moyra (née Odgers), whom he married in 1967, and three daughters.