My father, Stephen Wallwork, who has died aged 93, was a chemist who made a significant contribution to the development of modern crystallography, and later became a historian of Beeston in Nottinghamshire.
He was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, to Frank, a bank inspector, and Edith (nee Bennison). Stephen described himself as “not very bright” yet gained entrance to Manchester grammar school and won a scholarship in chemistry to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1943.
He chose crystallography as his research topic, setting the direction of the next 40 years of his career. He worked alongside the future Nobel prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin as well as one Margaret Roberts, who later became Margaret Thatcher. After graduating, he moved to Nottingham University in 1949, where he set up the x-ray crystallography department with a budget of £1,000.
In the late 1940s, without computers, solving a crystal structure was a labour of love, often taking many months to obtain just a single result. Stephen’s determination of the alpha-quinol structure, which he began in Oxford in 1946, was successfully completed, through patience, perseverance and meticulously accurate calculations, in 1978.
He was an early supporter of computers. When one was finally installed in his department, it filled a large room and had the storage capacity of a tiny fraction of a mobile phone today. Yet it vastly sped up the process of determining crystal structures.
He published nearly 100 papers on his crystallographic research as well as a book for non-physical scientists in 1956, Physical Chemistry for Students of Pharmacy and Biology. He played a pivotal role in the founding of the British Crystallographic Association, in 1982.
In 1983, having taken early retirement, Stephen enrolled on a new postgraduate course at Nottingham in local and regional history. His dissertation, to which he brought his scientific mindset and talent for painstaking research, involved a careful reconstruction of the 16th-century outbreak of plague in Beeston.
Between 1985 and 1990, Stephen worked as a statistical assistant in the department of history at Nottingham University, undertaking research, helping colleagues with numerical work and teaching mathematical statistics to history students.
In later years Stephen became much involved in the blue plaques scheme in the area, and was in demand as a popular lecturer on the history of Beeston. His love of walking and cycling was hindered by his peripheral neuropathy, which he put down to exposure to hazardous chemicals in his early career. After becoming less physically active, he took up watercolour painting in his 50s. He continued to paint and pursue local history research and writing, publishing his last article late last year and producing his final painting for Marion, his wife of nearly 65 years, just days before he died.
Stephen is survived by Marion, their children, Christopher, Anne, Michael and me, and six grandchildren.
