Michael Timmons was a highly-respected plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Bradford Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital, Bradford. His special interests were cleft lip and palate surgery, and surgeries on other complex congenital problems, such as hypospadias. He was born on 17 February 1949 in Croydon to John Timmons and Lenchen Timmons née Schlegel. He studied medicine at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he wrote a ground-breaking thesis on the forearm flap. During his time at Christ’s, he was secretary for the modern pentathlon, swimming and water polo teams. He was appointed as a consultant at the Bradford Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital, and saw children in Bradford, Airedale, Halifax and Huddersfield born with a cleft lip or palate. He was also an unsung hero of the Bradford City fire of 1985, operating on and caring for many of its victims. In 1994, he led a team of colleagues to Sarajevo to assist emergency surgical services in the Yugoslav Wars. In the 1990s and 2000s, Mike travelled to Rwanda and Kenya on assessment missions for the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the charity UK-Med and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Michael made vast contributions to medical studies and debate, publishing books on human anatomy, and publishing and reviewing several articles in medical journals. Michael was editor of the *British Journal of Plastic Surgery* from 1994 to 1997 and a council member of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Anaesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS) from 2010 to 2012, where he was immensely respected as a wise colleague and great teacher. Michael retired from the NHS in 2016, after which he worked as an expert witness in medical legal cases. He was a regular attendee at the Doctors Updates meetings in Val d'Isère, where he always had something to contribute to the meetings and was an accomplished and personable ski companion. Michael was killed in a car accident on 4 October 2019 at the age of 70. He was survived by his wife, Ildiko (née Németh), a doctor, and their daughter, Gemma. His colleagues from across the globe paid tribute to him as ‘a real gentleman, humble, interested, intelligent, well-read, meticulous, supportive and always a pleasure to meet’. Of his work, his colleagues remarked: ‘Michael didn’t just operate on patients – he was completely committed to their wellbeing and was a surgical perfectionist. He was the sort of gentleman we so need within our specialty as parts of it hurtle seemingly towards the commercial at the expense of service.’ He will be greatly missed.