My former husband Keith Thompson, who has died aged 86, was an academic and horticulturalist specialising in the area of optimum harvest, and the packing and storing of fruit and root crops.
Working as a crop scientist for the government-run Tropical Products Institute from the 1960s to mid-80s, Keith worked on overseas assignments in many countries including Trinidad, Colombia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia, Turkey, Thailand and Yemen.
He was on a field trip outside Aden in 1986 when the coup happened that sparked the South Yemen conflict. He and his local counterpart trekked to a coastal refinery compound, and Keith and other British nationals were collected by a diverted HMY Britannia, the royal yacht, to land at Djibouti and fly back to the UK. Keith’s souvenir was a Royal Navy sweater to keep him warm.
Born in Halifax to Hilda (nee Smith), a mill worker, and Harold Thompson, a lathe-turner at Churchill Redmond metal works, Keith attended Copley junior school. Aged 10 on holiday in Bridlington, his cousin accidentally hit him in the eye with a golf club, and he lost the sight in that eye. Due to missed schooling, Keith failed his 11-plus and at 13 joined Halifax Technical College, leaving at 16 with no qualifications.
Horticultural interests led him to enrol as an apprentice gardener for Halifax Public Parks and he gained Royal Horticultural Society qualifications. By 1960 he had added some GCEs and A-level botany and zoology, and gained a place at Wye College, a University of London establishment located in the Kent countryside, to study for a horticulture degree.
I met Keith at a graduation party in Canterbury, and we married in 1965. Two years later, Keith gained his PhD from Leeds University, and a daughter, Katie.
Recruited by the government’s Overseas Development Administration (ODA), which financed the Tropical Products Institute, Keith and the family set sail to Trinidad, where he lectured in crop science at the University of the West Indies, and our son, Miles, was born.
Subsequent teaching and consultancy posts followed, in Jamaica, Khartoum, Seoul and Bogota before returning to the UK and the Tropical Products Institute in 1980, settling in Bromley, Kent, while continuing overseas assignments.
In 1987, Keith was appointed professor of crop science at Cranfield University, based at Silsoe campus, Bedfordshire. Many of his PhD and BSc students were from countries where he had worked, and he stayed in that post until retirement in 2000.
We divorced in 2004. The same year, Keith settled in Marsden, West Yorkshire, home to the jazz festival that he loved.
In 2020, while teaching a course at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Bangkok, he met Pikunthong Nuktamna, a psychology lecturer at Huachiew Chalermprakiet University. They became partners and were engaged.
Pikunthong survives him, as do Katie and Miles, six grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and his brother, David.
