Ian Logan Craft was born on 11 July 1937 in Wanstead, East London, one of twins, sadly his sister failed to survive the birth. He was the eldest of the three sons of Reginald Craft, an employee of Barclays Bank, and his wife Lois née Logan, who also worked for the bank until she married. Educated initially at St Mary’s Convent in Woodford, where he grew up, he then went on to Dame Alice Owen’s School in Islington where a teacher encouraged him to study medicine. He trained at Westminster Hospital Medical School and graduated MB, BS in 1961. After an initial job in radiotherapy, he decided to specialise in gynaecology and obstetrics, regarding it as a happy specialty, helping women to give birth as safely and pleasantly as possible. After house jobs at the Westminster and Kingston Hospitals he became a fellow of the college in 1966 and was appointed a consultant at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in 1972. Four years later, still only 39 years old, he was appointed a professor at the Royal Free Hospital (RFH). At the RFH he proceeded to set up an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) clinic with the help of a donation in 1977 from Roger Walter of the pop group Pink Floyd, whose daughter India was delivered by Ian. He was a very hands on practitioner, delivering numerous babies and administering epidurals himself. Already he was caught up in controversy as his approach to childbirth upset many advocates of the so-called natural birth movement stirred up by the controversial psychiatrist R. D. Laing – his car was twice vandalised. The first baby in the world to be conceived by IVF, Louise Brown, was born at Oldham General Hospital on 25 July 1978, largely due to the work of pioneering gynaecologists Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe. Four years later Ian oversaw the birth of Europe’s first set of twins to be conceived by IVF at the RFH to Jo and Stuart Smith on 29 April 1982 and two years after that his team reported the birth of the first set of triplets. Later that year he moved to the Cromwell Hospital to found an IVF facility there. In 1984 he published a ground-breaking paper on the use of the drug buserelin which overcame ovulation problems, using it the following year for the first time to aid a birth. In subsequent years its use would be credited with a huge increase in the numbers of live births. Ian left the NHS in 1985 frustrated by reductions in his funding. He then joined the staff of the world’s biggest IVF clinic at the Wellington Hospital (WH) in St John’s Wood. While there he continued to push at the boundaries of his specialty, becoming in 1986 the first to use gamete intrafallopian transfer to produce a baby and, the following year, the first to use egg donation towards a live birth. In 1990 he successfully used a frozen donor embryo and was the first gynaecologist to be granted a licence to use direct injection of sperm into the egg to create an embryo. The first live birth produced by this method was in 1994. Another innovative technique was the successful retrieval of sperm from men who had had a vasectomy. He founded an IVF clinic in Dubai and in 1990 set up the London Gynaecology and Fertility Centre in Harley Street, over which he presided until retirement in 2009. Inevitably new techniques give rise to controversies and IVF proved a particularly emotive topic. Ian’s motto was said to be *everyone who wants a child should have a child* and to this end he would challenge current acceptable boundaries. He saw no problem with assisting births in single women or same sex couples, nor did he see the age of the mother as a possible barrier, various of his patients were in their fifties and postmenopausal, although when he treated Liz Buttle (at 60 the oldest mother in the UK in 1997), he was under the impression that she was aged 49. In his early work he had caused problems by using eggs from known donors and vehemently argued against restrictions to be placed on the number of implanted embryos. In response to the work of the Warnock Committee, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority was set up in 1984 to establish guidelines on IVF procedures and they eventually ruled that no more than four eggs or embryos should be implanted. The WH clinic briefly had its licence removed in 1987 because Ian failed to respect those guidelines. In spite of being something of a workaholic, he found time for his various enthusiasms. He collected pictures and sculptures, many of which he displayed in his flat in Piccadilly. Having always wanted a place in the country, he bought a Georgian mansion and farm in Iddesleigh, North Devon in 2000 and personally worked on its restoration. A music lover, he always went to the Proms, enjoying being in the pit with the promenaders, and commissioned a clarinet piece from Peter Maxwell Davis in memory of his father who had played both the organ and piano. He went to live opera and theatre and enjoyed cricket, rugby and football. In 1959 he married Jackie née Symons whom he had known since he was 16 and they had two sons, Simon and Adrian. He acknowledged that she had been very supportive throughout his busy career but was left to bring up the family on her own and they divorced in 1998. He developed a serious prostate related illness in 2009 and spent the next ten years in a care home in Esher, resuming some of his interests in his last two or three years. He died of a heart attack on 3 June 2019, survived by his sons, two grandchildren and his brothers Christopher, a racing car driver, and Andrew. Tina Craig