David Cairns was a consultant general surgeon in the High Wycombe Health District. He studied medicine at Cambridge University and graduated in 1962. After house jobs in vascular surgery and urology in London at the Middlesex Hospital and St Mark’s, he passed the fellowship of the college in 1967. H

John Lendrum was a consultant plastic surgeon in Manchester and Rochdale. He was born in Burton Joyce, Nottinghamshire, on 24 October 1936 into a long-established medical family. His father, George McCormack Lendrum, was a general practitioner; his mother, Enid Lendrum née Fletcher, was a housewife.