Deaths

We ask that you please keep Nicholas and his family in your prayers at this time. 

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Rest in eternal peace

Obituary: 

Nicholas Fitzherbert often quoted the former Abbot of Ampleforth, Herbert Byrne, who said: “I think one has to be prepared to start all over again, any number of times.” It was a sentiment Nicholas lived by with courage and determination as he overcame ill-health and personal hardship to help transform scores of young lives through his work as a Career Counsellor and Life Coach. Aged 57, he took a room in the Business Design Centre in Islington and advertised his services in the Yellow Pages, marking the start of a career which saw him advise more than 250 young people - his ‘alumni’. Many came from Goodenough College, a hall of residence for overseas post graduates of which he was a Governor for 29 years. Nicholas’s guidance and support, drawn from his own experience of adversity, including two redundancies, was often life-changing and he forged enduring friendships.

Dallas Leigh-Martine, a training adviser from New Zealand, met him in 1994 and described his help as follows: “I was £5,000 in debt, 12,000 miles from home but within 16 weeks I was offered four jobs through Nicholas.” When she married, Nicholas gave her away. Another alumnus, Georgie Vestey, wrote to him: “When we met all these years ago, you looked into my heart and my soul and saw a path for my career that even I had not seen.” 

Several of the qualities which made Nicholas such an effective Career Counsellor were in evidence at the very start of his professional life, in the army.  Aged 19 he joined the Coldstream Guards  as part of National Service and in the summer of 1953 he was selected to command the newly formed Assault Pioneer Platoon having attended a course on explosives with the Royal Engineers.  He moulded his lively collection of Guardsmen, several of whom had criminal records, into the pride of the battalion. On one famous occasion, he inadvertently silenced Field Marshal Montgomery when the latter appeared unexpectedly at battalion headquarters just as Nicholas’s platoon detonated a series of high explosives. Montgomery fulminated that he couldn't hear himself speak!

After the army, Nicholas worked for a small export company and persuaded the owner, Leonard Wadsworth, to give him a leave of absence to make a round-the-world trip, on the understanding he would establish contacts for the business. Thus, aged 26, long before taking a ‘gap year’ became fashionable, he worked his passage on a merchant ship to Australia and hitch-hiked across the country. In North Queensland he worked on a cattle station during the mustering season and in America visited 72 companies, cold calling the CEOs from public telephone boxes, securing several valuable contracts for Mr Wadsworth.

His greatest test was a redundancy in 1977, aged 44, from a City merchant bank where he had worked for 17 years managing pension funds. Overwork had resulted in illness but with the support of his wife, Terez, and demonstrating great perseverance and resilience he fought back and found his true calling in helping others.

Looking back over those years, he wrote: “In a way, all that had gone before served as preparation for this.” He is survived by Terez, to whom he was happily married for 49 years, children Elizabeth and Henry, and three grandchildren.