26-05-2025
Theo Nichols obituary
My friend Theo Nichols, who has died aged 86, was a social sciences professor dedicated to the critical study of the relationship between capital and labour.
Theo's first book, Ownership, Control and Ideology (1969), was followed by Workers Divided (1976) and Living With Capitalism (1977), two case studies of work at a large chemical complex, while The British Worker Question (1986) employed his powerful prose to critique dominant accounts of low productivity and the performance of the British economy. He went on to publish another 15 books and edited collections including the classic study The Sociology of Industrial Injury (1997).
Theo was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, as the only child of Wally and Min (nee Baker), both factory workers. Educated first at St Andrew's Murray secondary modern school and then Lawrence Sheriff grammar school, both in Rugby, in 1957 he went on to take up social studies at Hull University.
Drawn to industrial sociology, and after stints lecturing at the universities of Aston (1963-64) and Bath (1964-68), in 1969 he took up a lectureship at Bristol University, where he and I were part of the second tranche of appointments to its new department of sociology. In 2000 he left Bristol to take up a distinguished research professorship in social sciences at Cardiff, working there until his retirement in 2010.
Theo was a principled man who had little time for authority figures, valued hard work and disliked unfairness. An avid reader, he loved walking his dog and watching Bristol City at Ashton Gate.
His second wife, Nancy Lineton, whom he married in 1994, died 15 days before Theo. He is survived by three children, Rob, Jo and Claire, from his first marriage to Joyce Sage, which ended in divorce, by Nancy's three children from a previous marriage, and 15 grandchildren.
