Beverley Nichols
Beverley Nichols was an English writer, playwright, and novelist whose work also extended into journalism, children's literature, horticulture, and acting.
Born in Bristol on 9 September 1898, Nichols received his education at Marlborough College and subsequently at Balliol College, Oxford. These formative years shaped a career that would encompass an unusually wide range of creative and intellectual pursuits, carried out entirely within the English language and under British citizenship.
Over the course of his working life, Nichols occupied several distinct professional roles simultaneously. As a journalist, he contributed to the public discourse of his era in prose. As a novelist and playwright, he worked across narrative and dramatic forms. He also wrote for younger readers, establishing a presence as a children's writer alongside his output for adult audiences. Beyond the literary sphere, he pursued horticulture with sufficient seriousness to be identified as a horticulturist in his own right, and he assembled a collection of art significant enough to earn him the designation of art collector. His work as an actor added yet another dimension to a career that resisted easy categorisation.
Nichols lived and worked through much of the twentieth century, a period that saw considerable change in British cultural and public life. He remained a citizen of the United Kingdom throughout, and his output in English spanned decades during which the literary marketplace shifted substantially. He died on 15 September 1983 in Kingston upon Thames, having outlived many of his contemporaries and having maintained his association with multiple creative disciplines across a long life.
The range of forms Nichols engaged with — fiction, drama, journalism, writing for children — reflects a career built on versatility rather than confinement to a single genre. His sustained interest in horticulture, pursued alongside his literary and theatrical activities, points to a consistent habit of working across the boundary between the written word and the physical world of gardens and natural cultivation. It is this breadth of engagement, across prose fiction, dramatic writing, periodical journalism, and children's literature, that characterises his long working life and distinguishes his contribution to twentieth-century English letters.
Quotes by Beverley Nichols
Beverley Nichols's insights on:
Where the piano is, there is one’s treasure, as far as I am concerned... nothing, surely, is more delightful than sitting down at the piano on a summer day, and playing Chopin or Debussy while the natural sunlight drifts over one’s shoulders through the vines outside, creating a filigree of shadow in the printed page... a shifting pattern of ghostly leaf and blossom that dances to the mood of the music.
There are a thousand ‘greatest’ melodies, just as there are a thousand ‘greatest’ poems and a thousand ‘greatest’ pictures, because there are a thousand moods in the mind of man when a certain note rings with the most clarity – when a certain design is most sharply silhouetted against the changing curtain of his mind.
Some people find importance in the photographs of those titanic mushrooms of atomic poison which are periodically exploded over the world’s deserts; I find greater importance in one very small mushroom which mysteriously springs up in the shadow of the tool-shed.
On and on we wander in these pages – and we never reach the point because, happily, there is no point to reach.
Why do insurance companies, when they want to describe an act of God, invariably pick on something which sounds much more like an act of the Devil? One would think that God was exclusively concerned in making hurricanes, smallpox, thunderbolts, and dry rot. They seem to forget that He also manufactures rainbows, apple-blossom, and Siamese kittens. However, that is, perhaps, a diversion.
They came on one of April’s most brilliant days – a day as sparkling as a newly-washed lemon... a day when even the shadows were a melange of blue and orange and jade, like the shadows that poured from the tipsy brush of Monet.
To dig one’s own spade into one’s own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?
The seed of a blue lupin will usually produce a blue lupin. But the seed of a blue-eyed man may produce a brown-eyed bore... especially if his wife has a taste for gigolos.
A garden is a place for shaping a little world of your own according to your heart’s desire.
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.