From Anne Hand:

I do have vivid memories of Nicholas as an undergraduate calmly typing away in the chaotic Cherwell office (the only one with his own typewriter, I think, and probably the only calm one).  Also in a coffee bar demonstrating how to pour cream on to Irish coffee and in the jukebox café on the green at Witney, arguing religion among the Coca Cola and jam doughnuts  that we survived on.  I remember too that when I worked on the Irish Times in Dublin during a summer vacation, Nicholas very kindly invited me to the races at The Curragh, knowing how much I liked horses.  In recent years, when several of us have been back in touch and reminiscing, it’s been so good to catch up with his background tales of the Irish Times, to have his book recommendations and to enjoy the cartoons he co-created for the FT. Many thanks for the link to the Irish Times article and its observation that almost all his career achievements developed from his contacts and friendships – a great tribute not only to his many skills and interests but to his kindness and sense of humour.

From Jan Mihell:

I have letters that I wrote home when I was at Oxford. I mentioned Nicholas in one of them - it may amuse you to read about the occasion, the night of April 30/ May 1 1959, which some of the Cherwell staff spent up the River Cherwell in a field, before punting back to Magdalen Bridge to hear the choir sing at the top of the tower.  This is what I wrote to my Mum. 'We  - John and Pete and David and Clive and Geoff and Nicholas and a recently-joined reporter who lives opposite me in college, and Lew and Mike, and three acquaintances of his who just came along went up river in 2 punts. Harrison dropped his bicycle lamp into the water, where it remained alight for several hours. Nicholas lost his whisky overboard. This was about eleven o'clock.

'We made a little fire. How splendid that sounds! The warm glow, the happy laughing faces, the leaping flames, the frying pan full of savoury food. Our fire was a very little one, and we didn't manage to light it successfully till half-past one. However, we cooked sausages and mushrooms and a sort of omelette, and awaited morning. It was at this point that someone stole one of our punts. We abstracted another that no one seemed to be using - unethical, but the thing was pretty waterlogged and might well have sunk had we not rescued it.

'Dawn was lovely, specially the birds. In the fine morning light we punted downstream - all except Pete and Lew, who fell in up to their necks and walked home. David and Geoff were wet up to the waist. The rest of us merely had numb feet. The choir sang very sweetly, there was a surge upstream of boats which hadn't spent all night out and the 'Cherwell' staff fought their way in the opposite direction to explain away to the punt owners the loss of a paddle and the unaccountable gain of a pole and to drink coffee before departing Witney and tutorialwards.' [ To Witney because it was Friday, press day. People usually went there by bus.] 

I was Jan Hay Scott on that May morning, and later I married the Geoff who got wet to his waist - actually while rescuing Pete, a polio victim who couldn't swim, who slipped when getting on to the crowded punt and sank amazingly fast. Geoff and Lew and David quickly pulled him out of the water, however, and a few years later Pete became editor of the Guardian. I censored the dangerous bit when writing home.

From John Harrison:

The journey to Witney was a twice-weekly trip (13 miles) which we used to have to make by bus (not car!) as Cherwell was printed there by the local newspaper. It took up a lot of our time but we all remember it fondly!

My own particular main memory of Nicholas is of his arrival in the paper’s office as a freshman in 1958 offering his services, quite smartly dressed as I recall and bringing his own typewriter, a much valued addition to the paper’s solitary one. He was obviously very able and clearly a potential editor as indeed he eventually became.

And you might be amused by the following which he sent me in an e-mail some time ago (which I’ll also send to the Cherwell centenary organisers):

“I struggle sometimes to find the future more interesting than the past. I very much admire the energy of some of our contemporaries like Peter Preston and Melvyn Bragg and David Dimbleby (who ran Isis the term I ran Cherwell). I stopped typing this for a moment to see on google if they have changed the name Isis to Nonterror Oxford Weekly but they haven't.

“I was interested in your comment about undergraduates not being allowed to spend much time on Cherwell nowadays. It was a quite extraordinary feat to produce it twice a week (manic and mad would be my words looking back). I remember Will Moore, my French tutor at St Johns saying to me one day 'I hope you are not spending more than half an hour a week on that paper'. I risked trial for academic perjury and said of course not. In reality I was struggling to find 30 minutes a week to devote to reading French and Spanish books, How Peter managed to be editor in the spring term and then get a good degree a few weeks later was an amazing feat. 

"I was very lucky that Dr Moore (who kept a close eye on me because he had given me an open scholarship under the illusion that I was truly absorbed by Moliere (his speciality subject) went off to America for the whole of my second year and my progress and lack of it were watched with pretty complete indifference by a tutor in St Peter's Hall (as it was then).  As I thought at the time, the experience on Cherwell was infinitely more useful to me later than the acquisition of more and more plotlines from European literature”.