Michael David Nightngale of Cromarty, O.B.E., B.Sc., B.Litt.

Michael Nightingale was born in Blackheath, London, on 6 December 1927, but spent much of his boyhood at Wormshill, a small estate on the North Downs bought by his father in the early 1930s. A precocious child, Nightingale organized archaeological digs while at Winchester and went on to Wye College, to study farming, and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read for a B.Litt.on Roman field systems and manorial structure. He emerged as a mixture of traditionalist and iconoclast, his unconventional approach probably inherited, to some extent, from his parentage – a Fabian, stockbroking, landowning father and a Lithuanian mother whose persecuted family had fled to England in 1888. She died when Nightingale was sixteen and, on his father’s hasty remarriage, Nightingale moved into a cottage at Wormshill to live in premature domestic, but not financial, independence. His predilections were essentially antiquarian but his father, who had not long to live, was anxious to see Nightingale settled into a lucrative career and in 1951 secured a post for him as assistant to the investment manager of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, where he developed a nose for sound money and its management which he later put to good use. On his father’s death Nightingale inherited Wormshill and, in 1954, became assistant to the principal of London University, a post which ended abruptly after he drafted a speech for the principal attacking the university’s headlong redevelopment of the Bloomsbury squares. He had, however, also been appointed the university’s first ever investment manager when he pointed out the undesirabilty of keeping its substantial assets on deposit in the bank; his financial expertise was such that he continued as an investment consultant until 1966. Another administrative job followed Nightingale’s departure from Senate House, but one that provided an outlet for his creative energy. As secretary of the Museums Association, and editor of its journal, he pioneered the establishment of the Regional Museum Service (now the Area Museum Council) to give professional help to small provincial museums; and secured Treasury grant-aid towards the Walker Art Gallery’s purchase of Rubens’s Holy Family, thus setting a ground-breaking precedent. He was a member of the Museum Committee of the Carnegie UK Trust and of the Advisory Council on the Export of Works of Art from 1954-60 and of the British Committee of the International Council of Museums from 1956-60. At this juncture, Nightingale’s academic career looked promising: he had published papers in Antiquity and Archaeologia Cantiana and the history, Wye College 1447-1947, and had made a name for himself in the museum world. At the age of twenty-nine he was elected FSA, sponsored by Mortimer Wheeler, Nowell Myres and Donald Harden among other luminaries of the day; and in 1960 he was appointed OBE for his services to museology, all of which indicated a golden future. But Nightingale was now a family man, divorced from his first wife and married to his second; three of his five children had been born and he needed a higher income than scholarship could generate if he was to maintain the standard of living his father had provided and have something left over to finance his pet projects. He therefore returned to the City, firstly as director of J F Thomasson & Co., a successful merchant bank; then as director of Anglo-Indonesian Plantations which took him to Jakarta periodically, and finally, until 1989, as chairman of the Chillington Corporation, makers of high quality agricultural tools for the third world. But, though highly respected in City board rooms, Nightingale was a countryman at heart and an antiquary by inclination. His obsession (not too strong a word) for the preservation of the landscape and the churches and church monuments of the North Downs remained undimmed until his death. He loved Wormshill, knew most of the Kentish churches intimately from boyhood and empathised with the craftsmen who carried out the conservation projects he instigated, often working alongside them. An uncomfortable committee member because of his uncompromising, robustly expressed, views, Nightingale nevertheless made his mark on the Kent Archaeological Society as chairman of its Churches Committee from 1954; the fact that he contributed financially to its restoration programmes doubtless helped to secure his chairmanship but nevertheless his worth was widely recognized. Blindly a-political, though public spirited, he stood for office in municipal elections as the spirit moved him, sometimes as a Conservative sometimes as an Independent (his natural stance), and was Leader of Maidstone Borough Council in 1976-7 and mayor of Maidstone 1984-5. During some thirty years as a councillor and a member of planning committees, he steadfastly denounced the destruction of medieval houses and barns and supported the preservation of woodland and hedgerows. The Canterbury Diocesan Advisory Committee’s early efforts to `rationalise’ its parishes by closing village churches and selling their treasures naturally provoked Nightingale’s implacable opposition. Though for many years he was a thorn in the side of the General Synod (of which he was once lay chairman) his arguments gradually gained acceptance and were incorporated into mainstream policy. Always attracted to historical minutiae, Nightingale discovered the Rochester Bridge Trust, a well-heeled fourteenth-century charity dedicated to building bridges across the Medway, of which there was already a sufficiency when he joined the Trust in 1985. Nightingale immediately set about persuading the members to invest the Trust’s considerable annual income into developing tertiary education in the Medway Towns, then the largest conurbation in England without a university.The result was the Bridge Wardens’ College, appropriately housed in the historic Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham. Kent was undoubtedly Nightingale’s first love but he was equally active in Cromarty, where his wife had family connections. His assumption of the ancient title of Baron of Cromarty arose from his purchase in 1964 of the dilapidated eighteenth-century Cromarty House, which he restored into a family home. He raised funds, to which he personally contributed generously, to build an outstation in the town for Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon’s Institution of Technology (now Robert Gordon University); and fought a relentless battle to prevent the eye-sore of an oil refinery being built on his part of the coastline. In appearance and personality Nightingale resembled an Old Testament prophet: angular and ascetic, bushy bearded, tortured in expression, vibrant of voice, readily responsive to the din of battle and threatening doom if his teaching went unheeded. In fact, he was listened to; and though latterly his efforts were concentrated locally rather than nationally, he influenced public attitudes to conservation issues and the good he did lives after him. Nightingale, Deputy Steward of the Royal Manor of Wye; Warden of the Rochester Bridge Trust; Lord of the Level of Romney Marsh and Esquire Bedell of London University, died on 2 September 1998 and was buried to the tolling of the full peal of six bells of Wormshill Church, which he had begun to restore half a century ago.