Born on 29 March 1910, the third child of David Shackman, a manufacturing jeweller and diamond merchant, Ralph was educated at the Grocers' Company School and St Bartholomew's Hospital. Before the second world war he was the resident surgical officer at the Royal Infirmary Sheffield where he was enc

Francis Rankin Kilpatrick, known as ‘Kilp’, was a urological surgeon in London. He was born in Windsorton near Kimberley in Cape Province, South Africa, on 18 September 1908. His father had been a draper’s assistant who emigrated from Northern Ireland to South Africa in 1897, where he flourished, en

David Ronald Davies, always 'DR' to his friends, was born on 11 May 1910 in Clydach, Swansea, and remained readily identifiable as a Welshman throughout a long surgical career in London, followed by retirement to Exmoor. After schooling at the Ystalyfera County School, which inevitably gave him an e