William Ashby was born in Prenton, Birkenhead, on 17 May 1925, the son of Ernest William Ashby, a consultant electrical engineer and his wife Dorothy Margaret (née Bennett). He went to school at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool and graduated in medicine at the University of Liverpool in 1948. Th

Rodney Sneath was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham and a pioneer in limb salvage surgery for patients with bone tumours. He was born in Sheffield, the son of Ernest Saville Sneath, a master printer, who owned the ‘Saville Press’. His mother was Dorothy