Frederick Sydney Dainton, Baron Dainton of Hallam Moors

Frederick Sydney Dainton was born in Sheffield on 11 November 1914. He was educated at the Central Secondary School for Boys, Sheffield, winning an Exhibition scholarship to St John's College Oxford in 1933 (Goldsmiths' Company Exhibition 1935), from where he graduated with First Class Honours in Chemistry in 1937. Dainton then moved to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge for postgraduate research on reactions of simple gases, studying under R.G.W. Norrish. He was a Goldsmiths' Company Senior Student, 1939 (Ph.D. 1940), before being appointed University Demonstrator in Chemistry 1944 and H.O. Jones Lecturer in Physical Chemistry 1946. He was elected a Fellow of St Catharine's College Cambridge in 1945.

In 1950 Dainton returned to Yorkshire as Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Leeds. He stayed in Leeds for fifteen years, a period particularly productive both in terms of building up the department into a leading centre of research in physical chemistry and in pursuing his own research. Although Dainton's initial research field had been photochemistry, he broadened his studies thereafter to the study of combustion, chain reactions and polymerisation kinetics. In his own estimation his main contributions were: the kinetics and thermodynamics of addition polymerisation, the kinetics of cationic and anionic polymerisation, redox reactions, photochlorination, the reactivity of oxygen atoms in singlet state, photochemical electron transfer, quantum mechanical tunnelling and radiation chemistry.

...