Roger Checketts was a much-admired orthopaedic surgeon in the north of England who was especially noted for his expertise and promotion of the Orthofix dynamic axial external fixation system in the management of long bone fractures, limb lengthening, limb reconstruction after trauma and limb salvage after excision of bone tumours. Roger was the first of his family to become medically qualified. He was born in London on 25 May 1936, the son of Horace Checketts, a family grocer, and Temperance Louisa (‘Louie’) Checketts née Kimberley, but his childhood was in spent in the Midlands, attending Stourbridge Road Primary School and then Bromsgrove County High School, leaving him with a soft but unmistakable Brummie accent. On leaving school in 1954, he spent two years as a National Serviceman in the Royal Air Force, serving as a nursing orderly in Egypt and Aden, reaching the rank of corporal. While in the Middle East he was close friends with the writer of this memoir, also doing National Service in the RAF as a nursing orderly. On demobilisation, he attended the University of Sheffield between 1956 and 1962, during which time he gained honours in physiology and gained a four-month elective scholarship to Harvard Medical School. He qualified in 1962 and was appointed as both a house surgeon and house physician at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, before becoming a senior house officer and research assistant to Andrew Kay, studying aspects of recurrent ulceration after vagotomy. He also came under the influence of H L Duthie. The findings of this research were published in papers in the *Lancet*, *Gut* and the *British Journal of Surgery*, as well being awarded an MD with high commendation from the University of Sheffield in 1967. During this time, he might well have pursued a career in gastroenterology or upper gastrointestinal surgery, but this was not to be. As part of his training for the FRCS examination he took a junior post in orthopaedic surgery, coming under the influence of Sir Frank Holdsworth, and his future career was ordained. He continued in orthopaedic training at King Edward VII Orthopaedic Hospital, Sheffield, taking his FRCS in 1969 and learning from Brian McKibbin, John Sharrard and David Evans, among others, before moving to the university department of orthopaedics, Western Infirmary, Glasgow as a senior registrar to Roland Barnes. During his time in Glasgow he became a devoted and lifelong supporter of Celtic Football Club. In 1973, he was appointed as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Northern Regional Health Authority, working principally at the Sunderland Royal Hospital, where he quickly established himself as an outstanding clinical surgeon with a special interest in trauma and fracture management. He was later appointed as an honorary clinical lecturer at Newcastle University. In his early consultant career Roger practised the whole range of orthopaedics with special emphasis on fractures (he introduced a daily fracture clinic including on Christmas day), but with the rise of specialisation in orthopaedics he increasingly concentrated his work on surgery of the lower limb, including joint replacement as well as fractures. In the early 1980s he became interested in the use of dynamic external fixation for long bone fractures rather than traditional traction methods and was soon attracting referrals from elsewhere. In 1995, he published his considerable experience using this technique for treatment of tibial fractures (‘134 tibial shaft fractures managed with the Dynamic Axial Fixator’ *Acta Orthop Scand* 1995 Jun;66[3]:271-4). He was a pioneer in the use of dynamic external fixation in the management of limb lengthening operations and was for many years the foremost surgeon in the north east practising limb salvage after the excision of malignant bone tumours. Although not a prolific author, he became well known for his expertise and experience in external fixation and was in demand both nationally and internationally as a lecturer and as a teacher in workshops. He was especially known for his work on the management of pin track infection (a well-recognised and potentially dangerous complication of external fixation) and the Checketts-Otterburn classification of pin site infection is standard (Checketts R G et al ‘Pin track infection and the principles of pin site care’ in De Bastiani et al Orthofix external fixation in trauma and orthopaedics* London, Springer, 2000). Roger was also an inspiring and much-loved teacher both of undergraduates and postgraduates. His interest in orthopaedic training led him to be closely involved with setting up a rotational training scheme for registrars involving several regional hospitals and which later became the now massive Northern Orthopaedic Rotation. As a consequence of his influence and reputation, Sunderland soon became the place where orthopaedic trainees in the north wanted to go and competition for registrar posts were fierce. To have been trained by Roger was a sure way of getting a consultant post of choice. In retirement, he studied for and was awarded a degree in law from the University of Glasgow and established a thriving practice in medico-legal medicine, which continued until his late seventies. His passion and support for Celtic was unabated and he was astounded when the entire team travelled to the BBC TV studio to honour him on *Hearts of Gold*. His innate modesty and gentle personality, as well as the devotion of his nursing colleagues and several patients, including children, can be seen on a YouTube clip from the show, broadcast in 1988. His quiet sense of fun can perhaps be seen by his choice of email name, ‘rogerthebone’. A devoted family man, he married Helen (née Mcgrath) in 1962 and they had four children, Matthew, Elspeth, Andrew and Paul. He died after a short illness on 2 October 2018 aged 82.