Today marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Professor Herbert Nicholas – yet another Merthyr boy who worked hard to make it to the top of his profession.
Herbert George Nicholas was born on 8 June 1911 in Treharris. He was the youngest of seven children born to Rev William D Nicholas, minister of Bethel Chapel, and his wife Mary (née Warren), daughter of Samuel Warren, one of the foremost businessmen in Treharris, who opened Warren’s Drapery in Perrott Street.
At an early age, Herbert contracted rheumatic fever, which prevented him from attending school until he was 11. During this time he was educated at home by his eldest sister Evelyn, who had become a teacher. When he became well enough to attend school, Evelyn arranged for him to attend a small school in Cardiff run by a remarkable deaf lady, Miss Maud Humphries. Having travelled back and forth to Cardiff daily for three years, Herbert won a scholarship to the prestigious Mill Hill School in London. Mill Hill School was set up in 1807 by merchants and ministers from non-conformist backgrounds in order to provide a place of learning for the boys from their communities, as the “ancient” public schools at this time required all their pupils to belong to the Church of England.
Following his, not altogether happy, days at Mill Hill, Herbert won a place at New College, Oxford to read Greats. For the whole of his time at Oxford, his sisters supported him financially. The sums spent on him were carefully noted by Herbert however, and his sisters were duly repaid later. He graduated in 1934 with first-class degree.
The following year, Herbert acquired a Commonwealth Scholarship to travel to America to study history at Yale University. Originally concentrating on 17th Century history, he became more and more fascinated by contemporary American history, and he developed a huge admiration for the policies of President Franklin D Roosevelt. Upon his return to Britain in 1937, having managed to live off earnings for occasional articles he wrote as a freelance journalist for several months, he accepted a job lecturing in 19th Century History at Exeter College in Oxford.
Having spent two very happy years at Exeter College, the idyll was cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War. Classified as unfit for military service due to his bout of rheumatic fever as a child, Herbert joined the American Division of the Ministry of Information, where he had, as he later wrote: ‘…an indecently enjoyable war. I vastly enjoyed the work which was a natural extension of my academic interests, I had the company of singularly agreeable colleagues….’
In 1944, Herbert was elected as a fellow of Exeter College, and in 1946, following the cessation of hostilities, he returned to his post at the college. In 1948 he published his first book ‘The American Union. A short history of the USA’. In 1951 he published his only book about a British topic ‘The British General Election of 1950’.
That same year, he was invited back to New College to take over the position of tutorial fellow in politics. Although holding fellowships in other colleges (Exeter and Nuffield), New College would remain his base. In 1959 he published ‘The United Nations as a Political Institution’, which would eventually be published in five separate editions. In 1969 he was elected Rhodes Professor of American History and Institutions at Oxford, and in the same year he was elected to the British Academy, becoming vice-president in 1975-6.
Soon after his election as Rhodes Professor, he moved to Headington to look after his elderly sisters Evelyn and Doris, devoting nearly all of his time to their welfare. During these years he did find the time however, to write two more books – ‘The Nature of American Politics’ (1980) and ‘Washington Despatches, 1941-45 (1981). The first of these books is still used prominently in University courses on both side of the Atlantic.
When Evelyn died in 1987 (Doris having died previously), Herbert returned to college life, delighting friends, colleagues and ex-pupils with his sharp wit, punning one-liners and gifts as a raconteur. His favourite story being of how, in 1950, he, slight and bespectacled, together with his middle-aged schoolmistress sister, went with his pupil, Stansfield Turner, later a US admiral and head of the CIA, to hear a speech by the general secretary of the Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, who was fighting for a seat in South Wales. For their parts they found themselves denounced in the Daily Worker as ‘a bunch of American rowdies with their gangster’s moll trying to wreck the meeting.’ Most importantly, though, he never forgot his roots in Treharris, and spoke fondly of his youth there.
Herbert’s activities were curtailed when he suffered a stroke in 1991, but he recovered sufficiently to still be a major part of New College until his death on 3 July 1998 at the age of 87.