Tim Morley was a consultant spinal surgeon at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore, where he was a pioneer of scoliosis surgery. He was born on 18 March 1939 in London, the son of Henry Seaward Morley, a physician who became a consultant at the Royal West Sussex Hospital in Chichester and a master of the Society of Apothecaries, and Alison Kathleen Morley née Hill, a housewife. He attended Wellington College, and then Downing College, Cambridge and University College Hospital Medical School. He qualified MRCS LRCP in 1963 and a year later gained his MB BCh. He held junior posts at University College Hospital, as a surgical house officer, medical house officer on the cardiac unit and senior house officer in the trauma and orthopaedic department. From 1966 to 1969 he was a rotating registrar in general surgery, vascular surgery, neurosurgery, urology and orthopaedics at Southampton. He gained his FRCS in 1969 and from 1969 to 1974 he was a registrar, senior registrar and then senior surgical officer at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore. In 1975 he was appointed as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at King’s College Hospital, London, then, in 1978, moved to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore. He was also an honorary consultant at Chailey Heritage Hospital, Lewes (from 1978) and at Guy’s (from 1992). At Stanmore he worked with Charles Manning on the scoliosis unit, succeeding him in 1981. With Peter Webb he pioneered the Webb-Morley instrumentation, improving correction and stability in spinal deformity surgery. He also helped develop a sensory spinal cord monitoring system with Mike Edgar, Andrew Rawford and Steve Jones, from the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, which was adopted internationally. He also developed a scoliosis service on Malta, for which he was awarded a Maltese medal. He wrote on spinal surgery, covering the management of spinal deformity, spinal tumours, instrumentation and the management of the unstable spine. He was an honorary senior lecturer in orthopaedics for the University of London and a specialty regional adviser for the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He was president of the British Scoliosis Society and of the orthopaedic section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Outside medicine he enjoyed sailing (he owned a 47-foot-long sailing boat *Kwa Heri*), game shooting and skiing (he was a member of the British Orthopaedic Ski Group). In 1966 he married Mary, the daughter of the surgeon Noel Frederick Adeney. They had two children, a daughter, Nicky, and a son, Mark. Tim Morley died on 11 January 2023. He was 83.