Wherever he travelled — and he covered most of the globe — Francis Nichols was interested in helping and encouraging the people he met. In central Africa, in the early Sixties, he became an expert in sexing Tung trees, which need to be planted alongside each other in order to reproduce. Crucial to the economy, since their crushed nuts are used to make varnish, it is nevertheless notoriously hard to tell male and female Tung trees apart. Nichols developed an infallible technique in distinguishing the sexes.
In the West Indies, he took an interest in the role of oranges in the Jamaican economy, and wrote a definitive book on this hitherto neglected subject.
He brokered mining deals for a multinational company in South America, and sold prefabricated houses in tornado-ravaged parts of the Caribbean. He worked with victims of leprosy in Hyderabad and helped to secure £500,000 of lottery money for the charity Lepra, going on to supervise rehabilitation projects in the state of Orissa, where he cycled 400 miles across the desert to raise funds.
Perhaps his most unorthodox venture was into Zen meditation, which he took up with enthusiasm late in life. At the age of 80, he started a master’s degree in the traditions of yoga and meditation at the School of Oriental and African Studies, working under a Canadian Catholic nun called Sister Elaine. A dedicated prison visitor, he briefly taught meditation at a young
offenders’ institute in Suffolk, though it was one of the least popular courses on offer, and ended abruptly when participants picked up the cushions they were sitting on and started throwing them at other inmates.
Undaunted, Nichols stuck with meditation up to the point of his own death. He used to say that if you were a Christian, Zen would make you a better Christian, and if you were a Buddhist, Zen would make you a better Buddhist.
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Francis Nichols was born in 1932 into a diplomatic family, and spent much of his childhood in Rome, Prague and the Hague. His father was the British ambassador to the Czech government, first in exile in London, later in Prague, and the Netherlands. While in Prague, his mother sometimes smuggled jewels in the diplomatic bag for old aristocratic families desperate to get out of the country, and on one occasion escorted a young child out of Czechoslovakia, helping him to settle in Britain.
Nichols was sent to Cothill preparatory school in Oxfordshire, but was evacuated to the US during the war, returning to Europe in 1943 in a Portuguese flagged ship, which kept its lights blazing for the voyage, so that U-boats could see it was neutral. He was flown to Britain on the last leg of the journey from Lisbon airport and remembered seeing a German aircraft bearing the swastika, waiting to take off in front of them.
Educated at Winchester College and Oxford, he left with a third-class honours degree in politics, philosophy and economics. However, he did win a scholarship enabling him to do a master’s degree in economics at Yale.
It was at Oxford that he first met Maureen Cleave, later to become a journalist, and biographer of the Beatles, though they did not get to know each other properly until the 1960s. They were married in Sligo, Ireland, in 1966; the Beatles sent them a congratulatory telegram on their wedding day. Cleave was a particularly close friend of John Lennon’s and supposedly the inspiration for the song Norwegian Wood, but she elected not to introduce the 6ft 3in Nichols to the Fab Four as they did not take kindly to people who were taller than them.
After National Service (during which he represented his regiment at skiing, and was part of the ceremonial guard at Queen Mary’s funeral in 1953), he became an economist with the Colonial Development Corporation. He was sent to Barbados, British Guiana and Jamaica, where he was seconded to the University College of the West Indies, and wrote his book on the importance of orange cultivation. He also encountered corruption and remembered being greeted by an official with the words, “Good morning Mr Nichols, and where is my £100,000?”
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From 1961 to 1962 he lived in the Central African Federation — Southern and Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi). Based mainly in Salisbury, he developed his skill in sexing Tung trees, but also threw himself into helping local populations to develop their own agriculture. Later, rather to his surprise, at a dinner hosted by his father, he found himself being toasted by Marshal Tito. Returning to Britain after his father’s death, he worked as the economic adviser for the Country Landowners’ Association, then joined the Anglo-American Mining Company in South America; he and Maureen divided their time between Brazil and Peru, where the second of their three children was born.
They finally settled at the family home, Lawford Hall on the Essex- Suffolk border, where Nichols worked as an arable farmer. However, his travelling never ended and he took up the cause of Lepra, the charity working to improve the lives of leprosy victims. He was the principal writer of Lepra’s funding proposal to the lottery, which donated £500,000, coinciding with the children’s television programme Blue Peter organising fundraising events in schools, and allowing the charity to expand its operations.
He not only rode by bike across the Orissan desert to raise money, but drove from India through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, where he tried to sell his Land Rover to the king of Afghanistan; the deal fell through when the king announced he wanted a larger vehicle.
He rode on horseback through the mountains of Turkmenistan and Georgia and went trekking in Tibet, where his group inadvertently strayed across the border into China; the suspicions of Chinese soldiers were allayed by Nichols’ amiable reassurances and they took the group back to their barracks for supper.
A man of good humour and famous hospitality, he prided himself on his cooking and would write out menus for elaborate five-course dinners for his children on their birthdays, along with different wines for each course. Sadie, the eldest of their children, is a drama therapist; Dora runs a livery stables at Lawford, while Bertie is a farmer.
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Nichols was happy to settle down as a farmer in Essex and hand-rear orphaned lambs, keeping them warm in old wine boxes in front of the Aga. His enthusiasm for Zen meditation never waned, and it sustained him during a long and protracted final illness.
Francis Nichols, naturalist and traveller, was born on October 18, 1932. He died on June 21, 2015, aged 82