My first encounter with Francis Lupton was as one of a group of students from Aberystwyth visiting the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) at Cambridge, UK, as part of an Easter vacation tour in 1954. We were given a presentation, delivered with military precision, on wheat breeding by a tall, rather thin young man with a distinctly authoritative voice. Lupton had returned to Cambridge after the war to complete his interrupted studies, after seeing active service in the Middle East, Italy and Greece where he took part in some of the bitterest fighting, about which he characteristically said little. After graduating, he joined the PBI, under the directorship of G. D. H. Bell, in 1948. The Institute, which had previously been part of Cambridge University, had been hived off after the war to come under the aegis of the Agricultural Research Council. Lupton was assigned to the wheat breeding programme, thereby inheriting the mantle of Biffen and Engledow.