Philip Evans was born in Edinburgh, the elder son of a Welsh general practitioner and his French wife. He was educated at the Nautical College, Pangbourne, and at Guy’s Hospital. He qualified in 1942, having won the year before the Golding-Bird gold medal in obstetrics and gynaecology. In the same year he joined the Royal Navy as a temporary surgeon lieutenant RNVR. In 1943, when on active service in a destroyer, he was badly injured in both legs when the ship hit a mine. Despite his injuries he continued to look after other wounded men until help arrived, and for his courage and devotion to duty was awarded the George Medal. But the damage done led to his being invalided out of the Service and the after effects (recurrent osteomyelitis) were to plague him all his life and lead eventually to the amputation of one leg below the knee.
After leaving the Navy, Evans worked for the next three years as a medical registrar at Guy’s, and at some of the other hospitals in the Guy’s sector, and while doing so qualified MD and MRCP. In 1947 he was appointed first assistant consultant and then, in 1948, consultant physician to the Wrexham Group of Hospitals and he continued to work there until his retirement in 1979. He was for some years a member of the hospital management committee and was a founder member of the Society of Physicians in Wales. He published a number of papers, mostly on the treatment of peptic ulcer. In 1963 he was appointed a Justice of the Peace in Denbigh, and was elected a Fellow of the College in 1966.
Evans’ temperament was mercurial, which is perhaps not surprising in view of his mixed French and Welsh blood. He could be devastatingly comic on occasion and full of gaiety. But, at times, he suffered periods of depression, though this was known only to his close friends. He bore the burden of recurrent foot infection for many years with little complaint, even though it meant that nearly every form of sport and active recreation was denied him. At one time he was a keen yachtsman; and he always enjoyed the gastronomic delights of France on his regular visits to the family house in the Haute Loire.
Kindly, shrewd and wholly lacking in conceit, Evans was much loved as a physician and well deserved the devotion and regard he received from a wide circle of friends.
In 1942 he married Margarita (Peggy), daughter of John Wheelwright Barnett, an exporter and British Consul in Chile, and they had three sons. She nursed him devotedly in his many bouts of illness and survived him, together with their sons.
JR Forbes