A VERSATILE and creative physicist with a passion for music has died aged 88.

Peter Schofield spent much of his life working at Harwell and, in his spare time, played piano and wrote music criticism.

Peter Schofield was born in London on September 14, 1929, to parents Edith and Bertram.

After school he served for a year in the Royal Corps of Signals where he was a Second Lieutenant.

Mr Schofield, following his military service, attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on a scholarship to read mathematics.

He joined the theoretical physics division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in October 1956.

At Harwell, Mr Schofield spent spent 20 years in the theoretical physics division working on problems related to the neutronics and cooling of the first generation of commercial nuclear power reactors.

In 1976 he moved to the material physics division and was identified as its ‘Coordinator of Neutron Scattering’.

One major event was conference in 1982 to mark 50th anniversary of the neutron’s discovery.

Following his retirement from Harwell, he was appointed, from 1991 to 1994, as the British assistant director at the Laue-Langevin Institute in Grenoble, a position which he occupied during a difficult period in the history of its reactor, when it was shut down for major reconstruction.

Mr Schofield met the woman he would marry, Kerstin Brück, at a party in Cambridge in 1958.

A year later they married at the Anglican Church of St Peter and St Sigfrid in Stockholm.

Mrs Schofield was a teacher at the European School and St Clare’s in Oxford.

They lived, initially, in Oxford, where the couple’s first daughter Monica was born in 1960. The family then spent 18 months in the US before returning to Abingdon where they lived, aside from three years in Grenoble, until moving to Summertown in 1994.

The couple’s second child, Amanda, was born in 1965.

Music was his passion. Mr Schofield was a gifted amateur pianist and, in retirement, became a music critic writing mainly for the Oxford Magazine and for his own website peterschofieldsreviews.weebly.com.

Mr Schofield, who died on April 15, is survived by daughters Monica and Amanda and sister Mary.

Mrs Schofield died of cancer in 2011.

A funeral will be held at St Peter’s Wolvercote at 2pm May 4 followed by memorial tea at Lady Margaret Hall. All family and friends are welcome. Family flowers only. Donations to Sobell House.