His father Ernest (1895-1973) was a cutler who had left school at 13 to work for the firm of George Wostenholm, where he slowly rose through the ranks to achieve the position of sales manager.

Graduating in 1941, he was disqualified from active service as a result of poor eyesight, and instead went to London to work for the Ministry of Shipping where his duties included planning of Atlantic convoys.

One of his tasks was to arrange an exchange of prisoners of war on board the neutral Swedish passenger liner, the SS Drottningholm, in October 1943.

[6][9] After the war, he enrolled with the Control Commission responsible for administering the British Zone of Allied-occupied Germany, and was posted to Hannover, where he was billeted in the family home of his future wife, Brigitte Albert.

With the arrival of a second child they decided to settle in England in 1951, and soon afterwards, Ronald obtained a post as Assistant Registrar at the University of Leeds.

As early as 1951, schools were campaigning for change: the fact that every university had different procedures, different forms, and different timetables made life very difficult for applicants and their advisors.

At a national level, there was no accurate data on the number of successful and unsuccessful candidates, which made it difficult to plan the expansion of the sector expected in the 1960s.

By 1968 the office had outgrown its London premises and transferred to Rodney Road in Cheltenham: he was keen to find somewhere that was attractive to live, with good schools to provide a potential workforce, with a postal sorting office capable of handling millions of letters a year, and preferably without its own University, to avoid any suggestion of bias.

He was a governor and subsequently chairman of trustees[13] of Charlton Park Convent School in Cheltenham, where his two youngest daughters had been pupils.

He was a keen cyclist but learned to drive and acquired his first car when already into his sixties, having previously argued that public transport and bicycles, together with liberal use of taxis, was cheaper and more convenient.