My close friend, Charles Ilsley, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 74, was a cardiologist and a pioneer in the field of angioplasty. We were boarders at Churcher’s from 1961 to 1968 and were both in the school 7-a-side rugby team that won the Hampshire schools competition in 1968. After school Charles studied medicine at St Mary’s Hospital, London and started to specialise as a cardiologist in 1975.  He had a spell at Harefield Hospital as a cardiology registrar, then moved to the National Heart Hospital for a period of research with Tony Rickards who, in 1980, assisted by Charles, performed the first balloon angioplasty in any London hospital.

Then followed a consultancy at Dunedin Hospital in New Zealand where the Cardiology unit started the pioneering approach of directly treating heart attacks with angioplasty. Patient outcomes were unusually good and when Charles returned to Harefield as a consultant in 1987 he did outstanding work using angioplasty. In the 1990s, internal NHS politics sapped much of his time, as the hospital was marked for closure. It survived (largely due to the evidence of lives saved by angioplasty): perhaps his greatest achievement. Charles became clinical director at Harefield in 2008, but retained a sizeable clinical workload: in that year alone he performed 573 catheter procedures. He was a leading advocate of angioplasty as a treatment for heart attacks and, with the team at Harefield, he developed a 24-hour Primary Angioplasty service for treating heart attack patients. He demonstrated that this procedure could be as fast as thrombolysis (using clot-busting drugs) but the reason for its adoption was because of its much shorter in-patient time (3 days for angioplasty versus up to 14 days for thrombolysis).

Charles married Anne Rogers, a nurse, in 1972 and they had two children, Kate and Richard. That marriage ended in divorce in 2012. In 2013, he married Helen Binns, a consultant cardiologist at Northampton General Hospital and settled in Everdon, Northants. Charles is survived by Kate, Richard, two grandchildren, Edward and Florence, by his sister, Susan, and by Helen and three of their springer spaniels.