Born in Bristol on 20 June 1912, 'Bill' Waterfall's father was Robinson Waterfall, a chemical manufacturer of fertilisers. His mother was Mary Louisa Radley, the daughter of a schoolmaster. He was educated at Bootham School, York, where he won an entrance scholarship, but was taken ill, and passed the London Matriculation from Plymouth Technical College, and was accepted at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He went to the London Hospital for his clinical training and, after qualifying in 1937, was house surgeon to Charles Lindsay and Charles Donald. He was then house physician in the skin department. At the outbreak of the second world war, he joined the RAFVR and worked in Cairo and then field hospitals, for which he was mentioned in despatches. After the war, he was a trainee registrar in urology at the Central Middlesex Hospital, where he was influenced by McNeil Love and Kenneth Walker, and was then registrar at Plymouth General Hospital. He was one of the few general surgeons to specialise in urology, and wrote several papers in the *British Journal of Urology*. He was a very keen ocean racer, and former vice-commodore of the Royal Western Yacht Club and a member of the Royal Ocean Racing Club. He married a Miss Tivy, daughter of an ophthalmic surgeon in Plymouth, in 1939 and they had three sons, one of whom, Nicholas Brian, became a consultant surgeon in Bedford. Bill Waterfall died on 12 August 2000.