The Times/1936/Obituary/Mr. F. J. Matheson

Mr. F. J. Matheson

Mr. Frederick James Matheson, who died on April 16, was the youngest so of the Rev. James Matheson, Congregational minister in Nottingham from 1850 to 1878. Educated at the Nonconformist School at Bishop's Stortford, now Bishop's Stortford College, he went to the United States. There after some years in engineering works at Pittsburgh and St. Louis he became a journalist, writing for various newspapers. As correspondent of the New York Herald he was one of the earliest to enter Havana after the Cuban war. Returning to England he became English agent for Messrs. Ginn and Co., the New York publishers. Later he was editor of Progress, a periodical for the promotion of social welfare, and when the scheme for National Insurance was initiated he became one of the London Inspectors of the Department, which he served with great efficiency and devotion until his retirement under the age limit, when his colleagues showed their sense of his services by a farewell dinner in his honour. He had early shown his interest in social questions in working at an East End boys' club conducted by the late Sir Cyril Jackson, and in his later life in London he was an active member of the Rainbow Club, a discussion society, to which Sir Richard Stapley, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, Mr. J. M. Robertson, and other men of mark belonged.

Mr. Matheson will be remembered by his many friends in England and the United States as a an of varied interests and experience, whose friendship and social gifts made him welcome wherever he went, and whose friendship was prized by all who knew him, both young and old. His last years were divided between Bournemouth and Cambridge. His wife who survives him, was Helen Chrouschoff, of a well-known Russian family, whose work as a lecturer on history and as a translator of Russian book is well known. By his first wife he ha one child, Janet, no longer living, whose son, Harry Matheson, is working in a research laboratory in Washington.