Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2013 | Page 14

INTERVIEW

Anthony Roberts receives his OBE from the Queen

of direction, smiling: “I decided I
would chop people up instead!”
He trained to be a surgeon in
universities at both Oxford and
Cambridge. He mused: “There are
not too many who have been to both
Oxford and Cambridge, but if people
kept giving me scholarships it would
have been churlish to refuse them. I
always wanted to do surgery before I
got into medicine and fortunately I
made it.
“I was 28 and people told me I was
a bit old to go through the whole
training scheme, particularly plastic
surgery which is the most competitive
of all specialities – and always
technically challenging.”
He spent two years at Cambridge,
three at Oxford and then a further
six months each at Cambridge and
Reading. He also worked for six
months in the bush in Africa, before
looking for the senior house officer
position that took him back to Oxford
to do plastic and accident surgery.
His next port of call was Birmingham
in 1974 to work in plastic surgery at
the burn unit of a hospital for three
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Anthony Roberts and his wife Vivian at a Buckingham Palace garden party

years before moving to Newcastle and
then Leeds and Bradford. During that
time Anthony also spent a year in
Australia to undertake micro-surgery
training in Melbourne. He has also
worked and taught regularly in Hong
Kong and with the military service
in Egypt. As a consultant Anthony
covered all aspects of plastic surgery,
from head, neck and hand to burns,
breast reconstruction and skin cancer.
He had already been appointed to
Stoke Mandeville and was working
his three months notice at Bradford
at the time of the horrendous fire at
the town’s football stadium in 1985
that claimed 56 lives and resulted in
hundreds more being injured, many of
them with severe burns.
“I was on call for three weeks after
the fire,” Anthony recalls. “One of the
most memorable things about it all
was the fact that it was being televised
live as it happened. I was watching
television shortly afterwards, saw a
repeat of what was going on and knew
that I was needed at the hospital!
“Although six of the most seriously
injured went to the burns unit

at Wakefield, initially we had 57
patients admitted, and then a further
220 outpatients the following day. I
oversaw the whole operation for the
first eight hours, and perhaps that was
the start of many traumatic incidents
that I was involved in.”
Anthony’s knowledge and experience
in plastic surgery almost inevitably
took him worldwide – wherever there
was a major incident in which he
could play such a vital role.
He found himself in Athens to treat
victims after a major petrol refinery
fire, and was later in Hong Kong to
help youngsters injured when caught
up in a fire on a mountain.
He has also been on hand to help
rebuild the lives of war victims, having
worked tirelessly in Sarajevo at the
height of their conflicts as well as in
Azerbaijan and Kosovo. Indeed he has
used his professional skills working
and/or teaching in more than 20
countries spread over five continents.
“The majority of those were in
developing countries, and I was
particularly concerned with wars
and disaster management. I acted