My father’s partner, Felicity Grainger, who has died aged 80, began her working life as a research scientist before moving into the world of academic libraries, eventually becoming head of the library services serving three major medical schools.
Born in Bournemouth to Stuart Grainger, a bank manager, and Phyllis (nee Brett), after gaining a first-class honours degree in zoology in 1964 from Queen Mary College, London, Felicity received a doctorate in anatomy from University College London, after which she spent 10 years as a researcher in neuroscience in London and Cambridge.
Everything changed, however, when she went through a long turbulent period in her personal life from the mid-1970s to the end of the 80s. Two marriages, the first to an architect, Andrew Chadwick, the second to an anatomy professor, Keith Webster, ended in divorce, and in between those relationships the loss of her boyfriend, Peter Gibbs, in the Great Mull Air Mystery meant that, by 1990, she was seeking a fresh start. This came with her appointment as a medical sciences librarian at the University of Glasgow.
Rather to her own surprise she fell in love with Glasgow, and made it her home for the rest of her life. At the university she helped to build a stronger relationship between its library and its medical school at a time when digital resources were changing how medical students were taught and accessed information.
Rather reluctantly she left there in 1997 to become director of information and library services at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London, where she oversaw the challenging merger of her department with King’s College, returning each weekend to her home in Glasgow.
That task successfully accomplished, she retired to Glasgow, where she participated fully in the cultural and intellectual life of the city as president of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, an active member of the Glasgow Art Club, and an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish Opera and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Beautiful and charismatic in her youth, she remained elegant, witty, waspish and immaculately dressed into old age, always in her signature black and white. A lifelong fan of The Archers, she could never be disturbed on Sunday mornings before the end of the omnibus edition.
She is survived by her partner of the past 30 years, Ronald Singleton.
