The pioneering surgeon who carried out the first successful heart transplant in Britain has died.

Sir Terence English transplanted a new heart into Keith Castle, a 52-year-old builder from London, despite fierce opposition. The landmark operation in 1979 was opposed by religious figures and others who were horrified that someone's heart could be cut out and given to someone else.

Sir Terence has died at the age of 93 but since his landmark procedure, around 9,000 patients have received lifesaving heart transplants in the UK. The world-renowned surgeon also supported the Mirror ’s historic campaign which had the law on organ donation changed to deemed consent.

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Sir Terence, speaking in an interview in 2019 to mark the 40th anniversary of the operation, said: “I’d been turned down by various transplant bodies and had been met with an awful lot of criticism, so we knew this was likely to be the last chance. I very much had my back to the wall.”

Previous heart transplant attempts in the UK had failed in 1968 and 1969, with the patients living for just 45, two, and 107 days respectively. None of them made it out of hospital. With survival rates showing little sign of improving, a moratorium was placed on heart transplantation in the UK for a period.

Sir Terence undertook a first attempt at a heart transplant at Royal Papworth Hospital in January 1979, but it failed tragically. While Sir Terence was removing the donor heart, the recipient had a cardiac arrest. He was quickly resuscitated and the transplant went well, but he died 17 days later.

The failure sparked a backlash among prominent figures. Professor Sir Roy Calne, the organ transplant pioneer at the nearby Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge, accused Terence of setting back UK cardiac transplantation by five years.

Seven months later, Sir Terence found another potential donor and a recipient. He explained: “I had a second shot and I was going to take it. Our recipient was Keith Castle, a 52-year-old builder from London. He was a smoker with peripheral vascular disease and a duodenal ulcer. Not the best of candidates you might think, but what always struck me about Keith was that he was a survivor.”

Keith Castle was a bubbly character and became a household name, living a full life for five years. Royal Papworth gained an international reputation for heart transplantation and later, heart-lung and lung transplants. In 1984 Sir Terence performed Europe’s first heart-lung combined transplant alongside Professor John Wallwork.

Sir Terence served as president of the Royal College of Surgeons, the British Medical Association and the International Society of Heart Transplantation. He was knighted in 1991 for his contributions to surgery and medicine before retiring in the mid-1990s before later moving to Oxford.

After years of campaigning by the Mirror, the Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Act - also known as "Max and Keira's Law" - came into effect in England in May 2020. It brought the country into line with the system in Wales and Scotland, then Northern Ireland followed suit in June 2023.

There is now an ‘opt-out’ system meaning that adults are presumed to be organ donors after their death unless they have specifically registered as not wanting to donate. Writing for the Mirror in 2017, Sir Terence said: “The need to increase organ donation for all forms of transplantation is a worldwide problem. The opt-out system is one that has been shown to be effective in countries such as Spain.

“However, there its success was accompanied by the development of a supporting system of national transplant co-ordinators trained to work closely with intensive care units to ensure staff in ICUs identify potential donors and communicate this to local transplant centres. This needs to be improved in the UK.”

Sir Terence was born in South Africa in October 1932 and studied mining engineering at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg before deciding to switch to medicine at Guy’s Hospital in London. He died peacefully at his home in Oxford on Sunday night and leaves behind his four children, eight grandchildren and his wife, Judith.