The Queen's College Record 2023

DAVID LEWIS
Obituaries
My husband, David Hopkin Lewis, died peacefully in
Moorland House Residential Care on 18 October 2022
with complications of Parkinson’s.
He was born in Neath, South Wales on 20 February
1937 and was brought up in Glyncorrig, a small mining
community, where his father, Emlyn, had been billeted,
following discharge from the RAF with war injuries.
His mother, Elunid, clearly a woman with determination, opened a tobacco and
confectionary shop in a front room and by the time David was nine, aware of his
academic ability, she enrolled him at Colston’s school in Bristol where he made
good progress.
A shortage of staff led to the appointment of a temporary chemistry teacher in the
Sixth Form, Professor Marie Yemm, who was an enormous influence on David’s
education and he left school with excellent qualifications. National Service followed
where he was commissioned in the RAF seeing active service in Cyprus during
EOKA and Suez campaigns, earning promotion to Flying Officer.
David came up to Queen’s in 1957 on a state scholarship, and read Botany. He
attained a First in his Finals in 1960, and he then immediately began reading for
a DPhil in Botany as an Open Scholar of Queen’s, attaining his doctorate in 1964.
In May 1963, while reading for the DPhil, he was appointed a Browne Research
Fellow for three years. In 1964-65 David, with his new wife Rachel, spent a year’s
leave of absence from Oxford with a Fulbright Travelling Scholarship as assistant
Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Perdue University in Indiana.
At the conclusion of his Browne Fellowship, in 1966, David secured a lectureship
in the Botany Department of the University of Sheffield. He and Rachel bought an
old cottage in the Peak District National Park embarking on a restoration project.
Moving swiftly up the academic hierarchy, David was awarded a personal chair in
1993 and became Head of Department in 1987.
During the 80’s Higher Education underwent some major changes and small
departments like Botany at Sheffield were deemed “inefficient”. It was decided that
Botany and Zoology should be merged in 1988 to become the Department of Animal
and Plant sciences (APS) with David as its Chairman. David created an environment
whose core values were collegiality and academic excellence. Under his leadership,
APS emerged as a Biology department with few equals and whose success was
amply reflected in the National Research Assessment exercise.
114 The Queen’s College | College Record 2023