Gordon Aston was one of the leading quantity surveyors of his generation. Born in Dublin, he was educated at Sandford Park with distinguished schoolmates such as Owen Sheehy Skeffington and Conor Cruise O'Brien - whose ability to express unpopular and unfashionable opinions he shared.
Articled in 1932 to the long-established quantity surveying practice of Pattersons & Kempster, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers for the war years and served in Greece. One of his tasks there was to supervise the embarkation of thousands of White Russians to what he later discovered was their mass slaughter by the Bolsheviks - an episode for which he never forgave Harold MacMillan, who was the political director in Greece at the time.
After the war, he returned to Dublin and in 1947 was invited to return to Patterson & Kempster as a partner. In the year before he returned the firm's turnover was £3,041; in the year after he joined, it increased to £6,406.
Gordon Aston was to remain with Patterson & Kempster, later PKS, until his retirement in 1982. In that time he helped build it into one of Ireland's leading practices. He was always an innovator and with one or two colleagues led the profession into cost planning and cost control despite strenuous opposition from his more conservative colleagues, who preferred the then certainty of measuring Bills of Quantities - a task that will soon be replaced by computers. Gordon Aston was intensely interested in the legal and contractual aspects of building and practised as a chartered arbitrator in a number of significant disputes.
He was elected chairman of the Irish branch of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors in 1954/55 (now the Society of Chartered Surveyors) and took the lead in planning the RICS conference in Dublin that year. Unfortunately he missed the festivities, as he was rushed to hospital with appendicitis the day before the event.
A keen cricketer in his youth, his real sport was golf and his claim to fame was to beat Joe Carr in the West of Ireland Championships. A quintessential Portmarnock man, he was elected captain and later trustee of what he regarded as the only links in Ireland.
Widely respected in Dublin commercial life, he was appointed to the boards of Merchants Warehousing and Dublin Artisans Dwellings and served as chairman of both companies.
Apart from Portmarnock, his other club was the Kildare Street and University Club, where he was a member of distinction, respected and feared by those whom he crossed at the members' table, the snooker table or at the bar. He was elected an honorary member of the club in 1995.
Gordon Aston was a true professional. A man of integrity whose word was his bond, he was widely respected by his friends and colleagues, though many of the younger ones, or those less able to cope with his acerbic wit, sometimes found him daunting. A distinguished figure striding across St Stephen's Green with his brown trilby, he had a military air until recent years when illness cramped his style - though his brain and critical faculties lasted a lot longer.
Gordon was always his own man, whether it was forcing Charles Haughey, then Taoiseach, to reverse up the drive they shared, driving with an expertise that assumed that every other road user had been trained by Stirling Moss, or - his final gesture - arriving 30 minutes late for his own funeral.
In many ways his children fulfilled all his dreams. As a surveyor he was an architect manque and was proud that Michael became a real architect. His legal talents were reborn in Tony and his expertise in medicine (Gordon was an "expert" in many topics) was fulfilled by his son-in-law George and daughter Susan, who nursed him with great care and love in his difficult final months after his loved wife Margaret's unexpected death.
Gordon Aston, surveyor, arbitrator, golfer, clubman, husband and father, was a unique person from a generation that spawned many characters. He will be sorely missed.