Bryan Harold Cabot Matthews, 14 June 1906 - 23 July 1986

Abstract

Bryan Harold Cabot Matthews (later Professor Sir Bryan Matthews C.B.E., M.A., Sc.D., F.R.S.) will be remembered in the public field for his major contribution to neurophysiology and for his important contribution to the War effort by his work at Farnborough. These achievements appear to derive naturally from his vigorous personality, his life long interests and his family background. He was a friendly, likeable and at times commanding figure who, as experience at Farnborough shows, was capable of handling people with very varying backgrounds. He had, throughout his life, a deep love of activities that involved some challenge to the natural elements: skiing, canoeing, camping and above all long-distance sailing. Early on he developed an interest in technical things and in the way modern techniques could solve the problems with which he was faced, whether in the laboratory or at sea. His background and family were scientific. His father, Harold Evan Matthews, was trained as a pharmacist at the School of Pharmacy in London and was a manufacturing pharmacist with a factory and shop in the Mall at Clifton. His mother, Ruby Sarah Harrison, was also a pharmacist. His elder brother, born in 1901, was Leonard Harrison Matthews, F.R.S., the zoologist whose Biographical Memoir appeared in 1987 (vol. 33). The scientific culture has deep roots in the family and continues with Bryan’s son Professor P.B.C. Matthews, F.R.S., now a leading figure in an area of neurophysiology, the function of the mammalian muscle spindle, opened by his father. Bryan had an early interest in science, though this was probably not always purely academic, as for example when he had an accident with gunpowder at the age of 11. He went to Clifton College and while he was there he developed an interest in radio. This was in the early 1920s and very soon after the beginning of radio broadcasting in 1921; methods were primitive to say the least and, although in some respects simple, required much skill and patience to obtain results.