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My mother, Beatrice Baxter, who has died aged 102, was a secondary school chemistry teacher in Ilford, Essex.

After teaching at two mainstream schools – Gearies and Fairlop – she worked in the town for the rest of her career at Ethel Davis, a community special school for disabled children, where she became adept at helping pupils in wheelchairs or with cerebral palsy to carry out chemistry experiments.

Beatrice was born at the City of London maternity hospital to William Fox, an accountant, and his wife, Dora (nee Austin), a seamstress. Her place of birth put her in theoretical earshot of Bow bells, making her a genuine cockney.

A brilliant student at the Skinners’ Company’s school for girls in north London, she left there at 16, just before the second world war, to become a milk tester with Co-op Dairies. She then moved to Imperial College London to work as a laboratory assistant for most of the rest of the war, helping a group of Dutch expatriate scientists to develop better gas masks – work that later earned her a medal from the Netherlands government. She also qualified as a first aider and tended to people injured in bombing raids.

After the war she enrolled in evening classes at the Sir John Cass Technical Institute (later part of City, University of London) to study for a degree in general science, which she received in 1948. She stayed on to do a degree in chemistry, which she gained after just two years in 1950, the year that she married Herbert Baxter, who was also a chemist.

Following teacher training at Brentwood College of Education in Essex (now part of Anglia Ruskin University) she began her teaching career at Gearies boys’ school in Ilford and eventually retired from Ethel Davis in 1983.

Later she assisted Herbert in his new career of producing high-level reference books on chemistry, helping with the word processing and drawing diagrams showing the molecular structure of complex organic compounds. An armchair astronomer, she was also a keen knitter, although in old age she found the needles too difficult to handle.

Herbert died in 2010. Beatrice is survived by their two children, Gillian and me, and four grandsons. A third child, Laurence, predeceased her.