John Fraser Matthew was born on 2 July 1875, the son of Thomas Matthew, a military tailor in Queen Street, Edinburgh whose family came from Kettle in Fife. In the words of his son Stuart, he 'early acquired his fascination with army uniforms, badges and ceremonials never ceasing to attend army parades throughout his life'. His mother was Mary Hill Simpson.
Matthew was educated at James Gillespie's School where he won a prize for drawing. On leaving school he found employment in Stevenson's bookshop on the Mound, with occasional employment as a page in the retinue of the Marquis of Linlithgow. When calling at the home of another page to collect the rent in May 1893 Robert Lorimer's sister Louise spotted on the mantelpiece a model of Holyrood made by Matthew and took it home to show her brother. Within twenty-four hours Stevenson had been given a week's wages in lieu of notice and Matthew had become Lorimer's first apprentice: according to Pilkington Jackson, Lorimer 'instantly sensed in Matthew's drawings and personality an affinity with his own taste and outlook'. Matthew studied at the School of Applied Arts, Edinburgh University and at Heriot-Watt College, and completed his apprenticeship in 1897. Because of a cash-flow problem at the time he did not get the £15 due to him but in rapid succession he became improver, assistant and c.1899 office manager with James Smith Richardson, Reginald Fairlie, Ramsay Traquair and Percy Erskine Nobbs working under him. As a volunteer Matthew was called up in 1900 for the South African War and spent fifteen months on half pay from Lorimer (£40: his pay appears to have been £80 p.a. at that point) as a sergeant with the Royal Scots. He returned in May 1901(in Lorimer's words) 'twice the man physically he was when he went …a very useful sort of man'.
On 3 April 1902, when Matthew married Annie Broadfoot Hogg, his salary was three guineas a week. They set up house at Colinton in one of the Rustic Cottages Lorimer had built for Galletly. Matthew gave up all his outside interests to concentrate solely on Lorimer's practice in a role that he was later (RIBA Nomination Papers 1931), to describe as an unofficial partner in 1908 and by 1910 he was allowed to have a small independent practice of his own to augment his salary as office manager. The outbreak of the 1914-19 War saw Matthew on active service as a major in The Royal Corps of Signals and he was twice mentioned in dispatches. Although Lorimer had been able to buy Gibliston in 1915, by 1917 the office was closed for nearly a year from want of work; but by the time that Matthew returned at the end of 1918 the practice was already busy with war memorials and Matthew was concluding that the practice would 'need a huge staff - costing thousands a year to undertake the work'.
In 1920 Matthew bought a house in Minto Street towards the purchase of which Lorimer provided £650. Known since his Boer War days as 'The Military Man' his main tasks in the office were the estimating, keeping everyone at work and maintaining the peace, particularly in respect of salary in arrears and unpaid overtime.
As the office secretary, Margaret Brown recalled to Peter Savage: 'He'd talk all day to the apprentices, anyone. You had to shut him up at times. Then he'd go home to his house in Minto Street and retire to his basement room to do the work he hadn't done during the day. He also got on very well with the craftsmen.' Nevertheless, Alfred Lochhead, his chief draughtsman from 1920 and Harry Hubbard, who succeeded him, both saw him as extremely hard working, the latter observing that he was 'a man who combined a love of a joke with a keen sense of the ridiculous, and perhaps this pawkiness tended to conceal from some the brilliance of the real man. He was a fine draughtsman but we had regrettably few opportunities of appreciating this because he devoted so much of his time to running the business side of the practice - a task which he tackled with outstanding ability and a real flair for organisation. 'J F' worked hard - just how hard we in the office, enjoying his pleasant easy going company, hardly realised; but many a sketch design went home with him and was worked at in the small hours.'
In 1926 Matthew persuaded Lorimer to give him a partnership which was formalised in January 1927. But towards the end of the former year Matthew suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of the stresses of the Scottish National War Memorial project which had brought about a series of migraines, and never fully recovered. Nevertheless he almost wholly responsible for the University's King's Buildings, commissioned in 1927-29 and when Lorimer died in September of the latter year he became sole partner, the purchase of Lorimer's interest from Lady Lorimer, causing him some financial hardship. When Hew Lorimer, an architectural student at Edinburgh College of Art, applied for admission to his father's firm he was told that 'Your father and I had no such arrangement' and that he had his own sons to think of. Although some years later he told George Hay that 'he'd had enough of Lorimer' and that 'one Lorimer was enough for a life-time', by the end of the King's Buildings commission the office was seriously short of work and Harry Hubbard who had succeeded Lochhead as chief assistant had to be paid off. By that date his eldest son Robert, born 1906, was chiefly engaged on bursary research projects and assisting only occasionally. After the Lothian House commission was lost to Stewart Kaye, Robert, a year older than Hew, though it better to join the Scottish office, having secured the post of assistant architect with the Department of Health for Scotland against stiff competition in 1936.
John Fraser Matthew was admitted LRIBA in mid-1931, his proposers being John Begg, Frank Charles Mears and Robert Stirling Reid; and shortly afterwards, in November the same year, the RIBA Council elected him as a Fellow.
When Robert Hogg Matthew returned to Edinburgh as Professor of Architecture in 1953 he founded his own practice, separate from his father's. Matthew was by then semi-retired, assisted by the youngest of his three sons, Stuart Russell Matthew, born 1912. Stuart was educated at the Edinburgh Institution and at the Royal College of Art in London, and shared his father's interest in fine craftsmanship, much of his practice being concerned with small-scale armorial work. He was taken into partnership in January 1946.
In 1950 John Fraser Matthew had a second breakdown and for a short time the partnership with Stuart was dissolved, Stuart merging his practice with that of David Carr, the office being within Stuart Matthew's house at 14 Lynedoch Place.
John Fraser Matthew finally retired in 1951, his practice being wound up by his son Stuart. He died on 31 January 1955, by which date he had moved from Minto Street to South Queensferry. The partnership of Carr & Matthew was closed in 1959 when David Carr set up his own practice at 43 Manor Place and thereafter Stuart's practice ebbed away because of his poor health. His main business in the 1960s comprised projects farmed out by his brother Robert and small-scale work on Matthew family properties. In his later years Stuart's interests became more varied, the deaf, teaching music and by the late 1960s running large antique shop from a property he owned in Belford Road, for a time in partnership with Nigel Coates. His last important undertaking was a book, 'The Knights and the Chapel of the Thistle', published in 1988. He died on 13 May 1996, leaving estate of £1,743 5s 9d; his brother Robert had died much earlier, on 21 June 1975.