The enterprise dated its history from 1806, when Cuthbert Vaux was apprenticed to a local brewer, and operated under his name from 1837. In 1900, Cuthbert Vaux’s grand-daughter Amy married Frank Nicholson, the brewery’s manager and secretary. His grandson Paul joined the company in 1965, became managing director in 1971 and chairman from 1976. Under Paul Nicholson’s paternalist leadership, Vaux expanded to acquire Wards brewery in Sheffield, diversified into hotels and off-licences, and ventured briefly into the US. A fundamentally shy man, driven by traditional notions of decency and fairness, Nicholson commanded huge respect among those who worked for him and with him.
Despite de-industrialisation, the core beer business remained profitable. But the family’s residual stake was small, and control eventually passed to a group of “active” shareholders, led by the City fund manager Philips & Drew, who forced a decision in 1999 to pull out of brewing and refocus on developing the group’s Swallow hotels – which provided a new name for the parent company.A very public row ensued in which Nicholson launched blistering attacks on boardroom colleagues for what he saw as their lack of empathy with loyal employees and customers. Meanwhile, his younger brother Frank, Vaux’s managing director, launched a management buy-out bid aimed at saving the two breweries and their 700-plus workforce and retaining 350 tenanted pubs.
When Swallow dismissed the buy-out terms as unacceptable, the threatened closures attracted Westminster attention: Labour’s deputy prime minister John Prescott announced that he would call in the major shareholders to explain their position. But Paul Nicholson, having first seen off the chief executive and finance director, who were accused of secretly telling investors that they opposed the buy-out, was ousted in March 1999 and the rearguard action was lost.
At a shareholders’ meeting three months later to approve Swallow’s sale of former Vaux tenancies to Pubmaster, Nicholson spoke passionately from the floor to “register contempt for those who have committed this act of corporate vandalism”. He carried the meeting on a show of hands but the deal went through on the strength of proxy votes from City institutions.Paul Douglas Nicholson was born on March 7 1938 to Douglas Nicholson (who chaired Vaux in the postwar decades) and his wife Pauline, née Lawson-Tancred. Educated at Harrow, Paul did National Service as a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and qualified as a chartered accountant before entering the family business.
In his later career, Nicholson was a director of numerous regional businesses including Yorkshire-Tyne Tees Television and Northern Electric. He chaired the Urban Development Corporation for Tyne and Wear and the northern regional boards of the CBI and British Technology Group; he was also the inaugural president of the NE Chamber of Commerce. On a national platform, he chaired the Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association from 1994 to 1996 – as his father and grandfather had done in its earlier form as the Brewers’ Society.
Having been High Sheriff of Co Durham in 1980-81, Nicholson served as Lord-Lieutenant of the county from 1997 to 2013. A long-running saga during his tenure concerned the future of Auckland Palace, seat of the Bishops of Durham, and the series of paintings, Jacob and his Twelve Sons, by the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán that had hung in its Long Dining Room since 1756.
During an interregnum between bishops in 2003, the Church Commissioners signalled their intention to dispose of the impractical property and free themselves of its running costs. But Nicholson – with the encouragement and advocacy of the then Prince of Wales – sought to persuade them to hold back.
He went on to lead an influential group that campaigned to keep the Zurbaráns in situ and to assist in tortuous negotiations in 2011 between the Commissioners and the financier Jonathan Ruffer – who finally acquired both the castle and the paintings, placed them in a charitable trust and devoted much of his fortune to a wider project for the regeneration of the town of Bishop Auckland.
Nicholson’s own major charitable contribution to County Durham was the creation in 1995 of its Community Foundation, of which he remained president to the end of his life.
Nicholson published Brewer at Bay (2003), a no-holds-barred account of the battle to save Vaux. Its Castle Street brewery site in Sunderland was eventually redeveloped, while the Swallow group of hotels and pubs was sold three times before going into administration in 2006.
An accomplished horseman, Nicholson was a competitive three-day eventer at Badminton and elsewhere in the late 1950s and won the Liverpool Foxhunters’ Steeplechase as an amateur at Aintree on Sea Knight in 1963, and again in 1965.
The pairing were also 15th-and-last finishers in the 1964 Grand National, Nicholson at well over six feet tall having starved himself to 10 stone four pounds. He was later a keen four-in-hand carriage driver and president of the Coaching Club.
In 1970 Paul Nicholson married Sarah, daughter of Sir Edmund Bacon, Bt, KG, the premier baronet of England. She survives him with their daughter.
Sir Paul Nicholson, born March 7, 1938, died January 17, 2025.
Reproduced by curtesy of the Daily Telegraph.
He was sworn in as a Gentleman Freeman to the Masons’ Company of the Durham City Freemen in August 2003.
