Olive Checkland was the only child of Robert Anthony, a young naval petty officer, and Edith Philipson, one of the large family of John Philipson. Born in rural Northumberland, John moved to the wider horizons of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and rose to be High Chief Ruler of the Rechabite Order in Britain.

Olive proved a bright pupil and moved on to study geography at Birmingham University in 1938, becoming the first in her family to graduate. She took a keen interest in student affairs and it was in Birmingham that she met her future husband, Canadian Sydney Checkland, whom she married in 1942.

After a difficult time looking after Sydney as he recovered from wartime injuries, she soon had five children while also moving house as her husband took up posts in Liverpool and then Cambridge. In 1957, Sydney became the first Professor of Economic History at the University of Glasgow and, for the next 25 years, Olive operated in partnership in establishing the department and forming contacts with staff and senior students. Olive would preside over social events in the family home. These she considered an essential addition to meeting within the department. She also took a keen and organising interesting in the department's innovative field trips - combining the study of geography with economic and social history at Scottish locations.

As well as being active in many aspects of university life, including the chapel choir and the Queen Margaret Settlement, Olive became increasingly involved in historical research both with Sydney and on her own from the 1970s. With Sydney, she edited a re-publication of the 1834 English Poor Law Report in 1974. This was followed in 1980 by her work on Philanthrophy in Victorian Scotland - Social Welfare and the Voluntary Principle, and her history of the Queen Margaret Union 1890-1980: Women in the University of Glasgow. These Scottish social themes were taken further in Health Care as Social History - The Glasgow Case, 1982, while she had also found time to give practical help to political refugees including those fleeing Chile after the fall of Allende.

Two editions of the joint work with Sydney on Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832-1914 followed in the later 1980s. There were more academic visits overseas with her husband and her cultural interests extended eastward, notably to Japan.

When Sydney retired from Glasgow in 1982, he and Olive moved to Cambridge, though still returned frequently to the cottage they had acquired in Anstruther and to various university events.

Further academic collaboration was cut short by Sydney's death in 1986 after an active but too brief retirement.

Olive decided to concentrate her academic interests on Japan and gained a special and respected position in this field. Britain's Encounter with Meiji Japan 1868-1912 appeared in 1989 and was followed by Humanitarianism in the Emperor's Japan (1994), Japanese Whisky - Scottish Blend (1998) and her final publication, Japan and Britain after 1859 - Creating Cultural Bridges (2003).

Even so, Olive also published Sobriety and Thrift: John Philipson and Family in 1989 and on Isabella Lucy Bird, the nineteenth-century traveller, in 1996.

She kept a close interest in ensuring that students were the main beneficiaries from the Checkland Memorial Fund. Olive was an indefatigable and memorable woman whose own epitaph could be her own comment on Isabella Bird: ''A Woman's right to do what she can do well.''