SIR Oliver Scott of Yews, Westmorland, MD, 3rd Baronet, radiobiologist and philanthropist, has died aged 93.

The Scott family moved to Bowness around 1900.

They built the Provincial Insurance Company of Kendal, which provided the basis for family wealth until it was sold in 1994. Sir Oliver was a Director of the Provincial from 1955 to 1964 and retained an interest in the company. However, his central commitment was to medical research as a distinguished radiobiologist.

He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and undertook clinical training at St Thomas’s Hospital, qualifying in 1946.

He became interested in research showing how physics could contribute to medicine.

In the mid-1950s, he helped show how hyperbaric oxygen chambers could double the sensitivity of radio resistant tumours to radiological treatment, offering a successful method of treatment that was widely used for thirty years.

He developed a distinguished research career, making many contributions to an understanding of cancer tumours and their treatment.

When important research was threatened, he rescued it through negotiations that established the British Empire Cancer Campaign Research Unit at Mount Vernon, Northwood.

His generosity made this project possible. In 1966 he became Director of this Laboratory and under his leadership it became the most respected research centre in experimental radiotherapy in the world.

Oliver Scott’s international connections became extensive. In the 1970s he visited Moscow and Kazakhstan at the height of the cold war to assist and

collaborate with an oncologist investigating the effect of the Soviet nuclear testing programme on the Kazakh population.

Oliver Scott retired from the Mount Vernon Laboratory in 1969 for health reasons, though he continued his own research.

He was President of the Oncology Section of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1987-8 and awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the British Institute of Radiology in 1999.

Alongside this life in science, Sir Oliver was a generous benefactor. He was an active member of the Council of the Cancer Research Campaign. He expanded a trust his father had established to support medical research which continues to make many grants.

With his family, he gave Glencoyne, the site of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, to the National Trust. More recently he provided valuable support to Abbot Hall Gallery,

Kendal and Blackwell, the Baillie Scott Arts and Crafts House.

In all things, Oliver was supported by his wife Phoebe, who died earlier this year, in a life of remarkable quality. Alongside generous benefactions, they often undertook gestures of quiet kindness - letters or gifts that brought relief or happiness.

Both engaged with the arts, they made charitable arrangements to support young musicians, arranged evenings of chamber music in their London home, and even commissioned an opera.

Oliver enjoyed languages, writing essays and translating French and Russian poetry. Together, they spent as much time as possible at Yews, Oliver’s family home near Bowness.

Here he loved to sit, surrounded by his father’s library, discussing family history.

With Phoebe he presided with pleasure when the gardens of Yews were opened to the public.

Oliver Scott was given great gifts of intellect, character and wealth; he carried all three with a lightness, openness, generosity and sensitivity that enhanced the

lives of all who knew him, and many who did not.

The funeral will be held at 11.00 am on 26 November at St Martin’s Church, Bowness-on-Windermere, Windermere.