Michael Hobsley was a professor of surgery at University College London and at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, before it merged with University College Hospital Medical School in 1987. He was born on 18 January 1929 in Calcutta, where his father worked, and attended St Saviour's College, C

John Currie was head of the neurosurgical department at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London. He was born on 1 July 1926 in Darlington, County Durham. His father was a practising physician in Darlington who had trained at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London and served as a doctor in the First World War