Ian Blair, a leading nuclear physicist and former Oxfordshire county councillor, has died aged 72.

He was born in Manchester but brought up in Southport. From 1955 to 1958, he studied at Oriel College, Oxford, then took a PhD at Liverpool University.

For two years, Dr Blair was an experimental physicist at the Cern cyclotron in Switzerland, then worked for 32 years at Harwell and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Dr Blair and his wife Lynda, who married in 1960 after meeting at a church youth club, lived in Abingdon, where they ran a youth club.

He was a county councillor for Abingdon Central for 12 years, and fought four general elections as a Liberal Party candidate.

He was also a governor of Abingdon School and chairman of governors at the town’s Fitzharrys School.

Moving to Standlake 15 years ago, he became a governor of Witney’s Henry Box School and later of Standlake Primary School, and a trustee of Mulberry Bush School, also in Standlake.

For several years, he was an Ofsted inspector and a part-time lecturer at London University.

Dr Blair was also a lay minister in the Lower Windrush Benefice, preaching and taking services at four west Oxfordshire churches. In one Remembrance service, he talked of his wartime childhood and amused everyone by describing how, at the age of nine, he had to learn how to eat a banana, a fruit unavailable in this country for the previous five years.

A member of the Oxford Diocesan Board of Education and chairman of its schools sub-committee, Dr Blair was widely known throughout Oxfordshire.

He was an excellent cook and enjoyed his food, his wine, and his pipe which, at his wife’s insistence, he could only smoke on the verandah at the back of their house.

Dr Blair died in January, and was buried at St Giles’ churchyard, in Standlake.

After 48 years of happy marriage, he is survived by his wife, their son and daughter and three grandchildren.