My grandfather Keith Holly, who has died aged 93, was an agriculturalist, a researcher into weeds and a campaigner.
In 1960, he was involved in establishing the Weed Research Organisation (WRO) in Begbroke, near Oxford, funded by the Agricultural Research Council. He worked with the organisation for the rest of his career, in Begbroke and further afield, and spent 1965 in Raleigh, North Carolina, on a project funded by the WK Kellogg Foundation.
When he retired from the WRO in 1986, Keith continued to promote agricultural research. As a director of the British Crop Production Council, he helped to set up an agricultural centre in Shengyang, China, and produced educational resources for schools.
Outside work, Keith supported many causes. A prolific walk leader and campaigner for access to rights of way, he was a footpath secretary for the Ramblers for many years. He was also secretary of the Oxford City Fabian Society from 1954 to 1962, and secretary of the Oxford Confederation for the Advancement of State Education, fighting for comprehensive education, in the 1960s.
He campaigned to protect Warneford Meadow, Oxford, from development, and, in his late 70s, demonstrated in London against the Iraq war. He was a loyal Guardian reader for more than 70 years.
Keith was born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, to Eileen Holly. She was studying for a botany degree at the University of Reading when she became pregnant in 1925, and she brought him up on her own with help from her widowed mother. Eileen later had a successful teaching career, rising to the position of deputy head of two schools in Berkshire.
Money was tight and Keith had a difficult childhood. However, his diligence enabled him to attend Henley grammar school, where he excelled academically and, sponsored by Wall’s, went on to study agricultural botany at the University of Reading, graduating in 1946.
While at the university, he was part of a team of scientists investigating ways to feed people in postwar Britain and abroad. Keith was an intrepid researcher. In the summers of 1944 and 1945 he cycled from Reading to Snowdonia to undertake field experiments on the slopes of Cadair Idris, stopping at youth hostels and campsites on the way. In 1949, he travelled by flying boat to Tanzania to work on a groundnut project.
In 1954, Keith was awarded a PhD from Reading, which he completed while working in the department of agriculture at the University of Oxford. He met Doreen Hewitt while she was working as a research assistant at the Agricultural Research Service in Oxford. They married in 1957.
Doreen died in 2006. He is survived by his two daughters, Jean and Anne, two grandchildren, Holly and me, and a great-grandchild, Guy.
