Gordon Alexander Dyce Lavy was born on 1 October 1924 in Nablus, Palestine, where his parents were working as members of the Church Missionary Society. Having been ordained at Cambridge, his father spent some time as a missionary in the Middle East before deciding on a career in medicine and qualifying in Dublin. He had married Gordon’s mother while working in the Sudan, having sadly lost both his first wife and baby son when practicing in India. Gordon studied medicine at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at St Bartholomew’s (Bart’s) in London, qualifying in 1948. Rather than do his National Service in the UK, he joined the New Zealand Navy as a doctor and worked in various hospitals for six months. When the Korean War broke out he served as a medical officer on a naval frigate based in Sasebo, Japan and eventually returned to the UK three years later. He did locums in various local practices and passed the fellowship of the college in 1957. A member of the Christian Medical Fellowship, he went to Uganda to work as a surgeon in the Mengo Hospital in Kampala. After six years he and his wife decided that they needed to return to the UK to benefit the education of their growing family. He was appointed senior registrar at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in 1965 and, two years later, became consultant general surgeon at Pembury Hospital in Tunbridge Wells, remaining there for the rest of his career. He was also honorary consultant to Burrswood Hospital in Groombridge. In 1987 he retired and, after living for twenty years in Tunbridge Wells, Gordon and his family decided to move to the old vicarage in Pembury, renaming it “Copsley”. They stayed there until 2002 when they moved to a smaller house near the village green. He continued his association with St Peter’s Church in Tunbridge Wells where he was a lay reader, a task he had fulfilled since his time in Uganda. A member of the Pembury Society, he also played bowls and continued his lifelong artistic interests. They had a cottage near Wroxham in Norfolk which they visited regularly for over 20 years. He married Patricia née Ward in 1955; she was a nurse at Bart’s and indeed, had been there, unknown to him, before his trip to New Zealand. She shared his Christian missionary beliefs. Of their seven children, three of their four sons became surgeons and two daughters qualified as nurses. When he died of old age on 22 November 2019 aged 95, Pat survived him along with 23 grandchildren and five great grandchildren.