John Edwin Enderby was born in Lincolnshire, on January 16, 1931. The family moved to Chester and John went to Chester Grammar School. He carried out national service in Egypt from 1949 to 1951 and said that working in the telecommunications centre of RAF Ismailia “convinced me of the importance of physics and mathematics”.
John obtained a Teacher’s Certificate with Distinction at Westminster College London in 1953, before taking up a position at Penge Secondary Modern School for Boys and at the same time starting evening classes as a part-time physics student at Birkbeck College, where he earned a first-class honours degree in 1957. He stayed at Birkbeck for his PhD, supervised by Norman Cu-sack; his research was concerned with the electrical properties of liquid metals.
John lectured in Huddersfield from 1957-1960 and then moved to Sheffield University, where he was a lecturer and reader during the 1960s. A further move took John to a chair in Leicester University, where he became Head of Department. In 1976 John was appointed to a chair in Bristol Physics and served as Head of Department from 1981 until 1994, a long period interrupted from 1985-1988 when John took leave to be Directeur-Adjoint of the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, the world’s premier neutron beam facility.
John’s research impacted across several areas of condensed matter physics and chemistry. He developed innovative ways of using neutrons to study the structure of disordered matter at the microscopic level. In 1966 John and his colleagues introduced the technique of neutron scattering with isotopic substitution which advanced fundamental understanding of the structure of multicomponent liquids - those made up of two or more types of atoms – including liquid alloys, glasses, liquid semiconductors and molten salts. Different isotopes scatter neutrons in different ways allowing the correlations between different species to be unravelled. This insight, and John’s ability to exploit it using newly developed neutron sources, proved enormously productive in determining the physics underlying the structure of binary liquid mixtures. Perhaps of more general scientific significance, John and colleagues pioneered physics research into how water molecules are ordered around ions in aqueous solutions. Their neutron studies provided seminal information about a problem that challenged physical chemists of the calibre of Pieter Debye and one that remains crucial in biophysics and biochemistry.
Top class scientists are not always willing to shoulder the burdens of administration. John was an exception. He was a huge servant to Bristol Physics and, indeed, to the wider science community. Briefly, John was elected FRS in 1985, and after retirement in 1996, served with distinction as Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society from 1999 to 2004. He was awarded a knighthood in 2004 for services to science and technology and served as President of the Institute of Physics from 2004 to 2006. John was proud of his long association with the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) in Bristol where he was scientific advisor. The University of Bristol recognized John’s contributions and his distinction with the award of an Honorary DSc in 2006.
Focusing on the man himself; John took delight in his children, gardening, and woodwork. He was a qualified association football referee and a long-term supporter of Leicester City.
John possessed key 'people skills'; he was a magnificent team leader.
Those of us who knew John personally will miss his zest for science, his wise advice, and his font of anecdotes, most of which we cannot disclose. His relationship with formal theory and theoreticians is summarized by "The only field theory I know is "Please shut the gate." John was, of course, an experimentalist.
Our thoughts are with John’s wife Susan, his children (Penny, Emma, Rebecca Tom) and his grandchildren and great grandchildren.