Frank Wild Holdsworth (1904-1969) was born and brought up in Bradford and medically educated at Cambridge and St. Georges Hospital. He qualified in 1929 LRCP, MRCS and FRCS (Eng) 1930, and then, unusually, proceeded MB,BCh. Cambridge in 1934, presumably to take his MCh in 1935. 

He held junior appointments at St. Georges and then returned to Yorkshire as RSO at the Sheffield Royal Infirmary. He was helped and encouraged by the then Professor of Surgery Sir Ernest Finch, who not only suggested that Holdsworth should be elevated to the Consultant Staff in 1937 as the first orthopaedic surgeon in Sheffield, but also gave him one of his wards to set up the speciality.

By the time the war started in 1939 Holdsworth had a senior registrar and, soon after, a consultant colleague at the other city hospital in Sheffield, the Royal Hospital. For much of the war years however he was responsible for orthopaedic surgery in most of South Yorkshire. Gradually a few more consultant appointments were made in the periphery.