Archibald Campbell Dickie

Born        1868 at  Dundee, Tayside, Scotland 

Died          3 September 1941

Archibald Campbell Dickie was born in Dundee in 1868 and apprenticed to John Carver's Forfar office in 1885 and remained as assistant, the practice being then Carver & Symon, until 1893 when he went to London and joined first the office of Beeston & Burmester and secondly that of Frederick Hall Jones for experience. He also served as senior assistant in the office of J J Stevenson. During that period he worked either for or with Stanley D Adshead and with John Anderson from Marshall Mackenzie's office on competitions, but without success. Dickie was one of the five original day students at the Architectural Association in Great Marlborough Street and passed the qualifying exam in 1894, being elected ARIBA on 11 March 1895, his proposers being Herbert Duncan Searles Wood, a prominent member of the Architectural Association, Frederick Richard Farrow and Samuel Flint Clarkson.

In 1894 Dickie was appointed architect to the Palestine Exploration Expedition Fund where he worked under the supervision of Masterman and Bliss and remained until 1897. In the course of that work the Church of the Pool of Siloam and the Madebe mosaic were discovered. In 1898 he and Bliss, with whom he worked closely, published 'Excavations in Jerusalem 1894 97'. His work on the early churches of Palestine and Syria generally and on The Great Mosque at Damascus was subsequently summarised in R Phené Spiers 'Architecture East and West' 1905. On his return he joined the office of Arthur Beresford Pite and may have had some influence on that architect's transition from Italian Mannerist to neo Greek at that time. While with Pite he maintained his interest in archaeology and worked with R C Bosanquet on the excavations at Borcoviens on the Roman Wall. From Pite's office he entered the office of Dunn & Watson at Bedford Row, Bloomsbury c.1898, taking on as assistant Alexander Symon, the son of Archibald Symon, his employer in Forfar, in 1899. The arrangement with the Dunn & Watson practice was described by Theodore Fyfe as sharing an office rather than an actual partnership. Commissions were few and he was soon glad to accept a mastership for evening work under Hugh Patrick Guario Maule, a friend from his days in J J Stevenson's office, at the Architectural Association. Shortly thereafter he gave up his association with Dunn & Watson and formed a partnership with Claude Kelly, master of design at the Architectural Association.