[1][2][3] After university, Garnett joined Imperial Chemical Industries as a graduate trainee, initially in Glasgow.
He continued to work at ICI until 1962, becoming personnel manager at their plastics factory in Blackpool.
[3] The son of (James Clerk) Maxwell Garnett, C.B.E., and Margaret Lucy (daughter of Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton),[5][6] and grandson of physicist and educational adviser William Garnett, Garnett was educated at Rugby and Kent School in Connecticut, USA, becoming an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1940.
[2] In 1943, Garnett married Barbara Rutherford-Smith, with whom he had two sons and two daughters, Virginia (now Lady) Bottomley.
[1] In 1985 they divorced, and later that year he married his Industrial Society colleague Julia (now Dame) Cleverdon, and with whom he had two daughters.