John Ivor Tullis passed away peacefully in Highview House Care Home Inverness, on 14 July 2012, aged 87 years.

Born on 26 August 1924, Ivor was educated at Morgan Academy then Dundee High School. He had wanted to become a vet, but as the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow were often targets for Luftwaffe bombing, his mother decided St Andrews University was where her son should study and he chose dentistry, graduating in 1946. As a student he was a second lieutenant in the TA and later joined the Royal Army Dental Corps. Whilst serving in Singapore he met his wife-to-be, Margaret, a nursing officer in the Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps and they married in 1948.

He left the army in 1952 and worked as a GDP in two family practices in Dundee until 1969, when he joined the restorative dentistry department at the University of Edinburgh. Perhaps inevitably he was nicknamed the Sergeant Major by the cohorts of dental students he taught. With anaesthetist Donald Grubb, he pioneered new sedation techniques for dental treatment and introduced teaching in four-handed dentistry on supine patients. In 1974, he was appointed as Chief Administrative Dental Officer (CADO) for Highland Health Board in Inverness where he spent the remaining 15 years of his professional career until his retirement in 1989.

Ivor was a forthright character, perhaps shaped by the austerity, adversity, trauma and uncertainty of the Second World War and discipline of his military training. During his time as CADO, research was undertaken in Highland within primary dental care evaluating community-based preventive dentistry, using school-based fluoride tablets and fluoride rinsing schemes from which Caithness and Sutherland children continued to benefit up to the millennium.

He was an accomplished pianist, a competent cricketer and a useful golfer. He also spoke Norwegian, occasionally visiting Norwegian dentists he taught as students at the Edinburgh Dental Hospital.

On retirement he became more involved in politics serving as Chair of the Inverness branch of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party from 1993 until 1998, where he was fondly remembered. He is survived by Margaret, daughter Lesley and sons Donald and David, and was a loving grandfather of six grandchildren.