Collection DC 091 - Records relating to Dugald Cameron

Dugald Cameron OBE was Director of The Glasgow School of Art from 1991-1999.

Dugald was born in Glasgow in 1939 and spent his early life near Clydebank. He was educated at the High School of Glasgow. After a number of false starts on leaving school, including a very short time as an apprentice in Rolls-Royce, he entered the Junior non-diploma class at The Glasgow School of Art in January 1957 at the inspired suggestion of Harry Jefferson Barnes, then Registrar and Deputy Director, and thereafter completed the Diploma Course and a Post-Diploma specialising in Industrial Design. He had the great good fortune to be taught drawing by W Drummond Bone, from Ayr, and design by James Goodchild and Joe McCrum. Winning the Trades House of Glasgow travelling scholarship in 1961, he visited Scandinavia which was then the focus of international design.

Shortly after completing his post-diploma he became a part time teacher at GSA in December 1962, then Senior Lecturer in charge of Industrial Design in 1970, Head of Design in 1982 and Director of the School in 1991, retiring in October 1999. He had been appointed to a Chair in the Technische Hogeschool, Delft in 1970 but did not take it up.
During much of that time he practised as a freelance industrial designer working for over forty UK and American companies and, in 1977 with Alan Carlaw, established Squadron Prints, a small enterprise producing commercial lithographs of aircraft, ships and a few other subjects in profile.

On retiral he became a Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde in the Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management and a Visiting Professor to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at The University of Glasgow.

Throughout his life he has been sustained by his enthusiasms for railways, aviation and drawing. He has written and compiled a number of books on aspects of Glasgow’s aviation and railway history, and given many talks on Scotland’s aviation and railway history.