Benjamin Henry Dawson, after education at Middleton Grammar School, worked for a short time in industry while pursuing further education at Salford Technical College. After securing a scholarship to Manchester University Medical School, he duly graduated and became house surgeon to Sir Geoffrey Jefferson at Manchester Royal Infirmary. Sir Geoffrey, recognising Dawson's talent in the neurological sciences, was his adviser and exemplar, and this led on to an MD thesis on the blood supply of the human optic chiasma - a classic work still referred to some thirty years later. After training in neurosurgery at the Maudsley Hospital, London, and in Sheffield, he was appointed in 1956 as consultant neurosurgeon to the Salford Royal and Manchester Children's Hospitals. He then devoted his considerable energy, and powers of argument and persuasion, to the building of a neurosurgical unit. He trained a series of neurosurgeons to pursue and encourage clinical research whilst constantly striving to improve his departmental resources. He had a long-standing interest in cerebral artery aneurysms and vascular malformations, and in vascular features of cerebral and spinal tumours, and had an enormous experience of the then daunting problems of early treatment for congenital abnormalities of the central nervous system. He was also interested in the natural history and management of early sutural fusion, and in stereotactic surgery for Parkinsonism which led to a long and close association with the energetic department of mechanical engineering, in the young University of Salford, where he was visiting professor. He was widely travelled but spent virtually the whole of his professional life in the Manchester area. His restless disposition was a constant stimulus to young and old colleagues alike. Strongly loyal to those with whom he worked, he was a firm disciplinarian who nevertheless evoked great support from his former postgraduate students. He was a member of, and held office in, a number of societies, including the Society of British Neurological Surgeons, the Society for Research into Hydrocephalus and Spina Bifida, the Manchester Medical Society, the North of England Neurological Association, and the British Standards Institution. He was President of the Manchester Paediatric Club at the time of his retirement when he moved to Aboyne, Aberdeenshire. At the time of his sudden death on 31 December 1983 he was survived by his wife Muriel and their three children, Aileen, Jane and Benjamin.