Creeth was educated at Northampton Town and County Grammar School, and went on to read Chemistry at University College Nottingham,[1] [2] first as a war-time undergraduate (1942–44) and then as a postgraduate PhD student (1944-7) under the supervision of D. O. Jordan and John Masson Gulland.

[8] Once Watson had recognised the key role of the hydrogen bonds then the correct solution to the decoding of DNA seems to have occurred to him within about a week or ten days.

[9] Creeth’s personal achievement in conducting such a crucial experiment at age 23 similarly lacked recognition in his lifetime, although his role was posthumously recognised in the expanded Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix (2012),[10] and also by commemorative events at the University of Nottingham.

There has been some speculation as to whether the Nottingham team could have gone on to make the breakthrough on decoding DNA if events had turned out differently following the high point of their research in 1947.

[11] However Creeth left to work in London after completing his PhD, and then Gulland was killed in the Goswick rail crash near Berwick on Tweed on 26 October 1947.