Sir Neville Nicholls – An extraordinary man

‘Tis all a Chequerboard of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

When I heard of Neville’s death, this verse from the Rubaiy’at of Omar Khayyam came to mind and I reflected on how many of our generation have been put back into the closet recently. Neville and I have been friends for almost 80 years. We went through the lower forms of Harrison College together and he, his brother Courtney and I were three who were promoted to the Classical sixth form in 1948 and allowed to sit the Higher School Certificate after one year. Our master WD Isaacs referred to us as his babies, but that did not excuse us from the academic discipline applied to the rest of the class.

We both obtained Barbados Scholarships and I went to Mona while Neville went to Cambridge, and I would receive pictures of him sporting a pipe and punting on the river. He was a brilliant scholar and on return to Barbados after a short stint in Jamaica, made a stellar reputation for himself as a legal draftsman in the government service at the same time as colleagues such as Clifford Husbands and Oliver Brown were members of the government’s legal office. The late Sir Roy Marshall, no mean critic, referred to Neville as the finest legal draftsman he had ever met. In those years in Barbados our families were close as he and Yvonne started their family. From the government service he moved to the Caribbean Development Bank and in time became President and I read with pleasure many of the thoughtful addresses he gave on a wide range of Caribbean economic problems and development issues.

Our closest interaction since school began when he was appointed chair of the Cave Hill Campus Council of The University of the West Indies. UWI was not his alma mater but there was no one more committed to the idea and ideals which underpinned that institution. He wore the office of Chairman with dignity and his tenure accompanied the rapid physical and academic expansion of that campus. He was not given to grandiloquence but could be depended upon for a sound opinion given deliberately and dispassionately and derived from a firm grasp of the issues. In the upper councils of the UWI, his voice was one of reason and balance.

His was the life of a good public servant-dedicated in one role or another to promoting the social good in its many guises. He was economical in speech, but he could be eloquently passionate about his family, his work and cricket. His wife Yvonne was no mean talent herself and it was a joy to engage in vigorous conversation with them. He would admit willingly that her support was a major factor that allowed him to function at the level he did.

My wife Sylvan and I offer our condolences to his family and we hope they find some comfort in the fact that he lived a good life and leaves positive memories in the minds of the numerous people with whom he interacted as he played his many roles in public service. Destiny was kind to Neville and the many moves it made redounded to the public good. May he rest comfortably in its closet!