“It‘s too late to fire me now”
In Memoriam, a tribute to Nicholas John William Bates
3 April 1951–8 December 2020
“For the present now will later be past” — Bob Dylan
In a nutshell
It’s been 10 days since Nick died; “passing” was an ambiguous, politically correct word he didn’t think much of. He took a last breath and then not the next, after three weeks of uncertainty. No, it wasn’t Covid-19 that caught him by surprise, as some rush to ask and others, more discreet, wonder to themselves. He was walking along the boardwalk in La Cala de Mijas, on Spain’s Costa del Sol when, at a spot he particularly loved, he paused to look at the sea. The Mediterranean in front of him, the Straits of Gibraltar to his right, the northern tip of Africa easing into view; that vast continent where he spent his youth and which he loved was teasing the eyes to search for it, with just hints of the Rif Mountains in the Atlas Range visible as the winter day waned and the sea air shifted and the light played its games. He simply fell, for no reason we’ll ever know for sure — not a heart attack, not a stroke — and broke some bones in his skull. Three weeks later he died from a cerebral infection that raced through his brain.
RIP, our lovely Nick. Your students in your final year loved it that you told them “It’s too late to fire me now” when you were a bit outrageous.
We’re looking at the chessboards scattered around the chalet in Switzerland, the Bob Dylan and 1,000 other pieces of collected music, the old cricket bat and bright vest from Ghana, the economics books and mucky garden boots for cleaning out the Swiss alpine pond once the spring frog mating season ended, and of course, as always happens when someone slips away, we expect you to walk in the door again, Nick. And then we bow our heads and are thankful that you didn’t have to linger with a life less rich than the one you lived, and loved. We will miss you: Ellen, Liam and Jess, Tara, your mother Jean, your brother Alan, your sisters Mem and Kate, and all of our far-flung extended families and your many friends and colleagues. Next week your ashes will return to nature, as you wanted, on a mountain dear to you.
More than the nutshell
A life is so many events, a character is something so long in the making, a personality is seen through so many prisms and so many differences of closeness or distance — it makes no sense to try to summarize. Here are some of the fragments, shards from a broken vase that are hopelessly incomplete, but they let us dance around Nick, knowing that our deepest understanding of another person comes from the less-said, the interstices, the space and pauses between, the sideways glance.
True: he had a beard and bright blue eyes and in his youth cornflower blond hair (which gave him the right to tease students with politically not at all correct Dumb Blonde jokes, “What do you have to do if you want to make a blonde laugh on Monday? Tell her a joke on Friday.”). Even truer: the blueness of his eyes was given to him but the innocence he added to them was tactical, one more way to spring the surprise of a biting chess move, a fierce card in Bridge or a damning argument about the economic evil of giving crippling loans to developing countries.
True: he was indifferent to how his clothes were worn and he had a voice that could boom across a rugby pitch. Even more true: he was not indifferent to the price of cotton and who picked it and how much they made per day and what that bought them, and where charitable donations of used clothes ended up and what that did to local economies, and where they needed wells in Africa before health and education including sports programmes could work. His passions covered as many sports as he could fit in. Every Sunday for years he and his mother would spend 30 minutes on the phone raking over the world’s sports teams and the matches they’d lost or won, in tennis or football or rugby or, bless the Empire for spreading it: their beloved cricket. American football didn’t make the Bates cut because, according to Nick, they stopped and started too often, a bit like US corporate financial reports.
He once, briefly, dreamed of being a journalist but then he discovered you had to interview people, this gentle bear of a man who could play king in his classroom and entertain crowds at school, but who had a shy streak that left him quaking before making a phone call or asking a question in a do-it-yourself store. He married a journalist and enjoyed the nitty-gritty of interviews vicariously. A favourite of his was my interview for Business Week with Jean-Claude Killy, the hero of his skiing debut days. Nick ate croissants and drank coffees in a village in Haute-Savoie while I went off for the interview, then he pommelled me with questions until I had shared every detail several times and he could happily spend the afternoon on the slopes pretending to be Killy. Sadly, I never managed to interview Roger Federer, his all-time biggest hero — also Swiss with a heart partly in Southern Africa, a nice guy and someone who, like Nick, aspired to the best tennis shots of all time. No problem that Roger’s record was a little stronger than Nick’s.
His father and brother were engineers, people who loved to tinker with and mend and build things — Nick’s approach to home repairs or most physical, mechanical objects was his oft-repeated “brute force and ignorance”. The list of items that didn’t survive the mantra is long, which probably explains his love of buying anything on sale for half price; two instead of one if possible because you never knew when you might need to replace broken things. And yet he was an engineer of sorts, in the realm of ideas, always wanting to mend and move and build the world’s economic structures and when he took time out from that, to build and re-build mental castles in a world of high-level chess.
Teaching wasn’t what he set out to do; it was a default choice after realizing he’d never finish his doctoral degree in economics because he was too busy dominating chess, bridge and backgammon games in the university student union in lieu of going to classes and writing papers. Teaching wooed him, luckily for four-plus decades of students. He could enchant them with the famous “Bates quotes”, such as “if you marry your hooker the GDP goes down” (thank you Econ class 2015–2016), most of which I cannot share here for fear of shocking parents (the Bates philosophy: “What they don’t know about what their children learned at school won’t kill them.”).
The teachers who remember him singing in the halls, in particular his sound-alike Dylan imitations will hear his voice here:
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’ (Bob Dylan)
Growing up in Zimbabwe, he was shoeless whenever possible. It was in part an African thing, in part the fact that shoes never really fit and caused him lifelong pain, for his feet and legs were reconstructed when he was little due to a birth defect. Shoes in his homes were always like windfall apples in late autumn, scattered everywhere, landing unpredictably and with no pattern and a constant danger to others. Shoes to Nick were mainly a vehicle for locomotion to so many places around the world where he could dirty the soles with soil from the nations of the world. Southern England, Zimbabwe, very briefly Zambia, Wales, northern England, Switzerland — these were the places where he lived, homes where he could perch until school holidays arrived and he was off for weeks on end to Australia, India, Canada, the US, Central America, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Norway, northern Africa, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Czechia, Ghana to teach and southern Africa to see family, and so many more spots. He loved watching sister Kate haggle in Malawi’s markets and relished walking the dogs with sister Mem among the fruit orchards over the mountains from Cape Town. A game changer even for Nick was riding a bicycle across China in 1985 and seeing how cheaply he could do it by trading dollars for local money on the black market, since China then had one currency for foreigners, another for Chinese. Educational research, he called it.
He was often quiet at home, saying that he spent the day performing in the classroom. Here he would hole up with books and music and replay historic chess matches with ghost opponents. Anyone who knew him heard about his children. He had non-standard notions about raising them, starting with belting out Janis Joplin’s “Bobby McGee” to them as infants, while he gave them baths. There are too many stories to tell, but no one will be surprised to learn how pleased and proud he was when Liam published a book on breaking the rules — shades of Nick! — which Liam wrote in Chinese. He and Tara had a special complicity and three favourite shared activities: buying groceries, taking lakeside walks and drinking coffee; Tara can’t talk and they each enjoyed their parallel noisy silences, where Nick played music and Tara made gentle buzzing noises. When Liam’s wife Jess added Canadian accountancy skills and kind generosity on a grand scale to the family’s skill set, Nick began to relax: he’d done all right by his kids.
His last project was to learn Spanish. He would tell you it was so he’d be more independent when he travelled or spent time in Spain. In truth, he’d fallen in love with Cuban music and old Colombian drug cartel movies, gleefully aware that the films were giving him a vocabulary not fit for polite society.
And then the Swiss Alps, his last home, the place where he left us, with the views he loved of snow and meadows, magnificent sunrises and clouds, slopes nearby. The final piece of music I played for him, as he lay dying Monday night, was Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”, a favourite — sorry, Bob, but it’s Nick’s voice I’ll always hear:
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you …
The next morning he was suddenly gone and as I stepped outside to take a deep breath, thinking he could no longer do that, Venus rose calmly behind the Weisshorn in Valais, a view he loved. He’s at peace.
- Ellen Wallace with Liam Bates and Jess Lam, and Tara Bates
A special thanks to the hospital intensive care teams in Malaga, Spain and Sion, Switzerland, who took such good care of Nick during a time of terrific stress and overwork for them.
If you missed it, here is our charity of choice, in lieu of flowers –
Nick would have liked people to contribute to a project that corresponds both to his love of Africa and developing economies and his approach to charities, subjects that those of you who heard him talk about economics will appreciate. Here are the details that Liam is providing:
Donations can be sent to Charity: Water using this link: https://www.charitywater.org/
Charity: Water is a non-profit that provides drinking water to people in developing nations. According to a WHO & UNDP report, every $1 invested in clean water can yield $4–$12 in economic returns. Access to clean water is perhaps the single most powerful tool for sparking economic growth. Access to clean water gives communities more time to grow food, earn an income, and go to school — all of which fight poverty. Less time collecting water means more time in class and more time for women to start businesses and take charge of their own futures.
Charity: Water has an unusual business model where 100% of funds donated go to building wells. All operating expenses are paid out of a completely separate fund that is backed by wealthy individuals and family funds. All the financials are transparent and can be viewed online. All of the wells they build are photographed and GPS coordinates provided, so they can actually be visited, if you’re ever in that part of the world!
Thank you all for the friendship, comradery and much more that you shared with Nick over the years.
