The last person to see Sir Nicholas Wall alive was the nurse on the night shift at his care home.
The man who was once the most senior family law judge in the country seemed in good humour when she gave him his medication with a cup of tea and left him reading a book in his armchair. When she returned a few hours later she found his bed empty and a shadow on the wall. He had hanged himself.
Yesterday an inquest was told that the distinguished former president of the family division killed himself, having “lost the will to live” after having a rare form of dementia diagnosed.
Sir Nicholas, 71, a grandfather and father of four, left two letters for his family, in which he said he had “no hope for the future” now that his deteriorating condition meant that any hope of returning home had gone.
Acting Detective Sergeant Robert Grieve, of Kent police, said that in the letter addressed to his wife, Margaret, Sir Nicholas explained that he had lost the will to live and he would not get better and that Lady Wall had a life to live. He said his time was over, it was nobody’s fault and he respected what she had done for him.
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In the other letter, Sir Nicholas said he had no hope for the future. He feared the loss of his memory, and was struggling to accept that the rest of his days would be spent in a care home.
In it, “he said his condition will deteriorate. He valued the help and support he’d received from his family but felt he could not bond with them at this point. He felt his death was imminent, and has pushed close friends and family away because of this.”
Sir Nicholas, who was regarded as one of the most distinguished family lawyers of his generation, became president of the family division in 2010 but was forced to retire on health grounds two years later.
He had been suffering for several years from undiagnosed fronto-temporal dementia, an uncommon form of dementia sometimes referred to as Pick’s disease, that affects the front and sides of the brain, and can cause changes in personality as well as problems with behaviour, language and control of emotions. The diagnosis came only a few months before he was found dead in his room at Emily Jackson House care home in Sevenoaks, Kent, on February 17.
An inquest at the Archbishop’s Palace in Maidstone was told that a nurse, Mary Besslee, had visited his room on the ground floor of the care home with a cup of tea and his medication at about 10.30pm.
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She said he made a joke to her about being late and smiled, and that he seemed serene when she left him, reading alone. His cause of death was recorded as suspension, with a secondary cause listed as fronto-temporal dementia.
Recording a conclusion of suicide, Roger Hatch, northwest Kent senior coroner, said it was clear from the discovery of the note that it was Sir Nicholas’s intention to take his own life.
Sir Nicholas was born in Clapham, southwest London, in 1945. He studied English and law at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met his future wife Margaret Sydee, who was studying English at Newnham College.
She survives him, along with their daughters, Imogen, a humanitarian; Emma, a lecturer in infectious diseases at UCL; and Rosalind, a senior civil servant; and their son Simon, who works for the Courts Service.
For his death notice in The Times, his wife chose a verse from Tithonus, the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson about an old man who made the mistake of asking for eternal life without eternal youth, and finds himself cursed with immortality. “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall/ The vapours weep their burthen to the ground/ Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath/ And after many a summer dies the swan.” Sir Nicholas was a poetry lover himself, once quoting Philip Larkin to the parties in a divorce. “They f*** you up your mum and dad,” he said.
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Profile: Sir Nicholas Wall
Sir Nicholas Wall was one of the country’s most distinguished family judges and in a statement following his death, the Family Law Bar Association described him as “a compassionate judge who thought and cared deeply about the outcome of his cases”.
He was called to the Bar in 1969 after graduating from Cambridge University and was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1988. He became a recorder in 1990 and then a judge of the High Court family division in April 1993. He worked at the employment appeal tribunal and then the administrative court before being promoted to the Court of Appeal in January 2004.
In 2011, he said a “live-in lovers” law would protect women in long-term relationships from losing their home and income in a break-up and said he could “see no good arguments against no-fault divorce”. A father to three daughters and a son, he was also a feminist, resigning from the Athenaeum club in London over its decision not to allow female members.