Robin Gray was a consultant surgeon for the Greenwich Health District, a medical coordinator for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and then a medical officer at the World Health Organization in Geneva. He was born on 18 March 1942 at Epsom, Surrey, the son of Charles Horace Gray, a professor of chemical pathology at King’s College Hospital, and Florence Jessie Gray née Widdup, the daughter of an industrialist. He was educated at Kingswood Preparatory School and then Epsom College, and went on to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School. He was a house surgeon at St Thomas’, a house physician at Worthing Hospital, and then a senior house officer in venerology and a casualty officer back at St Thomas’. He then went to Leicester as a senior house officer in surgery at the General and Groby Road hospitals. He was subsequently a registrar at Plymouth General Hospital. He gained his FRCS in 1972. In 1977 he was appointed as a consultant general surgeon for the Greenwich Health District, a post he held until 1987. In 1988 he joined the ICRC, initially as a medical coordinator in Pakistan, then, in 1989, as a medical coordinator of surgical activities at the headquarters in Geneva. From 1995 to 2005 he was a medical officer at the World Health Organization, also in Geneva. At the ICRC he ushered in a ‘golden age’ of war surgery. He helped create a culture of independent ICRC hospitals to manage the war wounded in a number of countries in an era where there were not yet sufficient national personnel to face the task. Numerous volunteer doctors and nurses, mostly from European Red Cross societies, were seconded to the ICRC for a ‘mission’ of three to six months. Robin briefed them to what they could expect to encounter in a war zone. His gentle manner and jovialness hid a strong conviction in applying basic surgical principles to the difficult task of managing dirty and contaminated war wounds. ‘The best antibiotic is good surgery’ became his leitmotif. These basic principles involved wound debridement followed several days later by delayed primary closure, a tried-and-true application of the experience of numerous surgeons going back to the First World War, but all too often forgotten by new generations of war surgeons. He also encouraged surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses to record their experiences, collect data and publish their results. A large volume of war surgery articles followed constituting the most important cohort by a civilian organisation at the time. Robin went on numerous field missions often exposing himself to dangerous conditions. He was not dogmatic, however, and knew how to adapt to local conditions in some of the poorest countries in the world engulfed in armed conflict. He organised a first war surgery seminar in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1989, for Somali surgeons confronted with the wounded from an internal insurgency. Training through such seminars became a passion for him and he went on to organise such a session in Geneva ICRC headquarters beginning in 1990, a seminar that continues to the present day. Potential Red Cross personnel were thus prepared to meet the challenges that they would face in the field. Robin worked tirelessly to establish war surgery as a fundamental programme of the ICRC, often alone at the headquarters, at times helped by one or two colleagues, until such time as it was accepted as such despite the cost and logistic challenges. Years later, his example remained a model, and from one surgeon in ICRC headquarters working in a cubby hole, the surgical programme had become the hospital office with a head surgeon, head nurse, hospital administrator, anaesthetist and hospital programme manager. For those surgeons of a certain generation, Robin was and remained the leading light. He married Ulla Poulsen in 1964. They had a son and a daughter. Robin Gray died on 4 December 2020. He was 78.