My father, John Beetlestone, who has died aged 84, was an extraordinary man who founded a museum and had three careers.
Born within the sound of Bow bells in London, John was the only child of Albert Beetlestone, a clerk for British Rail, and his wife, Ivy (nee Spencer). The family was driven out of London by doodlebugs during the second world war and he was brought up in Norwich, attending Thetford grammar school.
After getting his degree in chemistry from Bristol University he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his first wife, Claire Watson. In 1960 they moved to Nigeria, where he became a professor of chemistry at the University of Ibadan, staying on to be head of department and then dean of the faculty of science.
In the 1980s he and Claire divorced and he returned to the UK to be professor of scientific education at Cardiff University. Here he met and married his second wife, Françoise Salgues Brench. They separated in 1984.
In 1986, troubled by the fear that science held for young and old, he founded the science museum Techniquest. It started in a gas showroom opposite Cardiff Castle, moving to a pre-fabricated industrial hangar, and then to a custom-built building that now anchors the Cardiff bay development area. The museum has been visited by more than 4 million people since it opened. There, in one of the highlights of his life, he met Princess Diana, who brought her two sons to play with the exhibits. In 1991 he was appointed an MBE.
His third “career” came after he retired from Techniquest in 1997, when he started fastidiously to research his ancestry going back 11 generations, searching far and wide for every birth certificate, marriage certificate, property deed, photograph, or reference to each relative he discovered.
He took a personal interest in the lives of people he worked with, providing them with opportunities they might not have had. However, given his old-fashioned sense of honour he never talked about it, despite the fact that in all other things he was rarely at a loss for words.
He told us that life was “not a dress rehearsal”. And for him it was not. He lived it to its fullest without regrets. He is survived by Kate, his dear friend since the 1980s, by his children, Linda, Philip and me, from his marriage to Claire, and Nicolas and Emma from his marriage to Françoise, and by seven grandchildren. Another child, Jan, predeceased him.
