Born 26 April 1912 at Swindon, Wiltshire, the second child and only son in the family of five of John Albert Honeywill, insurance agent, who died in 1922, and Elsie Rosalind Edwardes his wife. Educated at Bournemouth School, he entered University College Hospital Medical School in 1933 with a Goldsmid exhibition. His undergraduate career was brilliant. He shared the Magrath clinical scholarship and won the Atchison scholarship awarded to "the student who, within a period of three years reckoned from the date of his entry to the school, has shown the best work and greatest proficiency as a student of the medical school and hospital". In 1938 he received the gold medal at the University of London examination for the MB BS with distinction in surgery and obstetrics. At University College Hospital he filled in succession the posts of house surgeon, house physician, and casualty surgical officer. At the Royal College of Surgeons in 1930 he won the Macloghlin scholarship, of the value of £120 per annum for five years, after an examination in chemistry and physics, and three years later (1933) he was the Begley student receiving £20 a year for three years, having gained the highest number of marks in the anatomical portion of the examination at the primary examination in anatomy and physiology held by the Conjoint Examining Board in England. He married Margaret Joan Jaffee, MRCS LRCP, on 14 July 1934, who survived him with a daughter. He died from septicaemia and pyaemia on 17 September 1939, a man who would have gone far and could ill be spared.