David Peace

Creative and prolific glass engraver

David Brian Peace, town planner and glass engraver: born 13 March 1915; town planner, Staffordshire County Council 1948-61; Deputy County Planning Officer, Cambridgeshire County Council 1961-75, Head of Environmental Planning 1975-80; Chairman, Guild of Glass Engravers 1975-80, President 1980-86; MBE 1977; married 1939 Jean Lawson (died 1989; two daughters); died 15 February 2003.

If you seek his monument, look around Westminster Abbey, where David Peace designed the lettering for the memorials to Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Betjeman, engraved a glass screen for St George's Chapel and created, with Sally Scott, eight stunning panels of lettering and heraldry across the west end. Of the panels he wrote: "15 lions, 28 fleurs-de-lis, 10 martlets and two eagles provide all a herald could wish."

David Brian Peace was born in 1915 into a Sheffield Congregationalist family of file-makers. Even as a boy he was fascinated by lettering, observing the text painted round the Sunday School room and worrying about the letter R. Clarence Whaite, his art teacher at Mill Hill School, in north-west London, stimulated his interest in design, heraldry, wood engraving and Eric Gill's lettering. But when he came to study architecture at Sheffield University, Peace failed his finals, "not having sufficiently developed a personal style". The university and he made it up 50 years later when they awarded him an honorary degree.

Just before the start of the Second World War, he married Jean Lawson, an RCA-trained painter and a writer, and after various architectural- assistant jobs, he renounced his conscientious objection and joined the RAF, constructing airfields across Britain and in occupied Germany.

On demobilisation Peace worked as a planner, first for the West Riding and then for 12 years for Staffordshire. He put his need to travel around the whole county to good use by creating and publishing a very attractive architectural map of the county, to be followed by maps of the Peak District, North Wales and Portmeirion. He took his wife and two daughters on regular weekend excursions to see sites, ranging from footpaths to stately homes, of planning concern; his wife, encouraged by John Betjeman, a family friend, converted her journals of these visits into Sweet Vernal (1966). Peace contributed the chapter on Staffordshire to Betjeman's Collins' Guide to the Parish Churches of England (1968).

As if county planning, writing and mapmaking were not enough, Peace also started to develop his interest in glass engraving. He had experimented in the 1930s, making small presents for the family at the same time that Laurence Whistler and William Wilson of Whitefriars were also, unknown to each other, experimenting with this long-forgotten artform. In 1950 he borrowed his dentist's diamond-coated tools, bought an elderly foot-powered dentist's drill for £11 and was away into a whole new area of experimentation.

Commissions started to come in, not just for goblets, bowls and decanters, but also for windows. He wrote of that time: "Planning provided a livelihood, but glass was my life."

Architecture and planning was not irrelevant to his glass work, however; his three-dimensional awareness and sense of location ensured that all his work was fitting to the objects or place. Glass had to be engraved "in the round", with the knowledge that it could be seen into and through; windows had to relate not just to the building but also to the view through them. Peace also rapidly established that wording on glass should not be "Presented to . . . on the occasion of . . ." but a felicitous quotation. His very first commission, from an advertisement in The Times asking for suggestions for a golden wedding present, was a goblet engraved in italic, "With the ever- circling years comes round the age of gold." Thereafter he compiled a huge compendium of appropriate phrases in many languages.

In 1960 the family moved on from the pleasant Stafford house, from which had flowed paintings, poetry, essays, books, glass and maps, to Cambridgeshire, where Peace had secured a senior post despite a reference from Betjeman which began, "Mr Peace is often called Charles in honour of the famous 19th-century murderer." He specialised in historic buildings and conservation and wrote a couple of guides on these subjects. He was also instrumental in important planning decisions to protect medieval buildings and prevent high-rise development in Cambridge. Peace never made it to the top in Cambridgeshire, which disappointed him but in retrospect was greatly to his benefit, as he was spared the burdens of overall responsibility which would undoubtedly have severely limited his ability to do other things.

His glass engraving interests were expanding as he developed new techniques and worked on larger scales. He was never without commissions and had a series of exhibitions from the 1960s onwards for which he produced handsome illustrated catalogues. In all he was to produce over a thousand pieces.

He particularly enjoyed the fellowship of the Art Workers' Guild and in the mid-Seventies played a major role in the creation of a Guild of Glass Engravers; the three pioneers of the 1930s have now become several hundred craft workers.

Retirement from local government in 1979 freed up more time and he wrote a book, Glass Engraving: lettering and design, for Batsford. Then came a very happy encounter with Sally Scott, the painter, engraver and sandblaster, which led to a remarkable 14-year partnership in which his skills in lettering and heraldry were beautifully merged with her figurative work in a series of about 25 windows around Britain. As Laurence Whistler put it: "Sally gave his work wings."

Peace had a lifelong fascination with Eric Gill's inscriptions and had steadily accumulated information to upgrade Gill's brother Evan's catalogue. Shortly after I first met him as my future father-in-law he insisted that we went up together in the basket of a corporation cherry-picker that he had hired for the day to rub a 10ft long early Gill inscription high up a building in a busy Cambridge street. Eventually, 40 years of investigation was pulled together in the illustrated revised catalogue Eric Gill, the Inscriptions (1994). He then went on to write an autobiography for his family.

David Peace was a genial man, involved in many organisations and on many committees. He was immensely energetic and creative into his mid-eighties. He kept in close touch with a very wide circle of friends. Invidious as it may be to mention one, he had a special affinity with John Keatley whose imaginative Keatley Trust supported many of his ventures.

Peace and his wife had a house in North Wales which they loved deeply and to which they would retreat as often as possible.

David Davies