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Bill Brock was perhaps the preeminent historian of chemistry of his generation in Britain. He was a lifelong member of the 欧美AV and a member of the Historical Group. He donated much of his library to the 欧美AV鈥檚 library in 2022.

Brock spent his entire academic career at the University of Leicester, publishing about twenty books and more than one hundred research papers. He also wrote nearly forty entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, more than fifteen in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, and just over twenty in Bernard V. Lightman鈥檚 Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists.   Furthermore, he served as editor of Ambix, Chair of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, President of the British Society for the History of Science, and was awarded the Dexter lifetime achievement award of the American Chemical Society.

His greatest achievement was his full-scale biography of the German chemist Justus von Liebig which appeared in 1997. Justus Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper was the only book-length biography of this major figure to appear in decades, and the first ever by a professional historian. This volume explored Liebig鈥檚 central influence in populating European chemistry professorships, and his generational dominance in the field of organic chemistry, especially in his later pursuits of agricultural, physiological, pharmaceutical, and food chemistry.

For the general reader (including chemists) he produced The Fontana History of Chemistry in 1992. An identical American edition was published the next year as The Norton History of Chemistry; in 2000 a paperback reprint was issued by Norton with a new title, The Chemical Tree: A History of Chemistry. It appeared in German translation in 1997, and subsequently in Spanish, Polish, and Japanese editions. The book immediately became the best general account of the historical development of artisanal and scientific chemistry and its various branches and affiliations. The Times Literary Supplement judged it 鈥渁n astonishing tour de force鈥�. He condensed this volume, duly updated, into The History of Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press in 2016.

Brock remained an active scholar until the end of his life and his superb biography of Henry Armstrong, the eminent English chemist and ardent champion of heuristic or 鈥渟elf-discovery鈥� educational methods in opposition to  prevalent didacticism, will be published in June 2025 by the University of Chicago Press as Fifth Business: A Life of the Chemist and Educationist Henry Edward Armstrong.

Born in Brighton, Sussex, Bill Brock was educated at Hove County Grammar School for Boys and took a chemistry degree at University College London in 1959. He also studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and seriously considered acting as a career. He then took a masters in the history of science at the University of Leicester and joined the department there. Brock was Director of the Victorian Studies Centre at Leicester between 1974 and 1990. He retired and became an Emeritus Professor in 1998. He later held honorary positions at the University of Kent and University College London. In addition, he held several visiting fellowships at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) in Philadelphia.

Increasing ill-health forced a move to a care home in Wolverhampton in 2023, where he passed away. The perfect gentleman, he was unfailingly kind, generous, warm, and helpful, in short, the kind of person who leaves the world a better place. The history of chemistry will be forever in his debt.