Lindley Smith died on the 9th February just before his 83rd birthday. He was educated at Marlborough College before going to Christ’s College, Cambridge and Westminster Hospital Medical School where he qualified in 1940.

He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps as an ophthalmic specialist in Normandy and India, attaining the rank of major. He liked to relate how before the war he had spent time exploring Germany on a motor bike and acquiring a knowledge of the language, but when he answered a call for volunteers able to speak German he was …