Dudley Howard Williams was born on 25 May 1937 in
Farsley, Yorkshire, the only child of Lawrence Williams, an engineers chief order clerk, and Evelyn (née Hudson). He attended
Pudsey Grammar School, from where he gained a place at the
University of Leeds. He graduated in 1958 with a first-class BSc in Chemistry. In December 1962 Djerassi gave Williams three months' leave to go back to England to marry Lorna Patricia Phyllis (always known as Pat) Bedford, whom he had met at Leeds. She was a secretary in the Chemistry department. They married on 9 March 1963 and travelled to California, which they enjoyed exploring in their leisure time. The next move was to Cambridge in 1964, to take up a junior position in Organic Chemistry, at the invitation of
Lord Todd. A condition of the move was that the department should buy a Varian 100 MHz NMR spectrometer and an AEI MS9 mass spectrometer. Williams stayed at Cambridge until his retirement in 2004. In his memoir of Dudley Williams, Sanders noted that "the different areas of [his] science overlapped, intertwined and evolved so it is not easy to separate them out for discussion". He summarized Williams' work in three areas • NMR and MS • Determining the structures and modes of action of the
vancomycin family of antibiotics • Evolution ==Selected publications==