Donald Ian Findlay, M.A., F.S.A.Scot.

Donald Findlay was born on 20 June 1950 in Edinburgh into a distinguished Scottish family: his grandfather was John Ritchie Findlay, proprietor of The Scotsman and founder of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and his uncle was Ian Lindsay, a much respected architect concerned with the restoration and recording of historic buildings in Scotland. Findlay went to school at Harrow, read English at St Andrews and was then, in 1973, appointed Pastoral Measure Officer at the Council for Places of Worship, as it then was, under the secretaryship of Peter Burman, F.S.A. He remained with the Council for the rest of his short career and was Deputy Secretary at the time of his death. Findlay's particular responsibility was the drafting of reports on the architectural and historical quality of English Anglican churches proposed for redundancy or major alteration under the Pastoral Measure of 1969. In all, he wrote some 1,500 such reports, each one a small masterpiece: lucidly written from first-hand observation, penetrating, sympathetic and definitive, whether the church in question was Saxon, medieval or Victorian, or anything in between and beyond. When he arrived at the C.C.C. in the seventies, many fine churches and their furnishings were being recklessly and needlessly destroyed, with the backing or indifference of the Church Assembly. Findlay worked towards the reform of the procedures which allowed this to happen and now fewer are demolished, many are protected by the Churches Preservation Trust (of which he was a trustee) and many others retained in active use wherever possible - a commemoration of Findlay's influence, insight and effort, and a more enlightened approach by the synod. He was a trustee of the Ely Stained Glass Museum and served on the Executive Committee of the Georgian Group and the Buildings Sub-Committee of the Victorian Society. He loved music, sang well, was a competent organist and was for many years clerk to the Organs Advisory Committee of the C.C.C., in celebration of which Dr Francis Jackson, Master of the Music at York Minster, composed his Georgian Suite for organ and dedicated it to Findlay. In 1985 Findlay published All Hallows' London Wall: a History and Description, when that church was the Council's home, and in 1996 The Protection of our English Churches, a history of the C.C.C. to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary. Findlay was an essentially private individual. The partial deafness which had afflicted him since childhood made him seem remote to those who did not know him but he enjoyed a wide circle of friends and gave generously, and anonymously, to many worthy causes. Georgian history, art and architecture were his special study, indeed his great love, and he was writing a major work on English Georgian churches when he died. In London he worshipped in the eighteeth-century, Anglo-Catholic, Grosvenor Chapel, was vice-chairman of its committee and wrote an appreciation of the chancel designed by Scots architect and episcopalian, Sir Ninian Comper, in Godly Mayfair. For twenty-five years he shared an early eighteenth-century house in Spitalfields with Michael Gillingham, F.S.A. Together they re- converted it from its former use as a banana warehouse into one of the finest houses in the area with an exquisite garden. Although he had spent all his professional life in England, Findlay was proud of his Scottish ancestry and knew the parish churches of his native Banffshire better than anyone. He spent his holidays in Scotland and was planning to buy a Georgian house in north-east Scotland for holidays and eventual retirement, when his life was so cruelly cut short on 14 April 1998. His ashes are buried in the churchyard of St Margaret, Aberlour, near the family home on Speyside where his mother still lives.