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John Macdonald Nicolson (1869 – 1944) was a passionate gardener, and it was likely the extensive garden that attracted him to Winterbourne when it came up for sale in 1925. He was responsible for some of the garden’s most popular features, including the Japanese bridge and tea house, and the pergola. In this article, archives volunteer Sue Tungate and curator Henrietta Lockhart explore his life.
Nicolson was born in Liverpool in 1869. His grandparents, John and Janet Nicolson, lived on a farm at Kilmuir on the Isle of Skye and were Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian crofters. The large Nicolson family subsisted on a small plot of five to 15 acres and supplemented their income by gathering kelp, which was used as fertiliser. According to the 1851 Scottish census, John and Janet had at least seven children.
Highland crofters had a hard time in the mid-nineteenth century, with absentee landlords trying to bribe or force them off the land; the constant threat of starvation when the potato crop failed as it did in 1850; and the collapse of the kelp industry (which was supplanted by artificial fertilisers in the 1850s). Many crofters left for the United States, Canada, or England, including some of John and Janet’s children.
John Nicolson Junior, born in 1837, went south to seek work. In 1861 he was a drapers’ assistant in Sheffield, where he met his future wife Fanny, a dressmaker. The couple moved to Liverpool before relocating to Ladywood, Birmingham. John continued to work as a tailor and draper, and it is likely that his wife Fanny used her dressmaking skills to help him.
This interest in textiles was passed on to John and Fanny’s eldest son. Winterbourne’s John Macdonald Nicolson, born in 1869, was apprenticed to the wholesale drapery firm J. Walter Clark, and later worked for Frederick Bell, who also ran a Birmingham wholesale drapery company. Nicolson married Frederick’s sister Blanche Bell in 1895 and, five years later, he became his brother-in-law’s business partner. When Frederick Bell died in 1904, John Macdonald Nicolson became managing director of Bell & Nicolson.
Bell & Nicolson grew from small Victorian beginnings to one of the largest textile distribution companies in the country. It supplied hundreds of small shopkeepers who were the main source of clothing, drapery, and household goods for most people in the first half of the twentieth century. Small shop keepers would visit one of Bell & Nicolson’s warehouses, or be visited by one of their commercial travellers, to place orders, which were then delivered in one of the company’s distinctive olive-green vans.
John Macdonald Nicolson studied American business methods and was instrumental in introducing modern techniques in retailing and distribution. Bell & Nicolson’s Cannon Street Warehouse was one of the largest blocks in Birmingham city centre and, by 1936, they owned Union Chambers, then the tallest building in Birmingham. Branches were progressively opened in Cardiff, Bristol, Nottingham, Stoke, Chester and Belfast. By the 1950s, the firm had expanded into furniture.
As an employer, John Macdonald Nicolson was an authoritarian but generous Victorian patron; he demanded loyalty, yet also took an interest in the day-to-day lives of his employees. He provided a works canteen, a health insurance scheme, sporting clubs and a pension scheme, which were all well ahead of their time. He was chairman and managing director of Bell & Nicolson for forty years. His grandson Colin remembered ‘…as a child being shown around the Warehouse and being introduced to almost Dickensian figures, who retailed in reverential tones their recollections of the golden age when The Governor walked the floors’. It was a lively and efficient workplace with a bustling atmosphere.
The memory of his Scottish grandparents stayed with Nicolson. He carried his grandmother’s maiden name, Macdonald, which he passed on to both of his sons, and he named two of his successive homes ‘Kilmuir’ after the family croft on the Isle of Skye. The first of these homes was in Forest Road, Moseley, and the second a substantial Arts and Crafts house in Amesbury Road, Moseley, which was built in 1904 (the same year as Winterbourne). This house, now listed, still retains the name ‘Kilmuir’ today.
There were other aspects of his Scottish ancestry which influenced Nicolson. His grandson Colin recalled ‘on Skye there is a magnificent castle, Dunvegan…and both my wife and myself agreed that the garden looked exactly like Winterbourne. A huge gunnera [giant rhubarb], the ferns, just the feel of the place…’
Nicolson loved the tropical gardens in the west of Scotland; once he bought Winterbourne in 1925, he set about recreating some of the features he had seen there. His gunnera still thrive by the stream today. Colin describes their importance to his grandfather:
‘These [gunnera] are very characteristic of the gardens that you get in the west of Scotland in the tropical gardens and…he’s often pictured alongside these enormous plants very proudly showing them off.’
Japanese design had been influencing British gardens since the nineteenth century, and Nicolson created a Japanese ambience by introducing the bridge and tea house. The bridge was installed by J. P. White of the Pyghtle Works in Bedford. Next to the tea house, Nicolson had blocks of Westmorland stone installed by Hazelwood Nurseries of Acocks Green in 1937. He had seen these blocks at an Alpine Garden Society display at Birmingham Botanical Gardens.
Pergolas were popular features in Arts and Crafts gardens, and the ideas of famous garden designer Gertrude Jekyll may have influenced Nicolson’s introduction of a pergola across the bottom of the lower lawn. The line of Irish yews that divide the two lawns was also put in by Nicolson and adds definition and structure to the garden. Nicolson pursued his passion for alpine plants at Winterbourne, creating the scree garden which mimics the conditions at the bottom of mountain ranges, and commissioning several glasshouses. The glasshouses have all since been replaced, but the current ones still stand on a similar footprint to Nicolson’s
The lych gate was one of the last features to be introduced by Nicolson. As he grew older, he needed a sheltered seat to rest during his walks around the garden. Two metal hooks in the door frame once supported a swing for his grandchildren.
As his grandson Colin points out, Nicolson wanted others to be able to enjoy his garden:
‘…he was very keen to use the gardens as a facility for social events…he didn’t want them to be his own private domain.’
The garden was the setting for wedding receptions for his son John Macdonald (known as Donald) in 1926, and for the head gardener’s son. Nicolson was also the first to open the garden to the public. Open days were regularly advertised in the press, which raised money for local charities, including the General Hospital. For some of these events, Nicolson invited the band of the Scots Guards and Scottish music hall artists to perform on his lawns.
From all accounts, John Macdonald Nicolson was a formidable figure to his dying day, who inspired a certain awe and reverence in his family who always referred to him as ‘the Governor’. Nicolson rode in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and employed a fleet of servants to run the household and care for the garden, many of which stayed with him for years. He kept tight control over money matters and retained many of the characteristics of a Victorian pater familias. At the dinner table, no one sat down until the Governor arrived or spoke ‘til he had spoken.
Both Nicolson’s sons were employed in the family business. Colin was keen on cars and motorcycles and was pictured with two of his cars outside Winterbourne in 1930. Neither son was keen to inherit the house with its labour-intensive garden. So, in view of Winterbourne’s proximity to the expanding University of Birmingham campus, the house was left to the University in Nicolson’s will, with the proviso that the garden be preserved ‘in something like its present form’. Partly thanks to Nicolson’s foresight, the garden’s beautiful original features were indeed retained, and his vision of an oasis that could be enjoyed by the community has been fulfilled beyond anything that he could have imagined.
As Nicolson’s grandson recalled, ‘the garden was his great love’. Nicolson asked that his ashes should be scattered at Winterbourne, and a memorial to him can be seen on one of the rocks next to the Japanese tea house.
You can find out more about John Macdonald Nicolson and his legacy in our exhibition ‘The Evolution of a Garden’, which can be accessed through the door next to the gift shop. He is also featured in a display on the first floor of the house. Nicolson’s contribution to the garden will be highlighted in new garden interpretation panels, due to be installed this year.
