Walter Briggs was born in Blackburn on 15 June 1880. He entered Owen's College, Manchester, in 1897, graduating MB ChB in 1902 with second-class honours in the Victoria University, which still included Owen's College, University College, Liverpool and Yorkshire College, Leeds. Two years later he gained the MB BS London. In the meantime he had held resident posts at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary. In 1905 he went to Vienna, and while there he met, and became engaged to, Florence Taylor, an Australian-born pupil of the great piano teacher Leschetizky. She married him in 1908, abandoning the idea of a career as a concert pianist for a marriage of great happiness: their hospitable Blackburn home was always full of the sound of music. Walter Briggs started his career in Blackburn as a single-handed general practitioner, but was soon appointed to the honorary staff of the Royal Infirmary as assistant surgeon. In the first world war he joined the 64th Casualty Clearing Station as a surgical specialist. The nucleus of this unit was recruited in the Western Command, and for a short time was attached to the 2nd Western General Hospital, Manchester, before going to France in 1917. In 64 CCS Walter Briggs served with distinction with the rank of acting Major, being mentioned in dispatches, and there came under the influence of Sir Ernest Rock Carling and the great Harvey Cushing, who was working near by at 46 CCS (Mendinghem). In Harvey Cushing's Surgeon's journal there are brief references to these encounters - "to tea with Carling and Briggs" (15 October 1917), "A full operating day, Briggs and Carling from No 64 looking on" (Saturday, 20 October 1917). After the war Walter Briggs relinquished general practice, and on the retirement of R Y Aitken became the sole consulting surgeon in the Blackburn area. His wise leadership in the clinical and administrative affairs of the Blackburn hospitals became undisputed. In 1928-9 he was Chairman of the Blackburn Division of the Bristol Medical Association, and in 1945 he was elected President of the Manchester Surgical Society, a signal honour for a surgeon from a non-teaching centre. In his earlier years his surgical interests, which were always wide, were focused on orthopaedics. He organized and took charge of the first orthopaedic clinic established in Blackburn with a unit for long-stay patients in the municipal hospital at Queen's Park. During this period he attended regularly the meetings of the British Orthopaedic Association. Later, when the Blackburn Royal Infirmary appointed its first specialist orthopaedic surgeon, Walter Brigg's surgical repertory became restricted to major abdominal surgery and the surgery of malignant disease. His technique in the operating-theatre always showed how deeply he had been influenced by watching Harvey Cushing at work in France. In 1950 Walter Briggs was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England under the "twenty years" rule. This distinction could have come to him much earlier, if by chance he had been an MRCS. A change in the regulations made it possible for the College to recognize him at the age of 70, at the end of his active surgical life. Walter Briggs was one of the original members of the Manchester Regional Hospital Board, on which he served for seven years, from 1947 to 1955. On his retirement from surgery he made several voyages up the Amazon as a ship's surgeon. His wife died in 1954. Briggs was a rare person who had great integrity, professional honesty, absolute devotion to medicine and surgery, and an appreciation of the realities of life. He loved flowers, good music, good literature, a beautiful day, and, above all, the Lake District, which he knew intimately. He was also a sportsman, both actively as a young man and later as a spectator. He died on 2 July 1967 at the age of 87, and was survived by his daughter Nora, Mrs Arthur Carter of Darwen, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Mrs Carter had made a home for him for the last twelve years of his life, and he looked after her large garden almost to the end.