Billy Bremner, football player and manager: born Stirling 9 December 1942; played for Leeds United 1958-76, Scotland 1965-75 (54 caps), Hull City 1976-78; manager, Doncaster Rovers 1978-85, Leeds United 1985-88, Doncaster Rovers 1989-91; died Doncaster 7 December 1997. In this key position he had much contact with government circles, including with one Minister for Education, Margaret Thatcher, herself an Oxford chemistry graduate.Porter remembers Dainton as a good tennis partner at Cambridge; the same qualities of nimbleness and dexterity, which stood him in good stead in his laboratory, were related to a lifelong admiration for craftsmanship, in which his illiterate father had excelled.Of his multitude of interests one other must be mentioned: he was Chairman of the British Library Board from 1978 to 1985. Although the Dr Lee's chair had notable prestige - Hinshelwood's sole predecessor had been Frederick Soddy, also a Nobel Laureate - it did not offer the range or quality of influence which Dainton, by now Sir Frederick, was able to exert. Lord Porter of Luddenham, who shared a laboratory with Dainton "when we were both young" at Cambridge, remembers his commenting that "being professor at Oxford was a position of considerable influence and little power. Fred," says Porter, "liked power." After three years, in 1973, he became Chairman of the University Grants Committee.The UGC was the long- established intermediary between the Treasury and the UK universities, and the body which distributed government funding to the individual institutes - then already numbering 33. He was not exaggerating.The years 1965-70 were ones of student turbulence, and unlike the formidable Michael Swann in Edinburgh and many other distinguished Vice-Chancellors Dainton was adept at dealing deftly with militant students. I heard the story that he had on one fraught occasion quoted from Mao's Little Red Book: "You should respect your teachers; they know more than you do." Dainton assured me that this was not apocryphal but true.From Nottingham he was tempted back to Oxford to succeed Hinshelwood, the inspirer of his earlier attachment to reaction kinetics, as Dr Lee's Professor of Chemistry.

There, at Cookridge, he directed research at a special radiological unit before becoming Vice-Chancellor of Nottingham in 1965, which took him into the stratosphere of the British academic establishment, of which he was to be a central figure for four decades. He told me at a meeting at the Foundation for Science and Technology over the dinner table that the only reason he had gone to Nottingham was so that he could establish a medical school at the university. He became President of the Faraday Society and of the Royal Chemical Society, who bestowed on him its greatest honour, the Faraday Lectureship. Cornell appointed him to the prestigious George Baker Lectureship. For 40 years he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1969 he was given the Davy Medal.In 1937, he left for Cambridge to study reaction kinetics under the Nobel prizewinner R.G.W Norrish.

It was one of Dainton's gifts that he could handle difficult and brilliant scientists, and he got on well with Norrish. Supported by awards from the Goldsmiths' Company, he joined Sidney Sussex College.At the age of 36 Dainton became Professor of Physical Chemistry at Leeds. That was why he had always advocated close collaboration between high- quality departments of biological and physical sciences with medical schools and institutes. No man in post-war Britain did more to bring this about.His colleagues in chemistry recognised his distinction. For various periods in my life - for example, as chairman for the Advisory Board for Research Councils and its predecessor, the Council for Scientific Policy, and subsequently chairman of the University Grants Committee - I was responsible for the allocation of public funds to be used for that purpose.Dainton told the Lords that he had learnt many lessons - first and foremost was that the quality of future patient treatment rested upon the quality and extent of medical education and research today, which in turn were increasingly and critically dependent upon basic scientific research.

This was a natural question because from 1945 he had studied the chemical effects of radiation at Chalk River and made important contributions to a field of great biological, including medical, significance. Physiological changes occur in an aqueous milieu where all radiation harder than the ultra- violet produces electrons and other ionised particles. Dainton was one of the pioneers of the aqueous electron, extensively exploring its chemical aspects. Even to the chemical kineticist this was a topic of disheartening complexity with some of its initial stages occurring in less than a billionth of a second.Dainton more than most chemists was interested in the medical effects of his work. As he told the House of Lords on 25 February 1997:For well over 40 years I have had a deep personal and professional interest in research in clinical medicinecarried out by staff of university med-ical schools and institutes. Dainton's exceptional mind was fascinated by both the contents and the style of the book. The author, Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Oxford and this tempted Dainton to try for a university place from a school which had never before sent an undergraduate to Oxford.He was greatly fortunate in that the tutor at St John's was Dr H.W (later Sir "Tommy") Thompson.