1930-2023

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Ken Ray OBE BDS FDSRCS FRCS was born in Oxford and educated at the City of Oxford High School where he developed his lifelong love of rugby. He completed national service in Hong Kong and went on a County Scholarship to the University of Birmingham Dental School, graduating BDS in 1955. After initial training posts in Birmingham, he moved to the Royal Dental Hospital as registrar in oral surgery in 1957, remaining as senior registrar and subsequently senior lecturer. As a senior registrar, he was introduced by a mutual friend to Pam, a trainee almoner at the West Middlesex Hospital, and they were married within a year in the spring of 1958. By the time he took up a part-time NHS post at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in 1963, three children had arrived and for the next ten years he combined his increasingly busy clinical practice with his academic role in London, finally relinquishing this in 1973.

Ken immersed himself in developing and supporting his profession. Amongst numerous national roles, he was chair of the Central Committee for Hospital Dental Services and the Joint Committee for Specialist Training in Dentistry, President of the Hospitals Group of the BDA, President of BAOMS, Vice Dean and subsequently Dean of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the RCS London, and UK representative on the EEC Dental Liaison Committee. He was an honorary fellow of the Australian, Edinburgh and Glasgow Dental Faculties and the recipient of the Down Surgical Prize of BAOMS and the Colyer Gold Medal of the RCS London. He was awarded an OBE in 1996. Colleagues remember him as a formidable operator, someone who could be counted on to make the right decision and get things done in the most difficult circumstances.

In retirement, he and Pam travelled widely and were generous hosts to family and friends at their homes in the Berkshire countryside and in the Lake District. After Pam's death in 2016, Ken moved to Cheshire to be closer to his son where he built a new circle of friends and inevitably, unable to break the habits of a lifetime, chaired the residents board of his apartment complex to great effect. He died peacefully on 1 August 2023, a month after falling and fracturing his hip and a few weeks after his last visit to his beloved home in the North Lakes. He leaves three children, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Simon Ray