I knew the late Colin Matthew only slightly but greatly admired his scholarship. More particularly, I was gratified by the interest he took in contributions I made to the New Dictionary of National Biography and was pleased to share with him an experience of working and living in East Africa.
I was therefore disappointed to learn from the latest New DNB Newsletter that the fund set up in his memory will be for Oxford graduate and undergraduate students only.
The circle of scholars to whom Colin Matthew was known for his work on the Gladstone Diaries as well as the New DNB was very much wider than historians at Oxford. It seems a pity that younger scholars from a wider academic community should not have the opportunity of benefiting from a fund in his memory.
Roy Bridges Emeritus professor of history University of Aberdeen