Colonel Dr Graeme Nicol

Chris Ferguson of The Aberdeenshire Newsletter

Following officer training with the Royal Army Medical Core (RAMC)he volunteered for service with airborne forces parachute training and went to Parachute Field Ambulance then 2 PARA. He was then asked to join the SAS who were eager to recruit him to augment their mountaineering resources. After passing selection he became their medical officer. He completed his free-fall course at Chalons-sur-Saone and Pau with French special forces before serving in Oman and Libya.
 

Colonel Dr Graeme Nicol obituary for The Times

Graeme Nicol was one of four British climbers who raised the Union Jack on the summit of Peak Communism in Tajikistan in August 1962. Known today as Ismoil Somoni, it is the highest peak in the former Soviet Union, at 24,590ft (7,495m) close to the Afghanistan border. The Britons, who were members of a British-Soviet Pamir expedition to a range known as the “roof of the world”, were accompanied by Russians who raised the Hammer and Sickle.

After that tragedy Hunt returned to London leaving 26-year-old “Doc Graeme” with Joe Brown, 31, a former plumber, and Ian McNaught-Davis, 32, a computer manager and later a television presenter, under the leadership of Malcolm Slesser, 35, a scientist from Glasgow. It was not easy going, as McNaught-Davis (obituary, February 13, 2014) recalled in the Alpine Journal: “The first day into new pastures started badly. The Russians rose early and ate their food in silence; Slesser, in a flurry of camp activity, lectured Joe and myself on our sloth.”

A few days later they were “poised to make a direct attack on the summit”, but “Slesser had been going badly, clogged by food poisoning and mild dysentery”. That evening Nicol fell sick with the same illness and the following morning they were dismayed when the Russians, led by Anatoly Ovchinnikov, set off alone.

A day later Nicol pronounced himself fit and the British headed out in pursuit of their allies. Soon they came across another team from Leningrad, one of whom had suffered a heart attack. Nicol offered medical assistance and advice, though the misfortune had some advantages for the Britons because their Russian friends had helped to bring the man down, which meant that their teams were reunited.

Weakened by illness, Nicol was still determined to continue. “Graeme, who looked grey with fatigue, stated emphatically that as long as he could put one foot in front of the other, he was going upwards,” McNaught-Davis recalled. “It hardly seemed wise but the climbing was never very difficult.”

After another night, spent in an ice cave carved by the Russians, they reached the summit of Peak Communism with Nicol and Slesser arriving 40 minutes behind the other two Britons. “We caught our breath, then thumped each other, produced Buckingham Palace-type flags for filming . . . and generally went through a typical continental summit ceremony,” McNaught-Davis wrote, adding that when he lit a celebratory cigarette the bemused Russians accused him of decadence. Nicol produced a Saltire from his pocket to mark the occasion.

Nicol at Aberdeen University a year after the Soviet climb

On their journey home there was one final misadventure in Moscow. Nicol and his colleagues were invited to a 1pm lunch at the British embassy, but first decided to have their suits pressed at the Hotel Metropol. A matronly woman whisked away their jackets and trousers, leaving them in shirt tails and underwear. “At twenty to one we became concerned,” Slesser recalled in Red Peak (1964), his account of the expedition. They eventually arrived an hour late at the embassy where Sir Frank Roberts, the ambassador, exclaimed loudly: “Ah, I see the mountaineers have found their trousers.”

Andrew Graeme Nicol was born in Aberdeen in 1935, the son of Rosella (née Ewen), a former typist, and her husband Andrew Nicol, who had fought in the First World War trenches and against the Bolsheviks in Murmansk in 1919 before teaching business studies. He had a brother, Donald, a physicist who emigrated to Australia.

It was a modest upbringing, with the brothers sharing a room in a two-bedroom, ground-floor flat until their early twenties. Encouraged by his fiercely ambitious mother, Nicol was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, where he developed a love of hillwalking, rock climbing and the mountains. With a group of friends he set up the Boor Boys mountaineering club using primitive equipment such as a “borrowed” washing line for rope. It later became the Corrour Club and Tom Patey, the Scottish climber and writer, described them as “a motley collection of ex-grammar school boys, ‘brigands of the bothy’, who enforced a regular reign of terror on a community where misanthropes and ornithologists were rife”.

His most famous climb of this period was an ascent of Zero Gully on Ben Nevis in February 1957 with Patey and Hamish MacInnes (obituary, November 25, 2020) that has been described as “one of the greatest achievements in Scottish winter climbing”.

Nicol and his wife Christine, celebrating their engagement, in 1965

Nicol read medicine at the University of Aberdeen and kept fit by performing pull-ups on his bedroom door. He enjoyed summers climbing in the Alps before National Service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he was attached to the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment. When 22 SAS sought a medic they suggested that, as a para, he could be exempt from the gruelling selection course, but he would not hear of it and insisted that he would only join if he passed. He did.

After completing his free-fall course at Chalons-sur-Saône in eastern France, he was posted to Oman, where during a “hearts and minds” exercise he visited a village and was presented with a child who could not walk. His usual reflex hammer was not available and, to the consternation of the village elders, he tested the child’s reflexes with the butt of a rifle. The child leapt up and scampered away and Nicol was hailed a hero.

He completed a PhD in hypothermia and went on to hold appointments in the Medical School at the University of Aberdeen, culminating in senior lecturer in pathology.

In 1966 he married Christine Walker, a nurse from Motherwell whom he had met at a party in Aberdeen where she was studying midwifery. She survives him with their children: Andrew, a barrister; Stuart, a venture capitalist and Patricia, a Sunday Times journalist.

A commemorative plaque that the Russians gave Nicol

With oil fever gripping Aberdeen, Nicol left academia in 1977 to become an occupational doctor with BP and was seconded to Abu Dhabi as medical officer for the Abu Dhabi Petroleum Company. In 1983 he joined BP’s head office in London, eventually becoming the company’s senior medical officer, a role that took him all over the world.

He continued to hold Territorial Army appointments, reaching the rank of colonel. He also reconnected with a couple of the Russians from the Pamir expedition, remembering them at least as fondly as some of his British colleagues.

After retiring from the oil industry Nicol, who was good-looking, clean shaven and always smiling, became a lecturer in occupational medicine at the University of Al Ain in Abu Dhabi. The post was intended to be for one year but he stayed for seven, during much of which he and Christine lived in the Hilton Hotel. Finally returning to Aberdeen in about 2003, he once again sought pleasure in the Scottish mountains as a member of a hillwalking club known as the Galloping Geriatrics.

Graeme Nicol, mountaineer and doctor, was born on January 28, 1935. He died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease and bladder cancer on April 30, 2023, aged 88