Peter Gortvai, the only son of William, an obstetric surgeon and his wife Elizabeth, née Foldi, LDSRCS, was born on 1 December 1927. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his Natural Sciences Tripos in 1951 and won the Tripos prize. He then went to the London Hospital from 1951

‘You can teach a monkey to operate, but you can’t teach a monkey when not to operate.’ Many, especially on the European Association of Neurosurgical Societies’ training courses, will remember John Garfield’s pithy one-liners. That was the epitome of John – serious, but everything had to be fun and w

John Fairgrieve was a consultant vascular and general surgeon in Cheltenham who, in his youth, was an outstanding sprinter representing Great Britain in the 1948 Olympic Games and reaching the quarter final in the 200m. Although John was English, being born in London, he had Scottish roots as bot

Alan Blower served in the medical branch of the RAF as a consultant surgeon for 17 years, but had to retire on health grounds in 1970. He retrained in radiology, and became a successful and popular consultant at Peterborough. He was born in Greenwich on 31 January 1927, the only son of Thomas Paske

Peter Goodall was a consultant general surgeon in Derby. He was born on 8 February 1927 in London, the son of the Rev Norman Goodall, a minister of religion, and Doris Stanton, a Birmingham Medical School graduate. Peter was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Barnet and Highgate School,

Richard Vasey ‘Dick’ Fiddian was a consultant general surgeon at the Luton and Dunstable Hospital from 1964 to 1989. He was born on 6 October 1923 in Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire, where his father, James Victor Fiddian, was a general practitioner-surgeon. His mother, Doris Mary née White, came fr