Nicholls Cecil Raymond

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Biografie:
Cecil Raymond Nicholls 1911-1986
Cecil Raymond Nicholls (or Charles, as he was known to his friends) was a regular officer in the Royal Engineers who entered the Corps with a civil engineering qualification, having graduated at Birmingham University. He began rock-climbing while in his teens, and soon became a member of the Midland Association of Mountaineers. In the mid-1930s he began his alpine career, and in 1935 was among those in Zermatt who were under scrutiny by Frank Smythe for inclusion in the team for the 1936 Everest expedition. Among the climbs he did in that summer were the Dent Blanche by the Viereselsgrat, the traverse from the Margherita hut on Monte Rosa to Zermatt by the Liskamm, Castor, Pollux and the Breithorn, the Swiss-Italian traverse of the Matterhorn, the Monch by the Nollen, and the Jungfrau which he descended by the Guggi route. Though already a competent climber and an ideal member of any climbing party through his quiet imperturbability, cheerfulness and helpfulness, he was not chosen for the Everest expedition. Probably he was considered to be still too inexperienced.
In 1937 he was in Chamonix, and there he suffered the injury which was soon to put an all too early end to his climbing career. He was one of a party of five traversing the Drus when, at a place on the Grand Dru called “La Pendule”, a holdless slab which was crossed with the aid of a piton, he fell and dislocated his shoulder. Fortunately there were two doctors in the party and his shoulder was quickly put back. As it was still early in the day the rest of the party climbed to the top of the Grand Dru and returned to get him down the mountain, an operation greatly assisted by Charles's uncomplaining fortitude in spite of the considerable pain he must have been enduring.
Next year he was climbing again in the Alps and did the Rochefort ridge, the frontier ridge of Mont Blanc, and the descent of the Brenva ridge.
In 1938 he was elected to the Alpine Club, and in early 1940 he temporarily resigned his captaincy in the Royal Engineers to become a sergeant in the Fifth Scots Guards, a skiing unit destined for Scandinavia which never got there, owing to the swift occupation of Norway by the Germans. It was at this time that he put his shoulder out again when an Army truck which he was mounting suddenly started off, and thereafter his sporting activites were devoted mainly to mountain walking, shooting and fishing.
During the war Charles commanded a Field Company in northern Europe after D-day, and his subsequent career in the Army took him, among other places, to Quetta and Malaya and to Gibraltar, where he was Chief Engineer.
He leaves a widow and a son.
Ashley Greenwood
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 92, 1987, Seite 307



Geboren am:
1911
Gestorben am:
1986