Sir Paul Nicholson, Lord Lieutenant of County Durham

Dec 14 2009 by Karen Dent, The Journal

He will forever be associated with Vaux but there is much more to Sir Paul Nicholson's life than the Sunderland brewery group. Karen Dent hears about the thrills and spills in both business and pleasure that have marked his career.

SIR Paul Nicholson nearly didn’t make it to the age of 71 and his current role as Lord Lieutenant of County Durham.

A small plane, thick clouds and a fuel tank holding less than it should almost cut him off in his prime.

Shortly after qualifying as a pilot, he and a girlfriend flew to visit friends in Spain in a trip marred by thunderstorms along the French coast and low clouds over the Pyrenees.

“I thought I could take off and climb out to sea then get above the clouds and set sail to the south of Spain,” he recalls.

“We got in the cloud and the next thing I saw, the cloud cleared and there was a mountain absolutely straight ahead.

“I spiralled up and then set off for the south and I very carefully checked the amount of fuel that I should have had and it was fine.

“But then my girlfriend suddenly pointed that the fuel gauges were reading empty and we still had about half an hour to go to get to Malaga.

“We eventually landed and the plane coughed and spluttered on the runway. But I was so concerned I had it checked and I found that this particular aircraft held four gallons less than it was supposed to.

“If one had crashed and disappeared in the southern Spanish mountains, they would just have said the silly fool had run out of fuel.”

It didn’t put him off – he flew for 30 years, including the Vaux company plane. He agrees he is possibly a bit of an adrenaline junkie.

“I can always stop a conversation when they say, ‘Did you ever ride?’ and I say, ‘Well, I did get round in the Grand National and I won the Foxhunters (run over the National fences at Aintree twice,” he said.

It happened in the early 1960s on a horse called Sea Knight, bought by his father to three-day event but who preferred racing.

“I remember coming into Becher’s and with him digging his toes in. However, we got round, about in time to win the next race,” said Sir Paul.

“I was absolutely dead scared before any race but in the National, the nerves of the other jockeys ... the atmosphere was thick with smoke in the changing room, you could hardly breathe.”

Although he enjoyed riding, he never considered becoming a professional jockey and joined Vaux after qualifying as a chartered accountant.

The Nicholsons’ involvement with the Sunderland brewer began with his grandfather’s marriage into the Vaux dynasty.

“There were two brothers who owned the brewery and he never was allowed to have any shares until the company went public in 1927,” Sir Paul said.

“He was a very distinguished man. He became a knight – Sir Frank Nicholson was certainly a name to conjure with in those days.

“The trouble with Vaux was that we weren’t a family business as such, we were family-managed and my grandfather, my father and myself were all the chairmen, but we only had about 2-3% of the shares. The original Vaux family had rather more.”

Sir Paul – knighted in 1993 for services to North East industry and the public – was also chief executive of the group, which included breweries, tenanted pubs and the Swallow Hotel chain.

Vaux closed 10 years ago after boardroom machinations destroyed a management buyout bid led by his brother Frank.

Although he refers to it as old history, he admits a certain bitterness about the way things ended.

“Over 1,000 employees lost their jobs who shouldn’t have. One was accused of being paternalistic. I think people who worked for Vaux felt a loyalty to the company that was stronger than working for just the Federation Brewery or something like that. There was a loyalty there to the family and a respect.

“That devastated people when it went. A lot of people were extremely sad. That made it worse in many ways that it might have been otherwise.

“If you go to Sunderland, there is a desert in the middle of it which is where the 14-acre site of the brewery was. Ten years on, it’s a spat between Tesco who own the site and want to build a superstore there and the town who don’t want a superstore there.

“I’ll never feel anything other than pretty bitter, and pretty angry about it. There are certainly one or two people that I don’t talk to. Anyhow, it’s 10 years past and I’ve certainly moved on.”

The inside story is told in Sir Paul’s book Brewer at Bay. But Vaux is just part of his tale; he has been embedded in the North East business community for decades.

Sir Paul chaired One North East’s predecessor, the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, was the first president of the combined North East Chamber of Commerce and is a former CBI regional chairman.

He said: “One North East is a good organisation but I think that the Northern Development Company probably achieved 90% of what One North East did at 10% of the cost.

“And I think that if a new government decides they don’t want regional development agencies, I hope that one will be able to – and maybe only behind the scenes – try to help get a new Northern Development Company going.

“That’s going to be needed; if we don’t have a regional development agency, we’ve got to have something.

“The main difference between One North East and the Northern Development Company is that the Northern Development Company was a bottom-up thing – we formed it, we appointed the board, we appointed the chairman, not the government – and chief executives.

“One North East is a top-down organisation – people, the board, are selected by whatever means the Government have and it is very much Government-controlled; we weren’t. We did rely on a lot of Government funding but we had an enormous amount of discretion.”