William James Gall was born on 20 March 1924 in Uddington, Lanarkshire. He was the son of William James Gall, an apprentice engineer who was disabled in the first world war and then became a clerk. A keen district councillor, he was also a member of the Board of Guardians at Thornbury, Gloucestershire. Harriet Elizabeth Jones née Pullan, his mother, was a farmer’s daughter and a housewife. William was educated at Wotton-under-Edge Grammar School from 1933 to 1936 and then attended the Dean Close School in Cheltenham from 1937 to 1942. He studied medicine at Bristol University, graduating MB, ChB in 1947 and joined the staff of Bristol Royal Infirmary. The following year he left for a house job at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and from 1948 to 1949 he worked in the orthopaedics department of Hexham Hospital, Northumberland. In1950 he joined the RAMC and spent two years doing his national service in Malaya and Singapore. He also served as a major in the army emergency reserve. When he was demobbed, he returned to Bristol as a demonstrator in anatomy at the University and then worked at the Bristol Royal Infirmary where he found Robert Milnes Walker an inspiring mentor and Robert Victor Cooke *a hard taskmaster but a great surgeon and tutor*. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1954 and credited Geoffrey John Hadfield with giving him *enormous help with a personal FRCS course*. On moving to London in 1956, he became a registrar at the Westminster Hospital before moving to the Leicester General Hospital the following year as a senior registrar and tutor in surgery. He remained there until 1963 and then was appointed consultant general and urological surgeon at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth. At the college he was an examiner in anatomy for the primary FRCS and travelled to Ghana, Bagdad, Cairo and Khartoum; he was also Penrose-May tutor in 1973/74. He retired in 1986. He was a senior fellow of the British Association of Urological Surgeons, worked on DHSS appeals tribunals and was president, in 1986, of the Surgical Society of the South West. A keen rugby player in his youth, he took up sailing when he moved to the South West. He also enjoyed DIY and gardening. An enthusiastic student of viticulture, he grew his own grapes and made wine from them. On 2 January 1954 he married Gwendolen née Halley who was a lecturer in veterinary embryology. They had two children, a daughter Diana Mary born in 1954, who became a geographer, and a son, John, who is an engineer. He died on 24 May 2019 at home in Saltash aged 95 and was survived by his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.