David Erskine Tolhurst was a pioneering plastic surgeon. Born in Wellington, New Zealand on 24 September 1934, he was the son of Robert Erskine, a stockbroker, and his wife Joan Morton née Henderson. He attended the Huntley School in Marton, where he won the Sherriff Memorial Prize and the Wanganui Collegiate School, winning the Marshall Memorial Prize. At Otago University Medical School he was a science scholar and graduated MB, ChB in 1958. Moving to the UK, he did house jobs at the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, became a registrar in plastic surgery at the London Hospital and then senior registrar at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. While at the Queen Victoria he was mentored by the plastic surgeons Percy Harris Jayes and John Watson. He was a research fellow at Harvard from 1963 to 1964 and a Marks Foundation fellow from 1968 to 1969. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1967. In 1973 he was appointed consultant surgeon to the University Hospital and Sophia Children’s Hospital, in Rotterdam, Holland. While there he studied for a PhD at Erasmus University, publishing a thesis on fasciocutaneous flaps which was an innovative procedure at the time. He also won the Kay-Kilner essay prize of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons (BAPS) in 1978. Ten years later, in 1988, he became professor and chairman of the department of plastic surgery at the University Hospital in Leiden, where he stayed until 1991. On returning to the UK he worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital and was a lecturer at the British Postgraduate Medical Federation. A long time member of BAPS and founder and secretary of the European Workshop for Plastic Surgery, he also became historian and archivist for the European Association of Plastic Surgeons and co-editor of the *European journal of plastic surgery*. He was the author of numerous chapters in plastic surgical texts and wrote than 50 articles on topics such as hypospadias, cleft lip, muscle flaps and fasciocutaneous flaps. When he was 80, he published a collection of his essays on famous plastic surgeons entitled *Pioneers in plastic surgery* (Springer, 2015). At school he had been a champion at athletics and he was a member of the Otago University rugby team from 1957 to 1959. Later on he enjoyed tennis, skiing, golf and cricket. Other interests were the arts, bridge, painting and writing poetry – his partner recalled that he would acknowledge being entertained for dinner by sending the hosts a small painting or a poem. In 1974 he married Sonia Camilla Maria Messenger who was an assistant at Sotheby’s in London. They had two daughters, Camilla Fiona, who became a lecturer at St Andrew’s University and Charlotte Annabelle. Sonia died from ovarian cancer on 25 March 2012. Some two years afterwards he was in Peter Jones in Chelsea just before Christmas when he went to the assistance of a lady, Penelope Hopwood, whose carrier bag of presents had given way. The provision of a spare bag and his telephone number was to lead to a late romance which brought great happiness to them both. She moved to his home in Edwardstone, Suffolk and they discovered many shared interests as she was later to write in the *Daily Mail* when he died. It was not the first time his name was to appear in that newspaper as it had reported a brush with the law he had in 2016 when police were called by a neighbour who accused him of vandalising their hedge as he cut three twigs that were obscuring a mirror he had installed in the road outside his house to increase visibility for drivers on a blind bend. The police were amused and no charges were made. He died on 27 February 2018 aged 83 after suffering a series of mini-strokes and a bleed on the brain. His partner survived him together with his daughters, granddaughter, Eloise, and three grandsons including one known as Georgie.