Ken Edwardson was a general surgeon at Clatterbridge Hospital on the Wirral. He was born on 29 July 1935 in the Lancashire coastal village of Ainsdale, a suburb of the holiday resort of Southport, some 20 miles north of Liverpool. Despite the impending Second World War, this was an idyllic place for the local children to grow up in: they could roam without supervision and develop their own personalities and independence. Ken’s parents, Albert Edwardson, a smallholder, and Nellie Edwardson née Stones, the manageress of a local women’s clothing shop, came from families originating in the nearby fertile farming area known as ‘the Moss’ surrounding the ancient Halsall parish church, where they are buried. Ken was an only child who grew up in a small house in Ainsdale, opposite an imposing windmill, which ground grain from the local fields, providing entertainment for local children who climbed inside the tower to watch the shaft rotate and turn the sails. Education for Ainsdale children began at the local Anglican church primary school, St John’s, and for Ken commenced in 1939, coinciding with outbreak of the Second World War. Church primary school education in those days was based on ‘the three Rs’ (reading, writing and arithmetic), the written components of which, for first year pupils, were scratched on slates, together with exercise in the school playground, and compulsory sleep sessions on mattresses in the assembly hall. It was delivered by the women of the village as the men had been called up for war service. For most children this was in preparation for the 11-plus examination, but a scheme was in existence in Southport borough for bright, promising children to be transferred to the local grammar school, King George V School, a year earlier. It comes as no surprise that Ken was one of these. His subsequent academic progress in both school and university showed this to have been the correct decision. Ken applied for admission to Liverpool University Medical School and commenced his studies by moving straight into the second year of the MB ChB course in 1955. It was soon apparent that he was an excellent student: he gained a distinction in anatomy and was awarded an exhibition in anatomy, the Torr silver medal, the E B Noble prize, and a faculty of medicine undergraduate scholarship. He was invited to take an intercalated BSc in anatomy, studying the vascular supply of lumbar lymph nodes in normal and tumour bearing rats, for which he was awarded a first-class degree by thesis in 1957. He performed equally well in his undergraduate clinical years, where he worked on firms with notable academic clinicians including Charles Wells, Lord Cohen and Sir Norman Jeffcoate, the latter rewarding him with a distinction in obstetrics and gynaecology and the Henry Briggs memorial medal. It was no surprise when his fellow students elected him president of the medical students’ society and that soon afterwards he graduated MB ChB with second class honours, a rare distinction in those days. With such an academic record Ken could have proceeded to undertake higher clinical training anywhere in the country and overseas and to pursue a career in academic medicine, but he chose to stay in Merseyside. Indeed, following qualification, he only published a small number of clinical papers and at the age of 32 he was appointed as a consultant general surgeon at Clatterbridge Hospital and stayed in posts on Merseyside and the Wirral peninsula for the rest of his career. He was an outstanding general surgeon of the old school, dealing with conditions across the major specialties with skill and kindness, a fact testified by his extensive private practice. He was also surgical tutor at Liverpool University and an examiner in surgery for Liverpool and Manchester universities. He was a member of the International Society of Surgery and a council member of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland. At the Royal College of Surgeons of England he was a committee member of the overseas’ doctors training scheme. His entrepreneurial abilities were applied to the raising of funds for the development of a day case unit at Clatterbridge Hospital, a modern MRI scanning facilities and, notably, for a hospice for the care of the elderly successfully built in the grounds of Clatterbridge Hospital. He enjoyed horse riding and was chairman of the local Riding for the Disabled. Although he was a talented general surgeon, Ken was equally well known as a mountaineer and adventurer. This came about from his schooldays in Southport, when a new headmaster, Geoffrey Dixon, a member of the exclusive Climbers’ Club, noting that the school had amongst its old boys one John Thornley, a Himalayan mountaineer who died in 1950 attempting to climb Nanga Parbat, decided to found a school mountaineering society named after him. Ken’s enthusiasm for climbing and adventuring inspired by Dixon led him to explore and climb in the Himalayas, following the Everest trail in Nepal, trekking in Ladakh and Zanzibar and exploring the Atlas Mountains and Transylvania, and, using dog teams and igloos, Antarctica and the Arctic. He gained a pilot’s license and sailed many times as a crew member in the seas surrounding the British Isles. If all this was not enough, he pursued his talent as a wood carver; he made furniture and held two exhibitions of his sculptures. Ken married Sylvia Florence Linforth, a radiographer and magistrate, in 1962 and they had two children – Russell, a marketing executive, and Maxine, a general practitioner. Ken retired in April 1998 and pursued an active life with his family and friends from school and university days, notably meeting up every January in the Lake District with former members the Thornley Society at which Geoffrey Dixon was always a welcome guest.