Sir Nicholas Nuttall

Aug 9 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

SIR Nicholas Nuttall, third baronet, who has died, aged 73, of cancer, was the last of his family to be directly linked with the great construction company Edmund Nuttall, which built two of Merseyside’s most famous 20th-century creations.

It was Sir Nicholas’s grandfather, Edmund, the first baronet, who steered the company on to national projects and great success as the main contractor for Liverpool’s Royal Liver Building, in 1911, and the first Mersey Tunnel in 1928-34. This expertise gained from Queensway in tunnelling techniques paved the way for association with the Tyne, Medway and Dartford tunnels and, more recently, with a section of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.

The business was founded in Manchester in 1865 by Sir Nicholas’s great-great grandfather to undertake heavy engineering in north- west England for railway developments and projects such as the Manchester Ship Canal.

By the time of Sir Edmund’s leadership of the company, the Nuttalls were enjoying a very comfortable lifestyle and Sir Nicholas indulged in an elegant, sybaritic existence which even four wives and three divorces failed to dent significantly.

A soldier and horseman as a young man, he was later a devoted conservationist of the marine environment in the Bahamas, where he was a tax exile, successively with wives number three and four.

Never a hands-on executive of Edmund Nuttall Ltd, he followed its affairs very closely, especially after leaving the Army in 1968 (apparently a departure hastened by his many amorous adventures). However, he was an enthusiast for the Labour government’s Channel Tunnel project of 1974, which was later cancelled.

But equally, infuriated with the same government’s tax and industrial policies, he sold up and left the UK. As a result, Edmund Nuttall Ltd was bought by Dutch construction company Hollandsche Beton Group in 1978.

With his third wife, Miranda Mancroft (formerly married to actor Peter Sellers), he settled in the Bahamas becoming deeply involved in the protection of the island’s reefs and cays, threatened by over-fishing and crass development. Such was his expertise that he lectured widely on conservation.

Sir Nicholas Nuttall, engineering heir and conservationist; born, September, 21, 1933, died, July 29, 2007