Educated at Hawarden Grammar School, he won a scholarship to Liverpool University where he studied physics. Gaining a First Class Honours degree he continued his research at Liverpool looking at crystal structures using x-ray diffraction.

In 1936 he was invited to join Lawrence Bragg, who he had met on several occassions whilst working with Arnold Beevers on what was to become known as Beevers-Lipson strips, a technique by which they reduced huge calculations of three-dimensional Fourier summations to sums of a more manageable one-dimensional one. In 1937 he was working at the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge University where he was in charge of the crystallography group.

He became head of the physics department at Manchester College of Technology, later University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1945, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957. He retired from Manchester in 1977 but, remained an active member of the department.