John Adye Cholmeley was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, on 31 October 1902, the son of Doctor Mountague Adye Cholmeley and his wife Mary Bertha Gordon, née Cumming. His uncle, William Frederick Cholmeley FRCS, was surgeon to the Royal Hospital, Wolverhampton. He was educated at the Abbey School, Bec

'Tom' Morris was born in 1899 at Adelaide, where he started to read medicine, but interrupted his studies to enlist during the first world war, narrowly surviving the Spanish 'flu epidemic in 1918 aboard a troopship. After the war he came to England to follow in his father's footsteps at St Thomas's