C S Nicholls

Historian and Author

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A Kenya Childhood

In A Kenya Childhood Christine Nicholls chronicles her life in Kenya in lively detail. Her tales of schools in Eldoret, Nyeri and Nairobi, boarding at the Kenya High School, living on Mombasa island, climbing Kilimanjaro and making trips throughout Kenya are funny and sometimes sad.

Elspeth Huxley

For this, the first biography of Elspeth Huxley, C. S. Nicholls has made extensive use of her papers and letters - including those to and from Elspeth’s formidable mother Nellie and her hapless father Jos. Elspeth Huxley: A Biography is not merely a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary woman, but an absorbing account of an entire era of colonial and British history.

Red Strangers : The White Tribe of Kenya

With the stately lowering of the Union flag in December 1963, seventy years of British rule in Kenya came to an abrupt end. The effect of independence on white society was devastating. Thousands of second and third-generation settlers abandoned their homes and livelihoods, never to return. This is their story.

All titles from C S Nicholls

The Swahili Coast (Allen & Unwin, 1971).

Dictionary of National Biography 1961-1970 (Oxford University Press, 1981)
Dictionary of National Biography 1971-1980 (Oxford University Press, 1986)
Dictionary of National Biography 1981-1985 (Oxford University Press, 1990)
Dictionary of National Biography 1986-1990 (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Dictionary of National Biography - Missing Persons (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Cataract (with Philip Awdry) (Faber & Faber, 1985, also published in German)

Power: a Political History (Harrap, 1990, and OUP USA and other foreign publishers, also as an ebook)

Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Biography (Helicon, 1996)

Editor of a series of Pocket Biographies for Sutton Publications, one of which she wrote herself: David Livingtone (Sutton Publishing, 1998, also as an audiobook)

The History of St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1950-2000 for her former college’s fiftieth anniversary (Macmillan, 2000)

Elspeth Huxley, a Biography (HarperCollins, 2002, and paperback, 2003, published in USA by Thomas Dunne Books, 2003)

Red Strangers: the White Tribe of Kenya (Timewell Press, 2005 and as a paperback from lulu.com, 2011, and as a ebook on Kindle)

A Kenya Childhood, (2011, paperback from blurb.com)

Dr Christine Nicholls

Christine Nicholls was born in 1943 and taken to Kenya after the end of World War II, in 1947. Her father and mother were teachers, at the Central (later Highlands) School, in Eldoret. The family moved to Nyeri in the early 1950s, where her parents taught at Nyeri Primary School. After being acting headmaster at Nyeri, her father, Kit (C.J.) Metcalfe became headmaster at Parklands School and Westlands School in Nairobi, before moving to a permanent post as headmaster of Mombasa Primary School in 1954. By then Christine was a pupil at the Kenya Girls’ High School in Nairobi. Her mother, Olive Metcalfe, was headmistress of the Aga Khan Girls’ School in Mombasa. Christine boarded at the Kenya High School in Nairobi.

Seven years later Christine went to Oxford University, to Lady Margaret Hall. She received her MA and went on to do a doctorate at St Antony’s College. Upon receiving her D.Phil. degree, Christine became a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at London University. She then became a freelance researcher for the BBC Arabic programme.

In 1977 Christine joined Oxford University Press as Assistant Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She progressed to become Editor, before retiring in 1995. Five volumes of the Dictionary were produced by her (the first five with Sir Edgar Williams and Lord Blake). She lives in Oxford, England.