Richard William Heslop was born in Nottingham on 12 May 1931, the only child of Richard Basil Heslop, a bank cashier, and his wife, Edith Margaret née Butler, who was the daughter of a greengrocer. He was educated at West Bridgford Modern School from 1936 to 1942 and then at Nottingham High School until 1949 when he enrolled at Birmingham University on a county scholarship and worked on tissue transplantation with Lord Zuckerman and Sir Peter Medawar towards his B.Sc. While there he won the Bertram Windle prize in anatomy in 1952, the Cyril Raison prize in surgical diseases of children in 1955 and the Ingleby scholarship in paediatrics the same year. After qualifying MB, BCh in 1955, he commenced doing his national service in 1956 and served for two years as a Lieutenant and then Captain, in the RAMC. Stationed in Hong Kong, he was a clinical officer in surgery at the 33 General Hospital in Kowloon and the British Military Hospital. On his return to Birmingham he worked as a house surgeon to Francis Alan Roland Stammers at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and house physician to J. M. Smellie at the Children’s Hospital. From 1959 to 1966 he was casualty registrar and senior registrar to the United Birmingham Hospitals and the Birmingham Regional Health Authority. In 1967 he was appointed consultant urologist to the Hull and East Riding Area Health Authority, remaining there until he retired in 1992. President of the East Yorks Medical Association from 1973 to 1974, he was also secretary and chairman of the Yorkshire regional manpower committee, a member of the central manpower committee and a member of the Council of the British Association of Urological Surgeons. In 1982 he became surgeon to the Corporation of the Hull Trinity House and, in 1990, he was appointed a member of the board of management of the New Masonic Samaritan Fund. He had been a freemason since 1972 and eventually became an officer of the United Grand Lodge of England. Interested in classic cars, he was a member of the Morgan Sports Car Club from 1983. A keen photographer he had a collection of Leica cameras and, through his interest in military history, he had an impressive collection of Trench art. In 1959 he married Jean Elizabeth Gammond, a nursing sister at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. They had three children: Janet who was a clinical research officer for a drug company; Richard, a technologist for the Storehouse Group; and Elizabeth. He died on 23 December 2020 aged 89.