Martin Singer was born in South Africa on 17 June 1921. He studied medicine at the University of Cape Town and graduated MB, BChB in 1944. Initially he was inclined to become a paediatric surgeon, but when he travelled to the UK at the end of the second world war his brother advised him to apply for a post at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) in Stanmore. Under the impression that he would not be too challenged in what he described as *a sleepy country hospital* he was surprised to learn that under Sir Herbert Seddon the RNOH was fast gaining an international reputation and attracting surgeons from all over the world. Among others, he worked with Harold Jackson Burrows, an expert in limb salvage and David Trevor, an authority on congenital dislocation of the hip. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1950 and returned to South Africa six years later. For a while he worked at various establishments including the Red Cross War Memorial Hospital, the Cerebral Palsy School and the Maitland Cottage Home (MCH) where he was surgeon for 25 years and later honorary superintendant thus continuing his association with the MCH for 58 years in all. He joined the staff of the orthopaedic department at Groote Schuur Hospital (GSH) and fought a hard battle to open a dedicated hand unit. Eventually, having resigned from the orthopaedic department and joined the general surgery department, he was able to open a rudimentary section behind a screen in the old trauma unit. This was to be the country’s first hand unit and soon attracted skilled staff from disciplines such as plastic surgery to be part of the team. The unit at GSH was eventually named the Martin Singer Hand Clinic. Over the years it performed the first hand replants in South Africa, a hot box therapy to prevent spasms in hand patients, and stockinette sleeve dressings which helped patients regain hand movements after surgery. Offshoots from the unit were the foundation of a congenital hand clinic at the Red Cross and the country’s first brachia plexus injury clinic. He was president of the South African Society for Surgery of the Hand from 1973 to 1975 and of the South African Orthopaedic Association from 1977 to 1979. In 2004 he was the first African recipient of the pioneer of hand surgery award from the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand. One of the only 12 surgeons in the world to have received this award, he continued to operate at the age of 83 and commented that the award meant a lot to him, the department and his country. He stressed the complexity of the anatomy of the hand and said that *without animation the hand is a paperweight.* He was married to his wife Joy, a Norwegian, for 46 years. On 8 July 2015 he died aged 94.