Nicholas Barton was a consultant orthopaedic and hand surgeon at the Queen’s Medical Centre and Harlow Wood Orthopaedic Hospital, Nottingham. He was born on 28 May 1935 in Ruislip, the son of Ronald Cecil Nicholson Barton, a director of an advertising agency, and Mary ‘Molly’ Carty Barton née Farrell, a dancer. Nicholas attended the Hall School in Hampstead, and then Westminster School, where he developed his love of cricket. In 1953, he attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at the nearby Westminster Abbey. He studied medicine at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and then the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, qualifying in 1960 with a prize for psychiatry. He was a house surgeon and casualty officer at the Middlesex Hospital, and then a demonstrator in anatomy at Newcastle University and a rotating surgical registrar at Aberdeen General Hospital. He then trained in orthopaedic surgery as a registrar and senior surgical officer at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry, spending some time as a Harkness fellow at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, Los Angeles. In 1971 he was appointed to his consultant post at Nottingham, where he developed his main surgical interest, hand surgery. He became one of the first specialist hand surgeons in the UK and helped create one of the first integrated plastic and orthopaedic hand surgery services. Throughout his career he researched the treatment of many hand conditions. His first publication ‘Experimental study of optimal location of flexor tendon pulleys’ (*Plast Reconstr Surg*. 1969 Feb;43[2]:125-9) was on the impact on flexor tendon function and the amount of bowstringing caused by dividing the annular pulleys of the finger flexor sheath. This cadaver study demonstrated the importance of retaining what we now call the A2 pulley. He later published papers on the management of hand fractures, but his main interest was scaphoid fractures; many of his articles have become essential reading, including ‘Twenty questions about scaphoid fractures’ (*J Hand Surg Br*. 1992 Jun;17[3]:289-310). He was the editor of the *Journal of Hand Surgery (British Volume)* from 1987 to 1991, during which time the journal thrived. He was chair of the education committee of the British Orthopaedic Association and the Specialty Advisory Committee for Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery (from 1994 to 1995). He was the honorary secretary (from 1983 to 1985) and president (in 1989) of the British Society for Surgery of the Hand. In 2007 he was made a pioneer in hand surgery by the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand. Nicholas was also interested in the history of medicine, writing articles on Joseph Swan (1791 to 1874), a pioneer of research on peripheral nerves (*J Hand Surg Eur Vol*. 2008 Jun;33[3]:252-9), and John Hall (1575 to 1635), a physician in Stratford-upon-Avon, who may have had Shakespeare on his list (*Journal of Medical Biography*. 2000;8[1]:8-15). He also wrote a history of the first 30 years of the British Society for Surgery of the Hand (*J Hand Surg Br*. 1998 Dec;23[6]:711-23). As a student he worked on a barge on the Thames, became interested in the river and its tributaries, and, in 1965, wrote a book on the subject (*The lost rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners and the effects of London and Londoners upon them* London, Phoenix House). In 1960 he married Margaret Anne Joyce Rowe, a physiotherapist. They were inseparable, with Margaret accompanying him on his many conference trips. Once they had retired, they moved to Gloucestershire, where they lived in a building listed in Pevsner’s *The buildings of England*. Nicholas died on 11 October 2023 aged 88. He was survived by Margaret, their five children, 13 grandchildren and three great grandchildren. He was a gifted, questioning surgeon and teacher who will be fondly remembered and missed by many surgeons throughout the world.