Meredith Gwynne Evans was born on 2 December 1904, in the cotton town of Atherton, 10 miles from the City of Manchester. His father was headmaster of one of the elementary schools in that town and he went to his father’s school for his early training. Later he won a County Scholarship which took him to Leigh Grammar School and finally to the University of Manchester in 1923. His ideas about what he ultimately wanted to do seemed to be fixed at a very early age, and at the age of eleven years he had made up his mind to become a chemist. His brothers were of a like mind, as one brother, A.G., became Professor of Chemistry in Cardiff, and the other, D.G., is a reader in bacteriology in the University of Manchester. Though as a boy he had other interests in life, his main ambition came and remained first. He had, however, wide tastes in reading, from detective novels to the classics. Later, when he was a student at Manchester he became interested in orchestral music and was a great supporter of the Hallé Orchestra. He graduated with first-class honours in 1926. His early ability was soon recognized by his being elected a graduate research scholar, assistant lecturer, and Sir Clement Royde scholar. During the years 1926 to 1934 these appointments gave him the opportunity of researching into a wide variety of chemical topics. In 1934 he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship and proceeded with his wife to spend a happy year with H. S. Taylor in the Princeton laboratory. He returned to Manchester to a full lectureship in 1935, and this stage began his extremely fruitful collaboration with M. Polanyi. In this period his interest in physical chemistry became fixed in certain directions which coloured his work both at Leeds and at Manchester. The two men formed a firm friendship brought about by a similarity in many views of life apart altogether from their common interest in chemistry.
Lawrence Graduate Research Scholar Final Report, Allegra Mayer, 2021