Mark Deakin was appointed as a consultant and honorary senior lecturer in general and upper GI surgery at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary and Keele University in 1992. He was the senior consultant in pancreaticobiliary surgery at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire before his untimely death in 2019, whilst still in service, aged 64. Mark was born in Warrington on 11 March 1955, the first child of Joan Deakin née Wright, a pharmacist, and Frederick John Deakin, a general practitioner. Four more children followed over the next 10 years, one of whom followed their father and became a GP. Mark attended St Margaret’s Church of England Primary School in Orford, Warrington and then moved onto Boteler Grammar School, Warrington. Mark decided on a career in medicine at about the age of 15 and, because of his intelligence and dexterity, his father suggested he would make a good surgeon. In 1973, Mark went to Liverpool Medical School (where his father had also trained), and qualified with honours in 1978. He immediately pursued surgical training, with house jobs at Broadgreen Hospital, then an anatomy demonstrator post back at the university the following year. With fellowships from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1982, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1983, Mark continued his surgical training in Portsmouth, and then within the West Midlands Deanery. Although his training was in general surgery, he gravitated towards upper GI surgery as his specialist field. This led to a one-year research post studying peptic ulcer disease with Abdool Rahim Moosa in San Diego from 1991 to 1992. The resulting thesis was successfully awarded the degree of master of surgery by Liverpool University. On returning to England, Mark was appointed to the post of consultant surgeon and honorary senior lecturer at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary and Keele University. With James B Elder, he strengthened the academic research arm of the surgical department in Stoke-on-Trent, steering several students to attain PhD and MPhil degrees in his early years at Stoke, supervising laboratory-based research. However, relatively early in his consultant life, Keele University became a medical school, with a full complement of undergraduates. Mark always took his undergraduate teaching commitments seriously, but his true passion lay in the development of the surgeons of the future, and so he gave up his lecturer role to lean towards the teaching of postgraduate trainees. This change also allowed him to have more time to develop his pancreaticobiliary sub-specialist interest, with increased emphasis on clinical and practical techniques, rather than laboratory-based activities. He did however continue to support clinical trials and research during the whole of his career and was a major player in the ESPAC-1 and ESPAC-3 chemotherapy trials for pancreatic cancer. With his easy manner, his enthusiasm and sense of fun, he made an inspirational teacher. He was an early adopter of the ‘train the trainers’ methodology and ran many courses on behalf of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in local centres around the country. For many years, he organised an intensive FRCS revision course in Stoke, and continued to bring various surgical College courses to the region, including the basic surgical skills course, the laparoscopic skills course and the care of the critically ill surgical patient course. Indeed, he will be best remembered for his practical skills courses, particularly the ‘hands on’ ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography) training course, developed in house with Jonathan Green, a former president of the British Society of Gastroenterologists. This course, held two to three times a year, with mixed surgical and medical faculty from Stoke, is usually oversubscribed, with national and international delegates. It has been said that Mark was a ‘Jedi master’ in performing therapeutic ERCP, but he also had the ability to teach these skills, which is a rare attribute. He took his enthusiasm for postgraduate training into his roles for the Royal Colleges. He was an examiner for FRCS in Edinburgh, then an intercollegiate examiner, an overseas examiner, and finally progressed to becoming an assessor of examiners for the intercollegiate board. He was elected chair of the intercollegiate board writing group, which sets written examination questions. In this way, he helped to shape and to quality control the training programmes for the surgeons of the future. In 2010, he was elected president of the Pancreatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, in recognition of his clinical and research expertise. Over the course of his career, Mark remained a prolific author, with over 100 citations for articles in journals and book chapters from 1985 onwards. He had a well-earned national reputation as an expert in bile duct injuries. This led to him helping to formulate the commissioning guide for gallstone disease on behalf of the Association of Upper Gastrointestinal Surgery of Great Britain and Ireland in 2016 and to his involvement with medico-legal and General Medical Council cases where a bile duct injury was to be considered. Regionally he was elected chair of the liver and pancreatic expert advisory group, a committee that helped shape hepato-pancreatico-biliary services in the West Midlands. He was a strong advocate for subspecialisation, with a functional ‘hub and spoke’ integrated service within a supportive, not competitive, environment, to produce the best results for patients. He was passionate about excellence in clinical practice achieved by tutored experience, double consultant operating and accurate data collection with outcome measures at the forefront. Many of his publications are led by HES (hospital episode statistics) data. Outside of work Mark showed the same love of life, with great energy and enthusiasm for anything that he thought would be ‘fun’ or ‘character building’. His own early family life had always been hectic, fun and shared with friends and he ensured that his own home and family life mirrored this. Whilst he enjoyed squash in his earlier years and was a keen skier throughout his life, Mark’s lifelong passion was for sailing. Many weekends and summer holidays were spent sailing with family and friends. A diagnosis of gastric cancer in 2017 – treated aggressively, but eventually unsuccessfully – led to a short final illness early in 2019, whilst he was still working. Friends and colleagues, many from overseas, were able to go to Stoke to say goodbye to a man who changed so much of surgical training during his time and set so many young surgeons on their respective career pathways. He was survived by Liz née Richardson, a teacher from Warrington, whom he married in 1980. They had three children, all at the time of his death at various stages in their university and postgraduate careers. A special man – *Pertransiit benefaciendo*. Greatly missed.