(Walter) Norman Haworth was born on 19 March 1883 in Chorley, Lancashire. His parents were Thomas Haworth and Hannah, née Crook. He attended the local school until he was fourteeen, when he got a job at the Rylands linoleum factory where his father was manager. In the course of his work he learned about the use of dyestuffs which led to an interest in chemistry. Despite active discouragement from family and friends, he studied the subject with a private tutor in Preston, passed the entrance examination, and entered Manchester University in 1903. He graduated with a first class honours degree in chemistry in 1906. He was a pupil of W. H. Perkin, and began research with him on the synthesis of terpenes. After three years work on this subject he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition scholarship which he chose to hold at Göttingen, where he worked with Otto Wallach. After only one year of study he was awarded a PhD. For the second year of his scholarship he returned to Manchester as a research fellow to continue his work on the terpenes.
In 1911 Haworth was awarded the Manchester DSc degree and appointed senior demonstrator in the chemistry department of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. In 1912 he moved to a lectureship in chemistry at the University of St Andrews where he became interested in the work being carried out by Thomas Purdie and James Colquhoun Irvine investigating the structural chemistry of carbohydrates, especially sugars. Haworth gradually abandoned terpenes to concentrate on carbohydrates, though this research was interrupted by the First World War. Haworth became professor of organic chemistry at Armstrong College, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the University of Durham in 1920. The following year he became head of department. Despite limited resources he managed to sustain his own research and to attract an increasing number of postgraduate researchers to join him. In 1922 he married Violet Chilton Dobbie, the daughter of Sir James Johnston Dobbie. The couple had two sons, James and David.
In 1925 Haworth was selected to succeed Gilbert Morgan as Mason professor of chemistry at Birmingham University. He took with him a large group of research students and rapidly developed what was probably the most important school of carbohydrate chemistry in the world, attracting researchers from many other countries. Haworth established a reputation among his collaborators as an enthusiastic, efficient, and inspired leader, as well as sustaining a constant and rapid flow of papers throughout his tenure. In 1929 he published 'The Constitution of the Sugars'. Among the foremost achievements of his research school were the elucidation of the structures of simple and complex saccharides, work on the chain structure of cellulose, and research into the nature of biologically important bacterial polysaccharides. It was also responsible for the structural determination and synthesis of vitamin C. This was the first chemical synthesis of a vitamin, and it made large-scale production possible. This work, much of it carried out in collaboration with E. L. Hirst, and published in 1933, contributed to the award of the Nobel prize for Chemistry (shared with Paul Karrer) in 1937.
Haworth took on many administrative responsibilities within the university. He was Dean of the Faculty of Science 1943-1946, and Vice Principal 1947-1948. He also had close contacts with industry both directly and through the Society of Chemical Industry, which he joined in 1916 and whose jubilee memorial lecture he delivered in 1938. He played a part in building up the Rubber Producers' Research Association and served on the Colonial Products Research Council from its foundation in 1943. During the Second World War he was a member of the MAUD Committee which oversaw the early stages of the British atomic bomb project, and directed research, in collaboration with ICI, into chemical problems associated with the project, in particular the preparation of highly purified uranium and the search for volatile compounds of the metal. After the war he joined the Atomic Scientists' Association and was a signatory to the memorandum on international control of atomic energy submitted to the United Nations. He chaired the Chemical Research Board of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research from 1947.
Haworth was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1928. He was awarded the Longstaff medal of the Chemical Society (jointly with Irvine) in 1933, and the Davy (1934) and the royal (1942) medals of the Royal Society. At the meeting of the British Association in Norwich in 1935 he presided over the chemistry section. He received honorary degrees from Queen's University Belfast, Oslo, Zürich, Cambridge, and Manchester, and was an honorary member of the academies of science at Haarlem, Brussels, Munich, Vienna, Finland, and Dublin, and of the Swiss Chemical Society. He was president of the Chemical Society in 1944-1946 and vice-president of the Royal Society in 1947, the year in which he was knighted.
After his retirement in 1948 Haworth represented the Royal Society at the seventh Pacific science congress, which was held in New Zealand in 1949. He took the opportunity to visit and lecture at a number of universities in Australia and New Zealand. Less than a year after his return he suffered a heart attack and died at his home, Thurcroft, in Barnt Green, Birmingham, on 19 March 1950. He was survived by his wife
Source: L. L. Bircumshaw, ‘Haworth, Sir (Walter) Norman (1883-1950)’, rev. Sally M. Horrocks, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2012 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33772, accessed 10 May 2017
