Gordon Cassie was a general surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth II (QEII) Hospital in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, where he provided surgical services from 1962 until his retirement in 1986, with only one half-time colleague. Cassie was born in Aberdeen, the second son of James Harvey Cassie, a manufacturer’s agent, and Edith Cassie née Logan, and was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School. He read medicine at Aberdeen University, graduating in 1944. There was no previous history of doctors in the family: he said that he was from a family of civil servants and scientists. His brother Ian became a dentist in South Africa. In 1945 he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant and later as a captain attached to the 1st Battalion Royal Scots Guards, serving in India and Malaya. He entered Singapore on the day after its liberation in September 1945 and was one of the first doctors into Changi Jail after the surrender. He was horrified at what he found there. He did not talk about this until he was very old. After his return to the UK in 1947, Cassie worked in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and then moved to London to the West Middlesex Hospital, Paddington General Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where he was a senior registrar to Arthur Dickson Wright, Sir Arthur Porritt and Charles Rob. He married Doris Charles, a nurse, in 1949 and had two children, Iain and Alison. While at St Mary’s, he took a year out in 1957 and the whole family sailed to Boston, where he worked in Peter Bent Brigham Hospital on renal transplantation in dogs, resulting in the thesis for his ChM In 1962 Gordon Cassie was appointed as a surgeon to Welwyn Garden City, where a new hospital was being built, the first new general hospital since the formation of the NHS. The foundation stone had been laid in September 1959. A nucleus hospital was opened in 1962 in two wards of Hill End Hospital, St Albans, a mental health institution, with 50 beds for medicine and surgery. Here Cassie, the first surgeon, David Phear, the first physician, and Miss Stone, the matron, set about planning the new hospital. After inevitable delays, four wards were opened initially and the first patients were admitted on 1 July 1963. On 22 July, the Queen visited and formally opened the new hospital. The name was announced, the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital, later shortened to the QEII. One of Gordon Cassie’s particular interests was in medical education and he was concerned about the lack of facilities for doctors, visiting medical students and allied medical professions at the new hospital. He set about fundraising from firms in Welwyn Garden City. While on holiday in Spain in a bar he fortuitously met a local executive Frank Hodson from Welwyn Garden City, previously unknown to him, and mentioned the difficulty he was having in raising funds. When they returned home further meetings led to Frank becoming chairman of the steering committee, which enabled the building of a two-story addition to the hospital with library, lecture theatre and meeting rooms. The postgraduate centre was opened on 26 January 1973 and it became the centre of hospital academic life. The surplus money became the Gordon Cassie Fund, which was, and is still, used for bursaries for doctors, nurses and allied professions for study expenses. Gordon Cassie was the first clinical tutor and subsequently RCS tutor at the QEII. Outside surgery, his passion was golf, having played for the University of Aberdeen and St Mary’s Golfing Society. To get hold of Gordon in an emergency, and before mobile phones, one had only to look in the hospital, at home or on the golf course. In retirement, he moved back to Aberdeen and lived between the golf course and the River Dee and enjoyed both. For his 90th birthday he asked for a new driver. Gordon Cassie died on 25 August 2016 at the age of 94. He is remembered as being a man of outstanding kindness to patients and other members of staff, both senior and junior, and as a source of wise advice to all. He was very welcoming to me personally as his successor and took care to introduce me to everyone I needed to know. We corresponded annually until his death with news of the hospital, about which he had an abiding interest.