Geoffrey Yates-Bell was born in London on 6 December 1902, and educated at St Dunstan's College and King's College Hospital Medical School. He qualified in 1925 and subsequently held junior appointments at King's. In 1930, at the early age of 28, he was appointed consultant urologist to King's College Hospital and became senior urologist there in 1937. During the war he worked at Leatherhead Emergency Hospital, and subsequently at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, Queen Mary Hospital, Carshalton, and Heatherwood Hospital, although his first loyalty was always to King's. An outstanding surgeon and teacher, he was a founder member of the British Association of Urological Surgeons, President of the Urological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine (1952) and President of the Listerian Society (1948). His many urological interests and publications included calculus disease and urinary tuberculosis in children. His other interests were equally diverse - he was a keen gardener, an enthusiastic tennis player who coached his children to Wimbledon standard, and he also wrote on the mythology of Greece and Rome. He married Winifred Perryman ('Winkie') and they had two children, Andrew, also a urologist at King's College Hospital, and Caroline. He retired from the NHS in 1967, somewhat disenchanted by the bureaucracy of state medicine, and died at Pinehurst in Kent, aged 88, on 29 April 1991, survived by his children and six grandchildren, his wife having predeceased him.