Graham Farrington was a consultant general surgeon to Kingston Hospital, Surrey, from 1971 until his retirement at the age of 60 in 1994. He was born in Whetstone, London, on 31 October 1934 into a non-medical family. His father, Percy Morgan Sibley Farrington, owned a garage and his mother, Iris Lilian Broughall, was a housewife. Graham received his early education at the Minchenden Grammar School, Southgate, before proceeding to the University of Leeds School of Medicine, graduating with distinction in 1958 and obtaining the Public Welfare Foundation Prize of the College of General Practitioners. House appointments and registrar posts followed, including some in East Anglia. When working at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital he showed an early interest in paediatric surgery. During training he demonstrated a meticulous care when dealing with children suffering with testicular maldescent who had been referred to the paediatric centre at the Jenny Lind Hospital for Sick Children. These children he followed up into their teens. Graham Farrington's definitive higher surgical training in general surgery was undertaken on a rotational scheme at St George's Hospital, Tooting. In 1968 he went to the USA as a research fellow in surgery at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Hospital, Boston. Here he was able to participate in work on pulmonary response in shock and sepsis, for which this centre had a worldwide reputation stemming from the work of Jacob Fine. His first major publication was in the paediatric field and co-authored by C Gordon Scorer, of Hillingdon Hospital, on *Congenital deformities of the testis and epididymis* (London, Butterworths, 1971). This original work established the important principle that few if any testicles descend spontaneously after the age of one. Scorer and Farrington went on to publish a chapter on the topic in *Campbell's urology* (fourth edition, Philadelphia/London, Saunders, 1979). A popular and highly respected teacher, Farrington was surgical tutor at Kingston Hospital from 1980 to 1985 and was an enthusiastic commissioning officer for the new surgical wing at the hospital. Outside medicine, he was fond of gardening, enjoyed classical music and was an avid reader, particularly on the history of civil aviation. Close to his mother, who died in 2000, Graham Farrington never married. He died on 30 August 2008 in St Helier Hospital, Carshalton, from pneumonia following a stroke.