Cecil Jacob Todes was a consultant child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in London. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on 29 May 1931, the son of Morris Todes and Golda Todes née Slez, who were Jewish. His mother died in 1938 when he was just six years old. He attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and then studied dentistry at Witwatersrand University. Uncomfortable with Apartheid, he decided to emigrate to the UK in 1954. He worked as a dentist and gained his fellowship of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1956. He subsequently decided to retrain as a psychiatrist and enrolled at the West London Medical School in 1957, qualifying in medicine in 1960. He worked in junior hospital posts for two years, including at New End Hospital in Hampstead in general medicine, neurology and psychiatry, and then went to the United States to take up a Harvard psychiatric training residency in Boston. He returned to the UK in 1965, where he lived in the attic flat of the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, and gained his diploma in psychological medicine. He was appointed as a senior registrar in adolescent psychiatry at the Tavistock Clinic, where he trained with the distinguished psychoanalyst and pioneer of attachment theory, John Bowlby. He also trained with the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and underwent a Freudian training psychoanalysis with Lothair Rubinstein, a refugee from Nazi Vienna. In 1970 Todes was appointed as a consultant child psychiatrist at Barnet Hospital, transferring shortly afterwards to Great Ormond Street Hospital and then to the Paddington Centre for Psychotherapy. Aged 39, he noticed a tremor in his left hand, which his GP immediately diagnosed as Parkinson’s. He tried many different therapies to manage his condition, but the only treatment which seemed to have a lasting effect was L-dopa. He outlined his experiences with Parkinson’s in his memoir *Shadow over my brain: a battle against Parkinson’s disease* (Windrush), first published in 1990. He had to take early retirement from the NHS when he was 57 but continued in private practice at home until 1992. He enjoyed music and was a regular at London’s Wigmore Hall. He was married twice. In 1956 he married Lidia Johnstone in London. His second marriage was to Lili Loebl, a refugee from Nazi Germany he met in New York where she was the *Newsweek* correspondent to the United Nations. Todes died on 5 June 2008 in London at the age of 77. He was survived by his widow Lili, two sons and a daughter.