Nicholas Nuttall

Sir Nicholas Keith Lillington Nuttall, 3rd Baronet (21 September 1933 – 29 July 2007) was the heir to the

Sir Nicholas was educated at Eton College and Sandhurst, and took a commission in the Royal Horse Guards in 1953. He played polo, and was an amateur jockey. On his own horse, Stalbridge Park, he won the Grand Military Gold Cup at Sandown Park in 1958, came second in 1959, then third in 1960, won again in 1961, and came second another time in 1962. He served in Cyprus during the Cyprus Emergency. By 1966, he was a major, in command of the Guards Independent Parachute Regiment. He resigned his commission in 1968, on the death of his mother, to take over the family firm. He held a party at Lowesby Hall in 1959, to celebrate the restoration of a painted ceiling by Antonio Verrio, and held a dance in tents at Lowesby in 1976, shortly before it was sold, emulating a party held by the Shah of Iran in the desert in 1972.

Nuttall supported the Labour government's Channel Tunnel project in the 1970s. The company was later involved in the construction of High Speed 1. The company was bought by Hollandsche Beton Groep (later HBG), a Dutch group, in 1978, and he emigrated shortly afterwards with his third wife, Miranda, moving to Lyford Cay, near Nassau, Bahamas, on New Providence there, although he kept a house in Chelsea. He became involved in marine conservation and founded the Bahamas Reef Environmental Educational Foundation (BREEF), almost single-handedly transforming local attitudes to maritime conservation. The Nassau Guardian lauded him after his death as a "prominent local environmentalist... at the forefront of a number of important marine conservation initiatives and environmental causes".

Family life

Nuttall married four times.

1. Caroline York, daughter of former Conservative Party MP Christopher York, on 20 December 1960. They had one son, Harry, and a daughter, Tamara; and divorced in 1971.
2. Julia Williamson, formerly Lady Patrick Beresford, daughter of Col. Thomas Cromwell Williamson, D.S.O., of Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex. Lord Patrick Beresford had been Sir Nicholas's
   Camilla Shand (now the Queen Consort) to her first husband Andrew Parker Bowles;^[2]
   they divorced in 1975.
3. Miranda Quarry (stepdaughter of Stormont Mancroft, 2nd Baron Mancroft and third wife of Peter Sellers; later second wife of Alexander Macmillan, 2nd Earl of Stockton
   ); they had three daughters: Gytha, Amber and Olympia (Amber married Alistair Gosling in December 2016).
4. Eugenie McWeeney, from
   Bahamas
   , clothing designer and sister of former Attorney-General of The Bahamas, Sean McWeeney QC ; they had a son, Alexander.

He died of lung cancer. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by Harry, his son from his first marriage.

Notes

References

• Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2007
• Obituary, The Times, 20 August 2007
• Sir Nicholas Nuttall dies, The Nassau Guardian
• Lundy, Darryl. "p. 12427". The Peerage.^{[unreliable source]}