My father, David Buddery, who has died aged 90, was a gifted dental surgeon. He regaled his patients with anecdotes while attending to their teeth. David could recite the poetry of Rudyard Kipling by heart and was a dedicated Savoyard, claiming distant kinship to Sir Arthur Sullivan. He never missed local productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, and for several years was president of the Waveney Light Opera Group, based at Beccles in Suffolk.
The scion of a fishing family, he was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, the oldest of three sons. Evacuated to Retford, Nottinghamshire, during the second world war, he trained at Sheffield University and first practised dentistry in a holiday bungalow on the cliffs at Scratby, Norfolk, where he and his wife, Joycelyn, a librarian, began their married life in 1948. He would remove offending molars for people seated in deckchairs. He later established a surgery in Great Yarmouth and became clinical assistant in the department of oral surgery at the James Paget University Hospital, Gorleston.
He enjoyed canoeing and, in order to take his parents and family for afternoon jaunts on the Norfolk Broads, purchased a small cruiser called Tigger which was moored at Upton Dyke near Acle in Norfolk.
From hearing King George V's first Christmas broadcast in 1932 he maintained a lively interest in amateur radio, and exercised great ingenuity and skill in constructing and designing radio sets. His membership of the Radio Society of Great Britain spanned 75 years. He founded the Gorleston Amateur Radio Society, organising the monthly meetings, field days and summer activities, sometimes in his garden, and maintained his interest in receiving and sending morse code messages to the end of his life.
Jocelyn died in 2004. David is survived by his son, also David, and myself; by two grandchildren; and by his brothers, John and Martin.