Collection: Ted Hughes and Nick Grant - a friendship

“To Nick/ When you lack a lake/ remember the rivers”.....

In the spirit of hope and fellowship we'd like to welcome 2025 with this tribute to a touching friendship, Nick Grant's collection of books by Ted Hughes that were given to him  by the author himself. 

Ted Hughes saw nature frequently through the experience of fishing and, sharing a passion for fly fishing, a pastime which cemented their firm friendship, Nick Grant stated that Ted Hughes and his wife Carol welcomed him to ‘a whole new world of the arts’ he would go on to embrace. Rumour has it that Nick Grant and Ted Hughes met in 1980 when a mutual friend tried to lure Hughes into purchasing an outlandishly expensive collection of Japanese netsuke buckles. Supposedly, Nick Grant was invited along to the poet’s viewing in order to arrange a bank loan to assist Hughes to pay for the collection but as soon as Grant and Hughes discovered their mutual passion for fishing, dreams of netsuke buckles were thoroughly displaced and they soon after went fly-fishing in Ireland together. 

Subsequently, later on in their friendship, Grant was asked by Hughes to become invested in The Arvon Foundation, a charitable organisation promoting creative writing which Hughes had been deeply involved in from its conception- Grant was offered the role of chairing the Finance Committee, having established the Duncan Lawrie private bank in 1971 as Managing Director and later as Chairman. In 1982 Duncan Lawrie would contribute to the prize fund for the biennial Arvon International Poetry Competition, helping to secure the future of the competition. This revered competition had first been judged in 1980 by Ted Hughes, Charles Causley, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin. Known as the “Banker to the literary set”, Grant harboured relationships with a coterie of literary figures including Sir Michael Morpurgo.

This collection of inscriptions to him from Hughes is intensely personal and a profound reflection of the intimacy of their, in some ways unlikely, but deep and enduring relationship.