Christopher Wilfred Venables was born on 10 March 1935 in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. He was the only son of Wilfred George Venables, the manager of a chain store, and his wife Norah née Rainey. Educated in Swindon, he attended the Commonweal and Headlands Grammar Schools and won a Wiltshire County scholarship to study medicine at London University and the Westminster Medical School. He graduated MB, BS in 1958 and was awarded two Chadwick surgical prizes. House appointments and registrar and lecturer appointments at the Westminster Hospital followed and he was strongly influenced by the work of Sir Stanford Cade and Robert Cox. After a spell as house surgeon at the Birmingham Accident Hospital, he joined the RAMC to do his National Service as a surgical specialist. In this post he travelled widely, working at the Aldershot Military Hospital, the Lagos Military Hospital in Nigeria, the Iserlohn Military Hospital in Germany and spending time in the Southern Cameroons. He also visited New York as he was awarded a surgical research fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital. He joined the staff of the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle as a consultant general surgeon and worked closely with George Young Feggeter. Eventually he developed an expertise in the field of gastroenterology, contributing several papers in that subject to various surgical journals. He also lectured in surgery at the University of Newcastle. Healthcare computing was another field in which he took a great interest. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, a member of the North East Surgical Society and a member of the British Society of Gastroenterology. In 1960 he married Anne Ferguson and they had two daughters and a son. He died on 21 March 2019 aged 84, survived by his wife, children and grandchildren.