Thomas Henry Cullen (Tom) was born on 6 February 1917 in Kelvedon, Essex. A farmer’s son, he was born and brought up on Clarke’s Farm. Educated at Colchester Grammar School, he opted to study medicine as farming in Essex was not particularly productive in the 1930s. He entered the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1934 and qualified in September 1939 just as the second world war broke out. After a spell as a house surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital, in June 1940 he enlisted as a medical officer in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. He was posted to the Middle East in the November and then on to Greece. As the air base in Maleme, Crete, where he was based came under increasing attack from the Germans, his work became increasingly hazardous. *Suffering from dysentery he toiled alone for three days attending to more than 1,000 wounded men as the Germans came ever closer*. For this dedication he was awarded the MBE in 1942. Captured by German paratroopers in 1941, Tom was one of Britain’s last surviving escapees from a second world war prisoner of war camp. He did not talk about the experience to his family until he was 80 and only spoke publically about it around the time of his hundredth birthday. He was transported to a prison camp, Stalag XXA, near Torun in Nazi-occupied Poland where he spent two and a half years until he escaped in 1943 at the age of 27. Other prisoners sewed Polish looking clothes for him and John Grieg, an army officer, and then staged a supposed riot to distract the guards.*Taking a ladder, the pair managed to climb over an 8ft fence topped in barbed wire and walk over a frozen moat, sneak past guards and wait for a resistance truck to collect them before staying in several safe houses on their way to the coast. They made it to Gdynia, near Gdansk, then got a bus into the city before hiding in the hold of a ship for 36-hours. They eventually arrived in neutral Sweden and were passed to the British ambassador who got them back to Britain.* On his return to the UK, Tom spent the rest of the war serving at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire. On demobilisation he took up the post of consultant surgeon at Kettering General Hospital. During the 30 years and more that he spent there, he worked hard on the reorganisation and development of the hospital throughout the early years of the NHS, He was a fellow of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and a senior fellow of the British Association of Urological Surgeons. While he was stationed at Halton he met and married Catherine Mary née Lockerbie (Mollie). He went back to his roots on retirement, buying a farm in Kelvedon. Mollie predeceased him in 2006. He died on 24 March 2019 aged 102 and was survived by four children (including his son Richard), eleven grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren. Two of his children qualified in medicine.