John Grocott was the surgeon in charge of the plastic department at North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary. He was born on 23 January 1910, the only son of William Harley Grocott, headmaster of the Church of England school at Fenton, Staffordshire, and Eleanor Jane Grocott née Shemilt. He had two sisters. He received his secondary education at Orme Boys’ School in Newcastle-under-Lyme and at Longton High School, from where he won the Guy’s Hospital Medical School War Memorial Scholarship for chemistry and biology. He was an undergraduate at Guy’s from 1928 until 1933, when he qualified with the conjoint diploma and the London MB BS. He obtained his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1935. At Guy’s he came under the influence of Herbert Eason and William H Trethowan in particular, after which he returned to Stoke-on-Trent as a house surgeon at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary In 1934 a plastic surgery centre was established at that hospital under the direction of Sir Harold Gillies, joined later by Archibald McIndoe, who each conducted regular visits until 1939, training Grocott in the craft of plastic surgery long before formal training programmes existed. By the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Grocott ran the plastic surgery centre single-handed in addition to his duties as a general surgeon. In 1940, Grocott was recruited into the Emergency Medical Service, which took him to other hospitals for extended periods, including Hill End Hospital St Albans, Harlow Wood Hospital and Leicester Royal Infirmary. He continued to provide a single-handed consultant service in plastic surgery at North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary throughout this period, treating hundreds of severely injured service men and women, and continued single-handed until his retirement in 1975, following which he maintained his sessions at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital, Oswestry until 1976. John Grocott had a lifelong enthusiasm for cars and was an accomplished engineer. He combined these passions by building a succession of customised Alvis and Jaguar cars, one of which was officially named the Grocott Jaguar. He was married three times. In July 1936 he married Mona Wayte. They later divorced and he married Alethea (Ann) Savage, his theatre sister, in 1954. After her death in 1963, he married Kathleen (Kay) Muldoon in 1966. She predeceased him in 1985. He retired with Kay first to Anglesey then to the Isle of Man. Grocott died on 21 April 1992