Born in 1930, Dulal Ghosh was raised by a widowed mother in humble circumstances and won a scholarship to the Calcutta Medical College, qualifying MB BS in 1954 and gaining the Calcutta MS in 1961. He came to Britain in 1966 and passed the Fellowship in 1969, gaining the Edinburgh Fellowship in 1968

Robert Mitchell was born in Longueville, New South Wales, on 13 October 1927. His father, William Robert Mitchell, was an accountant. His mother was Lilian née Coram. He was educated at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School and studied medicine at the University of Sydney. He did junior posts

Francis Sandor was born in Budapest on 13 July 1905. His father, Ignac, was a businessman in Budapest and his mother, Jenni Cipszer, was a teacher. He left Hungary with the advent of Communism and went back to medical school in Edinburgh and re-qualified as LRFPS (Glasgow) in 1952. He originally tra

John Gibbons was born in Moseley, Warwickshire, on 26 November 1926. His father, Leonard Norman Gibbons, who had been severely gassed in the trenches during the First World War, later became legal adviser to the Birmingham Gas Board. His mother was Gladys Elizabeth née Smith, a secretary. John was e

John Steuart Alexander Linton was a consultant surgeon at Nottingham. He was the son of the Very Reverend J H Linton, a missionary who became a bishop in Persia. His mother, Alicia Aldous, had qualified in 1908 from the Royal Free Hospital and was then senior resident in Isfahan Hospital. She was on