John Atwell was a paediatric surgeon in Southampton and a distinguished paediatric urologist. He was born on 17 May 1929 in Maracaibo, Venezuela. His father, Percival John Cyril Atwell, was a manager with Shell Oil; his mother was Doris May Atwell née Gardner. When he was five, the family returned to England, to a home on the Hamble River, Hampshire. He was educated at Peter Symonds School in Winchester and then spent two years in the Royal Corps of Signals. From 1949 he studied medicine at the University of Leeds, qualifying in 1955 with the McGill prize in clinical surgery. All of his junior posts were in Leeds. He was a house surgeon at the General Infirmary, a demonstrator in anatomy at the university, a house physician at St James’s Hospital, a senior house officer in the receiving room at the General Infirmary and a registrar on the surgical professorial unit there under John Goligher and Alan Pollock. Keen to work in other centres, he became a house surgeon at the Postgraduate Medical School of London, a senior house officer at Great Ormond Street, a surgical registrar at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and a senior registrar back at Great Ormond Street, where he trained in paediatric urology with David Innes Williams. In 1961 he returned to Leeds as a lecturer in surgery. In 1963 he went back to London, as a senior lecturer with consultant status at the Institute of Child Health, where he worked with Andrew Wilkinson, the first professor of paediatric surgery in the UK. He also had sessions at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hackney and later at the Westminster Children’s and St Thomas’ hospitals. In 1969 he moved to Southampton to establish the Wessex regional centre for paediatric surgery at Southampton General Hospital, the first such regional centre in the south of England outside London. From 1986 to 1993 he was also a civilian consultant in paediatric surgery to the Royal Navy. As a trainee in Leeds his main research interest was Crohn’s disease, but his later publications were on neonatal surgery and urological subjects. He made many important contributions to paediatric urological research, including a landmark paper in 1985 ‘Ascent of the testis: fact or fiction’ (*Br J Urol*. 1985 Aug;57[4]:474-7), the first paper to authoritatively document the phenomenon of secondary testicular ascent. Other research included studies of familial inheritance of upper tract duplication, pelvic ureteric junction obstruction, vesicoureteral reflux and other congenital anomalies of the urinary tract. An elected member of the Society of Paediatric Urological Surgeons, he was president of the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons from 1989 to 1990 and in 1997 was awarded the Association’s Denis Browne gold medal. He was an examiner for all four Royal Colleges and chairman of the court of examiners at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He had a lifelong passion for sailing and won many prizes in sailing competitions and regattas. He also collected old English glass. In retirement, he learnt to fish with flies and to paint watercolours. In 1960 he married Sue Nightingale, a nurse at Great Ormond Street. They had two sons and a daughter, 11 grandchildren and three great grandchildren. John Atwell died on 14 December 2016 at the age of 87. A children’s day surgical ward at Southampton General Hospital has been named in his honour.