Dennis Thornton Price

Dennis Thornton Price was born in Leeds on 24 May 1930, the eldest child of Kitty and Stanley Price, a couple from Croydon who had four children. During the war he spent three of his formative childhood years away from home, evacuated to a school at Fairbourne near Aberystwyth.

After two years’ national service in the Royal Engineers, he went on to study chemistry at Merton College, Oxford, specialising in the chemistry of osmosis. During this period, he brought a decommissioned army Land Rover and made an ambitious overland trip through postwar Europe and on to Greece, with his brother and two friends.

After graduating in 1953, he went to work for …