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The eldest son of Vice-Admiral Victor Danckwerts, who had seen action in HMS Kent during the 1914 Battle of the Falkland Islands and had been the Navy’s director of plans in 1940. He fell foul of Churchill when the latter was First Lord of the Admiralty and was removed from office, but later served in Washington before becoming second-in-command of the Eastern Fleet.

After schooling at Winchester, Peter Danckwerts read chemistry at Oxford before joining the Royal Navy in 1940. Having volunteered for special duties, he was assigned to undertake bomb and mine disposal.

After a short training period, S/Lt (Sp) Danckwerts RNVR led a small team defusing magnetic and other mines dropped in the Thames Estuary between Teddington and Southend. He was awarded the George Cross later that year for ‘great gallantry and undaunted devotion to duty’ whilst neutralising enemy mines.

In 1942 he was posted to Gibraltar to deal with the threat of Italian mines, including limpet mines attached to ships by frogmen riding midget submarines. Then, after a spell in Algiers, he participated in the invasion of Sicily but, ironically, he had the misfortune to tread on a small anti-personnel mine. After hospitalisation in Portsmouth, he spent the last year of the war with the planning staff at the headquarters of Combined Operations.

Following demobilisation, he studied chemical engineering at MIT and then worked as an academic in Britain before joining the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He was appointed professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College and then at the University of Cambridge. He was elected president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers in 1965 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969. After retiring from the University of Cambridge in 1976 he became the executive editor of Chemical Engineering Science.

He died in Cambridge on 25 October 1984.

The demagnetising of metal ships was accomplished by degaussing the hulls of the ships. Initially this was done through a process known as coiling, which involved wrapping electromagnetic coils around the hulls and passing strong electrical pulses through them, thereby making the ships magnetically neutral. This was too expensive to be used universally, but Goodeve devised a cheaper system called wiping, which involved dragging a large electrical cable with a 2,000 amp current passing through it along the side of a ship. Goodeve was one of a number of scientists who received awards for the development of the degaussing technique, his prize being £7,500.