Born in 1885 son of Thomas Henry Attwater, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, he was educated at Merchant Taylors School and won an exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took second-class honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos, part I, 1906. His father had been a scholar of Pembroke. He qualified from Guy's, where he became ophthalmic house surgeon, and was a resident at Westminster Hospital and registrar at All Saints Hospital. After active service in France as an RAMC Captain during the 1914-18 war, he became urological surgeon to All Saints Hospital and to Margaret Street Hospital for Chest Diseases. When he began work at All Saints it was in a dingy old house in the Vauxhall Bridge Road but he achieved its development into the Westminster Hospital (All Saints) Urological Centre. With his delicate touch and taste for mechanical instruments he was a pioneer of cystoscopy. Attwater was an active and useful member of many societies. He was treasurer for many years of the West London Medico-Chirurgical Society and of the *British Journal of Urology*, served on the executive council of the British Health Resorts Association, and was elected President of the Section of Urology in the Royal Society of Medicine and the Hunterian Society. Between the wars he lived at Hampstead but later removed to Richmond. He was interested in psychology, and found his recreation in rifle-shooting and carpentry. Attwater married twice: first in 1915 Nora Collingdon Hawkins, daughter of William Hawkins MRCS, of Broadwey, Dorset; she died in 1929. Secondly, in 1933, Doris Emily Winter Callaway. He died on 29 May 1961 aged 76.