Anthony Ledwith was born on 14 August 1933 in Goose Green, Greater Manchester to Thomas Ledwith and Mary Clare (née Coghlin)[2] Thomas Ledwith was killed in a railway accident when Anthony was four and his brother Thomas was two.
Ledwith was educated locally: St Cuthbert's Primary School (1938–1945); Wigan Junior Technical School (1945–1948); and Wigan District Mining and Technical College (1948–1954). He was, with local help, able to go to London to take practical and written exams of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, which lasted a week. He was successful, and later in 1954 was also awarded a London University BSc External Honours degree.
Ledwith joined C. E. H. Bawn’s group to study for his PhD at the University of Liverpool. Here he was introduced to and became expert in the field of polymers, and was awarded the higher degree in 1957. He stayed on at Liverpool and became a lecturer, and was promoted to senior lecturer, reader and professor in turn, becoming Campbell Brown Professor of Industrial Chemistry in 1980.[3]
In 1984 Ledwith left academic life for a while to become Deputy Director, then Director, of Group Research at Pilkington plc. Not surprisingly, polymer coatings for glass were of particular interest to him. After retirement from Pilkington in 1996, he returned to academia as Professor and Head of the Chemistry Department at the University of Sheffield.[1] In 1998 Ledwith was elected to be President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a post he held until 2000.
Anthony Ledwith married Mary Clare Ryan at St Marie's Church, Standish in 1960. They had three daughters and a son: Joanne (1961), Stephanie Clare (1963), Katherine Elizabeth (1964) and James Anthony (1969).
^Variously spelled. In the index of marriages it is both Coughlin and Coghlin; for the births of her two children it is Coghlin; for the Royal Society Biography it is Coghlan.)
