Sir Crispin Tickell's address at the memorial service on 27 June 2003
You may wonder why I of all people should have been
asked to deliver this address. Many of you will have known
Max Nicholson better than I did, and indeed for longer. He and
I first met with Julian Huxley, certainly some time ago, but I
could hardly have imagined then that I would be addressing you
on this occasion. For me it is simply an honour, and I warmly
thank those who invited me.
Max Nicholson was a giant in his time, with a compelling
combination of idealism, imagination, energy, and managerial
ability to put his ideas — as he once said, an ever turning
Catherine Wheel — into practical effect. How appropriate that
towards the end of his life this classic example of Renaissance
man should have created the New Renaissance Group to drive
forward thinking which he believed neglected by that sluggish
and stumbling body politic which is our society.
I suppose that he will first be remembered for his work on
conservatioh and the environment. As a child he kept notes on
the birds, mammals, reptiles and plants he saw on walks. I like
his observation, when aged 13, that “the starling often perches
on the back of sheep”; and still more that “248 rabbits counted
on walk”. Some walk! In my own childhood I remember
counting rats on a rubbish dump on my way to school, but I
could never manage more than a dozen.
As a young man Max explored both Greenland and the
Amazonian rain forest and won recognition as an authority on
birds. This was the passion of a lifetime, with books,
chairmanships, and presidencies (not least that of the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds) to show for it. But he also
helped create the World Wildlife Fund, the International
Institute for Environment and Development, and Earthwatch
Europe; and he participated in — if not dominated — most of the
environmental organizations and movements of his time. The
diversity of life, with our need to cherish it, was at the core of
his being.
For this brief address I searched for some underlying
theme of activity. It was not easy in someone of such variegated
talent. I think perhaps it was mostly a challenge to the current
conventional wisdom, or the Establishment as he called it, to
which he joined creative ability to put forward alternative ideas,
policies and actions. He himself thought that this tradition of
dissent went pack to his Irish birthplace. Of course his views on
the environment were revolutionary in their day. But even
before the second world war, he was active in protest on a wider
front. Through the Week End Review, at Political and
Economic Planning, and in articles, broadsbeets and reports, he
joined in what he called “a most comprehensive check up on the
state of the nation and on many of its main industries, public
services and supporting activities”, and found it seriously
wanting.
During the war, he rose steadily in a hieracrchy of key
administrative jobs, including in the Ministry of Shipping and
War Transport, in which, as he wrote, “the manifest
incompetence and partial disloyalty of the Establishment to the
nation opened a vast vacuum for new principles, new methods
and new leadership.” Unfortunately circumstances later
enabled the Establishment to crawl back out of its war time
bunkers and regain the levers of power”. But not completely,
and not without a fight. Between 1945 and 1951 he became one
of Herbert Morrison’s right-hand men, and was responsible for
steering through the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, the
1949 Act which set up national parks and the Nature
Conservancy (including Sites of Special Scientific Interest), and
the organization of the Festival of Britain in 1951.
Thereafter he switched his formidable energies to more
directly environmental causes, both national and international.
His campaigning was conducted with an ex-civil servant’s skill
and guile through the organizations he chaired or guided, and in
such pioneering books as “The Misgovernment of Modem
Britain” in 1970. He became directly involved in the promotion
of the Silver lubilee of 1977, and its wide ranging success was
partly his doing. He was not universally popular, especially not
among the misgovernors. As he wrote “I entered the 1980s
feeling once more that I had the great Beast in my sights”. No
wonder the Beast did not like it. Sometimes the Beast managed
to frustrate him, but often he outsmarted the Beast.
In no way was Max an arrongant man, who, like some other with a mission, ignored others. He was able to listen as well as to speak, and to dream as well as to think. The problem was that his mid worked more quickly than those of many other people who didn't enjoy being left behind. At root he had a deep humility about himself. He once wrote:
“1 feel myself as probably no more than an ephemeral
vehicle, one of countless millions, responding clumsily
and ineptly to inspirations and signals partiy from my
fellows and partly from some disembodied source,
committing between birth and death countless follies,
misdeeds and errors, and also some remarkable creative
acts, able to radiate influence and persisting ideas. We are
children of this lovely and generous planet earth.. .As W H
Auden put it, we “can live because we have lived.."
I add to this remarkable statement some words from
Timothy Ferris in “Seeing in the Dark”
. . . . . . . . .when darkness is falling for good, it is well to have in
mind, in addition to human love and loss, and of the
natural splendours of this world — of birdsong at dawn, the
roaring spray of the surf, the sweet smell of the air in the
eye of a hurricane, the workings of bees in the throats of
wildflowers — a few memories of the other worlds as well.
If you have seen plasma arches rising off the edge of the
Sun, yellow dust storms raging on Mars, angry red lo
emerging from the shadow of Jupiter, the golden rings of
Saturn, the green dot of Uranus and the blue of Neptune,
the glittering star fields of Sagittarius, and the delicate
tendrils connecting inter-acting galaxies, have watched
auroras and meteors writing silent signatures in the sky —
if in short you have seen not only this world but something
of the other worlds too — well, then, you have lived.
