John Prichard Bennett was a consultant plastic surgeon at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire on 3 July 1939, he was the son of Russell Percy Bennett, a headmaster, and his wife Margaret Enid née Prichard who was a hairdresser. After attending Court Lane Primary School in Cosham, he completed his education at Portsmouth Grammar School. He studied medicine at the University of London and trained at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, graduating MB, BS in 1962. During his time at St Mary’s he was mentored in ENT surgery by John Fergusson Simpson and in plastic surgery by Robin Lyell Blin Beale. He later recalled that his attention wandered while he was assisting Arthur Dickson Wright with an abdomino-perineal resection of the rectum, whereupon he was rapped over the knuckles with a pair of forceps and heard the words *You don’t appreciate major surgery Mr Dresser!*. In 1969 he passed the fellowship of the college and in 1972 became consultant plastic surgeon at the St Lawrence Hospital in Chepstow and the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. Three years later he moved to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead and stayed for nearly 20 years until his retirement in 1994. Their first clinical director, he occupied that role from 1990 to 1992. He also worked at King’s College Hospital from 1975 to 1989 and served as vice dean of the King’s Medical School from 1981 to 1983. He was on the editorial board of *The British Journal of Surgery* from 1984 to 1986, and also became Society of Apothecaries lecturer in the history and philosophy of medicine and pharmacy at King’s from 1980 to 1989. He married Elizabeth Frances née Smith, a nurse, in 1963. They had a son, James Garfield Bennett, who became a teacher. Outside medicine he studied bookbinding and loved to restore old books. He was member of the Society of Bookbinders, an associate member of Designer Bookbinders and a life member of the Bibliographical Society. A keen gardener, he cultivated old shrub roses. After he had retired he was critical of the huge changes that had taken place during his 32 years in the NHS. *In 1962* he wrote in 1998 *the honorary consultant ....was becoming extinct. All powerful, unpaid by the hospital, retiring at 65, very much of the pre-antibiotic era, in whom the art of surgery featured more than the science they were, in the main, excellent teachers and commanded great respect. In the 1960s political expediency rather than long term planning bedevilled the service culminating in the market ethos of the present time. The consultant of today is but a pale simulacrum of his predecessors, versed in science rather than art, of low morale, earning a salary, the lackey of managers, reviled by the politicians and threatened with litigation by his patients he retires early with mixed feelings of regret and relief. ‘Sic transit Gloria...’* He died on 2 March 2018 aged 78.