John Ernest Bowerman was a consultant oral and maxillofacial surgeon at the Westminster and Roehampton hospitals. He was born on 13 March 1931, the son of Ernest J Bowerman, a pharmacist, and Irene M Bowerman née Partridge, a housewife, and was brought up in Torquay, Devon. He studied dentistry in Bristol and qualified in 1955 with gold medals. He then joined the Royal Army Dental Corps to carry out his National Service, however he was released to Honiton, to run the general dental practice of his uncle, who had become seriously ill. In 1960 he returned to Bristol to study medicine, working in a general dental practice in the evenings to help pay for the fees. He qualified in 1965 and in the same year became a fellow of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He then became a registrar and subsequently a consultant at the Westminster and Roehampton hospitals. As a young consultant, with the help of Stanley Lee and Gerald Westbury, he began to do head and neck surgery. At the British Association of Oral Surgeons, he insisted through the council and annual general meeting that ‘maxillofacial’ be added to the organisation’s name. He enjoyed teaching and on several occasions was invited to the Middle East to demonstrate surgical procedures. He was also an examiner in the UK. He published extensively and was one of the first to receive the fellowship in maxillofacial surgery from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh by examination. In 1991 he bought Pond Cottage and the accompanying estate and retired, with the aim of doing up and expanding the house. He also pursued another interest – fishing. He regularly visited Scotland to fish for salmon and trout and made two journeys to Norway to fish with Norwegian colleagues. Bowerman died on 25 April 2019. He was 88. He was survived by his wife Hilary (née Hazlewood), whom he married in 1955, their children Sarah, Martin and Karen, and grandchildren Amy-Louise and Michael.