John Noel Gleave Evans was a consultant otolaryngologist at St Thomas’ Hospital and at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London. He was born on 9 December 1934 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, where his parents were in the Colonial Service. He was educated at Guildford Grammar Preparatory School in Perth, Western Australia and then moved to the UK, where he attended Dulwich College Preparatory School and Cranbrook School in Kent, where he excelled at sport. He studied medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, qualifying in 1959. Following his registration in 1960, he carried out his National Service, holding a short service commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was subsequently commissioned into the Territorial Army in 1964 and eventually became an honorary consultant in otolaryngology to the Army in 1989. He started his ENT training while he was in the Army and passed his diploma in laryngology and otology in 1961. Following his National Service, he returned to St Thomas’ as an anatomy demonstrator and then an ENT registrar. After gaining his final FRCS in 1965, he became a senior registrar in the ENT department at St Thomas’ and at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street. In 1971 he was appointed as a consultant ENT surgeon at St Thomas’, followed a year later by an appointment to Great Ormond Street Hospital. In 1988 he also became an honorary consultant ENT surgeon at King Edward VII’s Hospital. John became internationally renowned as a paediatric otolaryngologist after developing the innovative laryngotracheoplasty operation for paediatric subglottic stenosis: this was reported in a ground-breaking paper in 1974 and is still referenced worldwide (‘Laryngotracheoplasty.’ *J Laryngol Otol*. 1974 Jul;88[7]:589-97). He developed a close and enduring friendship with Robin Cotton, who was working on an alternative technique for the same problem in Toronto and subsequently Cincinnati, and in 1981 they jointly published a five-year follow-up of their cases (‘Laryngotracheal reconstruction in children. Five-year follow up.’ *Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol*. 1981 Sep-Oct;90[5 Pt 1]:516-20). John lectured widely internationally and was honoured with many prizes and awards. He was president of the section of laryngology at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1993 and master of the 10th British Academic Conference in Otolaryngology in 1999, the year he retired from clinical practice. In 1960 he married Elizabeth Glascodine (known as Liezel), a nurse at St Thomas’. They had four children: Philippa, Charlotte, Mark and Kate. They were renowned for their hospitality, and their house in south London was the venue for many enjoyable parties. In retirement John and Liezel moved to Hampshire where they cultivated a large garden. John died peacefully at home on 27 March 2022 at the age of 87. An unassuming, approachable and kind man, he was particularly supportive to trainees and colleagues starting out in the relatively young field of paediatric otolaryngology. He will be much missed.