John Meiring Beck was a consultant paediatric surgeon at Leeds General Infirmary. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 10 August 1933. His father, Johannes Henricus Meiring Beck, was a general practitioner; his mother, Mavis Beck née Courtenay, was a legal secretary prior to her marriage. Beck’s grandfather Louis was a popular GP in Cape Town who died of Spanish flu in 1919 while attending his patients. Louis’ brother, Sir Meiring Beck, was a doctor and later a politician and cabinet minister. John Beck was educated at St Andrew’s College, Grahamstown and then studied medicine at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 1950 to 1955. He held house posts at Johannesburg General Hospital, where he worked under Phyllis Knocker, the first female surgeon in South Africa. After other house jobs and a period at Mission Hospital, in 1957 he was offered a job as a medical officer and assistant bus driver on a trans-Africa trip from Johannesburg to North Africa. Following family tradition, he went to Edinburgh, where he took his primary, which he passed at the first attempt. He was a senior house officer at Hammersmith Hospital from 1960 to 1961, where he worked for Ian Aird, a friend of his father’s, and was then a registrar in Southend and Rochford from 1962 to 1963. In early 1964, he returned to South Africa, where he had been offered a training post with Jannie Louw in Cape Town. He was a registrar under Louw, Sid Cywes and Christiaan Barnard at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, an experience which convinced him to specialise in paediatric surgery. In August 1966, he was appointed as a consultant paediatric surgeon in Johannesburg and as a clinical lecturer in the department of surgery, developing the paediatric surgery service with Michael Dinner. Due to Apartheid, he had to work at three hospitals: Transvaal Children’s Hospital was for the white population, Coronation Hospital for mixed race patients and Baragwanath for black people. Becoming increasingly appalled by the political situation in South Africa, Beck decided to move to the UK, to Leeds, as the first paediatric surgeon in Yorkshire. For the first ten years, he worked singlehandedly with his anaesthetist Lawrie Gardner to establish and develop paediatric and neonatal surgery in the region. In 1990, he was diagnosed with lymphoma, but resumed his clinical practice after chemotherapy. He retired from the NHS in 1995 and returned to South Africa, where he worked at a rural hospital at Kabokweni near the Kruger Park, helping improve the care of children in a poor and deprived community. He then moved to Cape Town at the invitation of Sid Cywes and his successor Heinz Rode, where he developed paediatric surgical clinics in black and mixed race townships at Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain on the Cape Flats. In 1998, his lymphoma returned: he retired from clinical practice and went back to the UK. He and his wife retired to Winchester to be near their family, but the lymphoma returned once again and he decided not to have further chemotherapy. John Beck died on 20 January 2016 at the age of 82. He was survived by his wife Ann née Wilkinson (known as Paddy), a former teacher, whom he married in 1960, and their three children – Lucy, James and Janet.