Alasdair James Walker was born on 22 June 1956 in Cardonald, Glasgow and some years later, in 1969, the family moved to Pollokshields. His father, William Walker, was a general practitioner, his mother Jean was a teacher and he had one brother and two sisters. After attending St Ronan’s School, he moved to the High School of Glasgow in 1965. He played for the first XV and became school captain in 1974 which was his final year. He studied medicine at Glasgow University, graduating MB, ChB in 1979 and worked as a junior doctor at the Victoria Infirmary, followed by the Southern General Hospital. In his teens he had been an enthusiastic sea scout with the 29th Glasgow Scout Group in Newlands and he applied to join the Royal Navy, serving as a medical cadet while at university and later volunteering with the Air Ambulance Service. In 1980 he passed out of Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, with the rank of surgeon sub lieutenant. Two years later, when the Falklands War broke out, he was 25 and serving on the HMS Plymouth as squadron medical officer. They were about to sail to the West Indies when they were diverted to the South Atlantic and thus became one of the first ships in the conflict zone, spending most of the time in San Carlos Water (‘Bomb Alley’). The surrender of the Argentine forces from South Georgia was signed in Plymouth’s wardroom, which subsequently became Alasdair’s operating theatre. In spite of being very heavily damaged by enemy fire and sustaining five casualties for his attention, the ship was the first British warship to enter Port Stanley harbour. After the Falklands, he spent 12 years from 1983 in further training at various naval hospitals, interspersed with a spell at Basingstoke District Hospital and two periods of working as a registrar in vascular surgery at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In March 1995 he was appointed consultant surgeon in vascular surgery at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth. He served in Bosnia in 1996 and Kosovo in 2001. By the time the Gulf War broke out in 2003 he was a Surgeon Commander and was appointed to lead Commando Forward Surgical Group 2 (CFSG) in Iraq where they were supporting the Royal Marines. The CFSG spent a hazardous time under fire in Iraq before crossing the border into Kuwait, where Alasdair and his team set up a tent in the port of Umm Qasr to carry out operations on injured civilians and soldiers from both sides of the conflict. Temperatures in the tent often rose above 40C and he found it best to operate wearing underwear, boots and a surgical apron. He visited Afghanistan on a clinical tour and was promoted to surgeon commodore. Appointed medical director at Joint Medical Command in 2009, he sailed to Sierra Leone in 2015 on HMS Argos on a mission to try and alleviate their deadly outbreak of Ebola. Also in 2015 he was appointed to the historic (dating from 1664) post of surgeon general as the most senior medical officer to the armed forces and was promoted to Surgeon Vice Admiral on 18 December 2015. The following year he helped to plan a facility for serving injured servicemen at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham and was involved in the regeneration of the former MG Rover site at Longbridge, to provide 400 family homes for military medical personnel, together with a retirement village. Throughout his career his constant mantra had been that the patient should always come first even when in the line of fire. Outside medicine he found time for many other enthusiasms including rugby, curling, sailing, Scottish history, gardening, scuba diving and amateur dramatics. In 1986 he married Sheena Handley and they had two sons Iain (born 16 March 1988) and Andrew (born 12 February 1994). The marriage was dissolved and he married Chris Parker in 2006. They shared an interest in breeding Bergamasco puppies – a rare breed of herding dog originally from the Italian Alps. He was a member of numerous influential bodies and served on the council of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Awarded the FRCS * ad eundum* in 2007, he was a member of the college’s Travelling Surgical Society. He published over 40 papers relating to military medicine, surgery and trauma and was appointed OBE in 2005 and CB in 2017. Sadly he developed brain cancer towards the end of his career and, although initial treatment was successful, he died at home on 1 June 2019, survived by Chris and his sons.