young people in an unsatisfactory care system. Nicholas was appointed as the President of the Family Division in 2010. His biggest achievement in this role was to persuade the judiciary to greater enforcement of the Children Act (1989), which put the welfare of children at the centre of cases. Sadly his tenure was curtailed by having to retire early on medical grounds in December 2012 with stress and depression, but he was later diagnosed with a rare form of dementia. At Cambridge, he met his future wife, Margaret Sydee, who was studying English at Newnham College. After they married, three daughters followed, Imogen, Emma and Rosalind, and finally one son, Simon. With four important women in his life, Nicholas was a feminist. He resigned from the Athenaeum Club over its then decision not to allow female members. He was also non-materialistic and uninterested in networking with the powerful, preferring days at home in his Clapham townhouse in an old pair of cords and a tatty jumper. His one extravagance was Glyndebourne which he said was as “near to nirvana on Earth that you could find on a sunny July day”. His other passion was collecting and re-binding antiquarian books, particularly Francis Bacon and Shakespeare. He hanged himself in his room at a care home in Sevenoaks having lost the will to live after his diagnosis with a rare neurological disease called fronto temporal lobe dementia that had only recently been diagnosed. He is survived by Margaret and all of their four children. Obituaries were published in many newspapers and this obituary is based on several of those.
Giles Adrian Waterfield [First Dulwich Picture Gallery Director, 1979-96] 24.07.1949 – 05.11.2016 Giles Waterfield was born in Bramley, Surrey, spent his childhood in France and Geneva. His father worked for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and then as a scientific adviser to the British Embassy in Paris. Giles was educated at Eton and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read English, and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he specialised in 17th and 18th century architecture. After a few years in Brighton, at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, and then as Education Services Officer at the Royal Pavilion, he was appointed as the first Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery. The Gallery is an architectural masterpiece that still sits quietly on extensive lawns, was designed by Sir John Soane as a series of interlinking rooms illuminated naturally through skylights, and was the first purpose- built art gallery in Britain, opened in 1814. The gallery was hit by a flying bomb in July 1944 and rebuilt by Austin Vernon and his nephew Russell Vernon, who later became architect to the Dulwich Estate (the obituary of Russell’s architect son Philip Vernon also appears in this yearbook). But by 1979 when Giles arrived, the gallery was in need of further modernisation. He turned to Lord Rothschild, who was then Chairman of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and was a powerful help in negotiating the disentanglement of the gallery and its establishment as an independent charitable trust the son of Anthony Waterfield and his wife Honor, and he
Sir Nicholas Peter Rathbone Wall [1956-63] 14.03.1945 – 17.02.2017
Nicholas Wall was born in Clapham in 1945. With Britain on the brink of winning the Second World War,
his mother, Margaret, named him Nicholas, because it means “victory of the people”. His father, Frederick, was a philatelist who worked at the Stanley Gibbons stamp shop. The family had limited means but Nicholas won a scholarship, so was able to follow his older brother John to Dulwich, arriving from Macaulay Road school in Clapham. At the college, Nicholas was in Sidney and played cricket for the 1st XI in his final year, before going to Trinity College, Cambridge to study English and Law. He was called to the Bar in 1969, took silk in 1988 and became a bencher in 1993 when he was appointed to the family division of the High Court. He shunned lucrative divorce cases to focus on children’s cases in the public sector. With young lives at stake, he often made legal dispositions late into the night, hearing cases on the phone in his pyjamas. He was promoted to the Court of Appeal in 2004. He was an outspoken critic of the plan in 2009 for family courts to be self-funding, which he believed would lead to huge fee rises for local authorities, deterring them from bringing such cases. Without proper funding the family justice system would implode and it was children who would suffer most. Unwigged, he was a kindly, unstuffy individual. When interviewing young wards of court, he would remove his wig and let them try it on. He was bullish in defending their rights, denouncing social workers for “trampling on the rights of parents and children” by placing
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