Robert (Bob) Godfrey was born in South Australia and, as a child, moved with his family to Perth WA .His father Dr Kirk Godfrey was an anaesthetist. He married Betty-Ann Wadsworth in 1955, and they had three children, Esmerelda, Anne and Kirk.

Bob was educated at Hale School in Perth, and obtained his MBBS in Adelaide in 1944. After obtaining his MRCP in England in 1951, while working at Belgravia Hospital, he returned to Perth in 1953 to take up the position of Medical Director at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children (PMH). He continued in this position for 26 years, and then remained as a consultant paediatrician until his retirement in 1989. He was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1986.

He made many changes to PMH, including the introduction of free visiting, the provision of parent accommodation, and the creation of play areas. Supervision of clinical medicine, previously undertaken by honorary visiting staff, was upgraded by the appointment of three young full-time paediatricians. He was a firm disciplinarian, a good clinician, and raised the standard of paediatrics at PMH to equal the best in Australia. He was nicknamed ‘God’ by the junior medical staff, an epithet which was reinforced by his signature where the last four letters of his name trailed away in a spidery line.

He was adamant throughout his administrative period at PMH that he should have patient responsibility, and was probably the last of the medical administrators to maintain this dual role.

Bob was tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired and good-looking; he stood very straight and was a magnet to the opposite sex. A very good swimmer, he invariably won the doctor’s race in the annual inter-hospital nurses’ swimming carnival. He was also a keen hockey player at University and liked classical music, always insisting that the only operas worth listening to were those written by Mozart.

His later years were plagued by the increasingly restricted activity of Parkinson’s disease from which he finally died.