Former Newport provost Randolph Webster has died, aged 87.
Mr Webster, who was also a former computing science lecturer at Abertay University, was born in Dollar, Clackmannanshire, into a family of artists.
His father, Robert Bruce Webster, and mother, Elizabeth, were watercolour artists.
He had an older sister, Lorna, who also became an artist and went on to study at Edinburgh College of Art.
Mr Webster attended Dollar Academy and then George Watson’s College in Edinburgh before going on to do a BSc in physics at Edinburgh University.
During the war he joined the Royal Air Force where he become a meteorologist.
In the RAF he was stationed in Saigon, then a part of French Indo-China and also Marseille.
On the way to the Far East he had a near-death experience when the plane he was travelling in was caught in a lightning storm and was so badly damaged by the time it landed at a Mediterranean airbase that it was pushed into the sea as unsalvageable.
In Marseille he learned to speak colloquial French, which he used to practice later when the ”Onion Johnnies” (as they were then called) came on their bicycles to sell their wares around the houses in Newport.
He returned to Edinburgh after the RAF and his interest in meteorology led him to the subject of his doctorate, which was regarding the electrical effects in trees during thunderstorms.
While at Edinburgh University he met Nina Davidson, originally from North Uist and the Isle of Skye, who was teaching in Edinburgh and they were married in 1951 at St George’s West Church by the Rev Murdo Ewan McDonald.
In 1952 the couple moved to Newport and Mr Webster took up a post as a lecturer in physics at the College of Technology in Dundee.
The couple had three children Ralph, Rae and Renee.
Mr Webster was the provost of Newport from 1971 to 1974, and the provost’s lamp still stands outside the family home.