John Alfred Valentine Butler (known to his friends and colleagues as J. A. V.) was born into a Cotswolds farming family in Winchcombe on 14 February 1899; he was the eldest of three children of Alfred and Mary Ann (née Powell). After attending the local primary school he won a scholarship which covered the travelling expenses and fees for Cheltenham Grammar School. Coming from a non-academic family he had no encouragement to go to university, and so took a short apprenticeship with a local pharmacist. This led to his being drafted into the RAMC towards the end of World War I: after training, he was posted to a field hospital near Ypres. Here, he had the chance for self study, with the help of books on loan from Lewis's Lending Library in London, and the University Correspondence College, Cambridge.
Butler was demobilised in October 1919 and enrolled at University of Birmingham, from where he graduated “BSc with 1st Class Honours in 1921 (1st in the year).” In 1922 he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in the University College of Swansea. His work here resulted in the later publication of his first two books (see Works).
Butler’s next appointment was in 1926 as Lecturer in Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh, under Sir James Walker, where he studied the behaviour of electrolytes in mixed solvents, on which he published a series of papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (A) with five different collaborators from 1929-1933. A wide range of other papers appeared during this productive phase. Productive but not financially rewarding: he found it difficult to support his family on his Lecturer’s stipend. In 1939 he was appointed to work at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Princeton and so at the end of August the family sailed on the Queen Mary to New York. Butler worked in J H Northrop’s group on the homogeneity of crystallised enzymes.
After the outbreak of WWII, Butler offered his services and was appointed Executive Officer at the British Central Scientific Office in Washington, DC, which had a staff of 17 officers, under the direction of Sir Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of Charles Darwin. He continued in that role until 1944, when Edinburgh asked him to return to teaching there. But he did not find the conditions “at all congenial”, and so he secured an appointment in 1946 at the Courtauld Institute of Biochemistry under Professor (later Sir) Charles Dodds, where he worked on the proteolytic degradation of insulin. This work was not altogether successful, in part because of the great strides made by Sanger. So, in 1949, Butler moved to the Chester Beatty Research Institute in Chelsea, directed by Alexander Haddow. There were two main themes to his work at the Chester Beatty, one of which – on the proteins associated with DNA in the structure of chromosomes, the histones – is especially associated with Butler.