NICOL, James Dyce (1805-1872), of Ballogie House, near Aboyne, Aberdeenshire

A landowner and retired East India merchant, Nicol won a famous victory for the Liberals at the 1865 general election for Kincardineshire. He was one of a number of Liberals who captured Scottish counties hitherto dominated by the Conservatives through exploiting the grievances of local farmers. Except on Scottish questions, Nicol ‘seldom spoke in Parliament, but could always express himself in a manner which showed that he had given careful attention to the subject under discussion’.1Aberdeen Journal, 20 Nov. 1872. In his first parliament he took a keen interest in agricultural and Indian questions.

A native of Kincardineshire, Nicol’s father was a surgeon in the navy who then took up the ‘unremunerative, though chivalrous, profession of a county doctor’.2Dundee Advertiser, 17 Mar. 1865. Nicol’s maternal grandfather was an Aberdeen merchant whose Badentoy estate he later inherited.3Aberdeen Journal, 20 Nov. 1872; W.E. Nicol, The genealogy of the Nicol family, Kincardineshire branch (1909), 6. After pursuing an abortive medical career, Nicol left Stonehaven at the age of sixteen to ‘push my fortune in the world, with very moderate prospects’.4Aberdeen Journal, 19 July 1865. He joined the Bombay merchant house of his relative William Nicol in 1821, becoming a partner in 1826. He returned to Britain in 1838 and retired from business in 1844, shortly after marrying into the Lloyds banking family, of Manchester.5Ibid., 13; Aberdeen Journal, 20 Nov. 1872. In 1850 he purchased the Ballogie and Balnacraig estates in Aberdeenshire, and in 1859 added Newtonhill, Gillybrands and Cairnrobin in Kincardineshire.6Nicol, Genealogy of the Nicol family, 13.

When in 1864, the long-serving Conservative MP for Kincardineshire announced his retirement at the next dissolution, Nicol offered as a Liberal. He was commended as a native of the county, who had ‘long been connected with some of the wealthiest London banking firms, and is a first rate man of business’.7Dundee Advertiser, 19 July 1864. However, as he had previously been a member of the Conservative Club in London, his opponents accused him of ‘being all things to all men’, a ‘turncoat’ and a ‘trimmer’.8Aberdeen Journal, 28 June 1865; ‘An elector’, letter to Montrose Standard, qu. in Aberdeen Journal, 19 Apr. 1865. In the event, Nicol won a surprisingly easy victory over his Conservative rival at the 1865 general election.

A ‘moderate Liberal’, Nicol supported the extension of the suffrage, but believed that the franchise was ‘a great trust for public purposes’ rather than an automatic right.9Dundee Courier, 18 Nov. 1872 (first qu.), 15 July 1865 (second qu.). He divided with the Liberal government in all the key divisions on their 1866 reform bill. In the debates on the representation of the people bill the following year Nicol cast votes in favour of enfranchising compounders, but not women, and increasing the representation of the largest towns at the expense of the smaller boroughs. Having described himself to electors as a ‘supporter of the existing relations between Church and State’, he opposed the abolition of church rates. Like many Scottish MPs, Nicol emphasised his antipathy towards ‘all religious endowments at the cost of the nation’ on the hustings, especially the Maynooth grant.10Dundee Courier, 15 July 1865.

‘Very regular in his attendance’, Nicol was preoccupied with agricultural questions in his first two sessions.11Dundee Courier, 18 Nov. 1872. His maiden speech counselled against uniformly applying stringent restrictions on the transportation of cattle (designed to prevent the spread of the plague) in counties such as Kincardineshire, where the outbreak had taken a much milder form, 19 Feb. 1866.12Hansard, 19 Feb. 1866, vol. 181, cc. 782-3. During his election campaign Nicol had criticised the game laws, which he argued operated at the expense of tenants, and the law of hypothec, which gave landlords a preferential right in their tenants’ property, including livestock. In his opinion, the law of hypothec had ‘a tendency to raise unduly the rents of farms’.13Dundee Advertiser, 17 Mar. 1865. Accordingly, he expressed support for the 1867 bills of McLagan and Carnegie to exempt hares and rabbits from the game laws and abolish hypothec.14Hansard, 5 Mar. 1867, vol. 185, cc. 1396-7; 8 May 1867, vol. 187, c. 2057.

In 1868 Nicol drew on his own experience in India to raise the collapse of the Bank of Bombay in Parliament, and pressed the government about their policy regarding the creation of a new bank. He hoped that the government-instituted inquiry would be rigorous. Individual investors, many of them members of the Indian civil service or army officers, had purchased shares in the bank because it appeared to have the security of being backed by the state. This was because the Bombay government were shareholders and appointed three directors to the board, Nicol explained.15Hansard, 27 Mar. 1868, vol. 191, cc. 426-7 (at 426). The Bombay government’s role in ‘one of the grossest cases of joint-stock mismanagement on record’, meant that he took a dim view of their involvement in the new, reconstituted bank. Nicol was so concerned that he called for the new bank to be completely separated from the Bombay government, and for an end to similar arrangements in Madras and Bengal, 8 May 1868.16Hansard, 8 May 1868, vol. 191, c. 2057.

Nicol was re-elected at the 1868 general election and sat until his death in November 1872, by which time his failing health had ‘compelled him to relinquish parliamentary and all other labours’.17Dundee Courier, 18 Nov. 1872. He was succeeded by his eldest son William Edward Nicol, a member of Birse school board and, after 1889, of Aberdeenshire county council. Nicol’s second son and namesake was an East India merchant and member of the Bombay Legislative council.18Nicol, Genealogy of the Nicol family, 14, 22-3.