He was born in Edinburgh on 27 March 1923 the son of Charles Henry Kemball FRSE (1889-1964), a dental surgeon, and his wife, Janet White.
In December 1939 he was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge where he graduated MA before gaining two doctorates (ScD and PhD).
[5] Kemball was the recipient of a Commonwealth Fund Scholarship, on his way to Princeton, to work with Professor H S Taylor, a leading expert on heterogeneous catalysis.
[1] Kemball sailed on the same ship back to England in September 1947, and joined the Department of Colloid Science at Cambridge to take up his Research Fellowship at Trinity.
Having reassembled his newly introduced mass spectrometer system, he started on an extensive period of research on the exchange reactions of hydrocarbons with deuterium by using evaporated metal films as catalysts; this was a significant a development of his work with Taylor at Princeton.