Obituary: Chessor Matthew, Architect who went on to become the first principal of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art

CHESSOR Matthew was a dynamic architect who became the first principal of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art.

He was just 23 when was admitted as an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Ariba) – proposed by the renowned North-east architect Thomas Scott Sutherland – and lauded by one of his fellow proposers as an outstanding student.

That same year, 1936, he became a lecturer in Wales and went on to work for the Air Ministry Works Directorate during the Second World War before returning north in the late 1950s and spending two decades in Dundee, where one of the campus buildings still bears his name.

The son of master joiner William Matthew and his wife Helen, he was born at Smiddyseat, Tyrie, a small rural community near Fraserburgh, and educated at schools in Tyrie and Strichen.

At 16 he was articled to architect George Watt of Aberdeen and began attending evening classes in architecture at the city’s Robert Gordon’s College. For three years, from 1932, he attended day classes at the school and was awarded his diploma in July 1935. He was then awarded the Byrne Scholarship, which allowed him to remain at the school for another year as a post-graduate.

By May 1936, when he was admitted Ariba, he was living at Whitewell, by Fraserburgh, but he moved to take up a post as lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, where he remained for five years.

During that time he travelled to Italy to study for several weeks and spent his holidays at London architects Ashley & Newman and the renowned English architect E Vincent Harris, who designed several important public buildings south of the Border.

For two years in the middle of the Second World War Matthew was a planning officer in the Air Ministry Works Directorate, but returned to the Welsh School of Architecture in 1946 as a senior lecturer.

Two years later he passed the Town Planning Institute’s final exam and was elected an associate of the onstitute in 1950.

In 1949 he and a number of colleagues had been granted permission to engage in limited private practice and he went on to complete a number of works in Cardiff, including repairing the war-damaged building and spire of the city’s Presbyterian Church.

He stayed on at the Welsh School of Architecture until 1957 and spent his final year there researching the growth of urban development in East Glamorgan.

He moved to the Dundee Institute of Art and Technology as head of its school of architecture and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1958. He was appointed principal of the Dundee institute’s art school in 1963.

However, in 1972, a committee of enquiry was set up to decide whether the Dundee institute should be split into two separate independent colleges, one for each discipline. Three years later the institution was dissolved to create Dundee College of Technology and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and, by virtue of continuing in his post as principal of the art college section, he became Duncan of Jordanstone’s first principal.

The Matthew building was erected during his time as principal and named in his honour. Matthew retired in 1978 and the art college remained independent until the 1990s, when it became a full faculty of Dundee University.

Although he was a man primarily immersed in his work, he also enjoyed fine wines, gardening, DIY, old cars and entertaining his grandchildren.

Something of a Francophile, he would also spend several weeks each summer in the Alpes Maritimes.

Predeceased 16 months earlier by his wife, Margaret, Chessor Matthew is survived by their son Stuart, grandchildren and great-grand- children.

ALISON SHAW