He was awarded an honorary title in Orthopaedic and Accident Surgery by the University of Nottingham in 1993, in recognition of his research and teaching in musculoskeletal trauma.

[11] He assisted his colleague Robert Mulholland to treat mountaineer Doug Scott, three weeks after he had badly fractured both legs in 1977 near the summit of Baintha Brakk in the Himalayas.

[12] In September 1990, Colton, with his colleague John Webb, performed a bone graft on Prince Charles to restructure his fractured right arm following a polo accident.

[15] In 1991, he operated on motorcycling world champion Ron Haslam, who had sustained an open fracture of his leg in a racing crash.

[16] After Kenyan conservationist Richard Leakey was critically injured when the light aircraft he was piloting crashed in Kenya in 1993, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands paid for Colton to fly out to Nairobi to assess the treatment options.