Nicholas Size
| Nicholas Size | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1866 Liverpool, England |
| Died | 14 April 1953 (aged 86–87) Whitehaven, Cumberland, England |
| Occupation | Writer, hotelier and railway administrator |
| Genre | Fiction, history |
| Notable works | The Secret Valley |
John Nicholas Size (autumn 1866 – 14 April 1953) was a British hotelier and tourism promoter, but is best known for his novels about Norse settlers in the English Lake District.
Born in Liverpool, Lancashire in the last quarter of 1866, Nicholas Size followed his father Henry into railway administration. For many years he was goods manager at Exchange Station in Bradford, Yorkshire, but having developed a fondness for the Lake District, around 1920 he reopened the long-derelict Victoria Hotel, now trading as The Bridge Hotel in Buttermere, Cumberland. Initially he pursued his plan of investing in the hotel in tandem with his railway career, but about 1927 he moved in.
Interested in the heritage of the area, Nicholas joined the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society in 1927. Intrigued by the possible connection between Buttermere and the Norse landowner Bueth, mentioned in official documents relating to Cumberland at the time of the Norman conquest in the early 12th century, he produced a booklet, The Epic of Buttermere portraying the secluded valley as a stronghold of resistance to the invaders, and site of a supposed Battle of Rannerdale Knotts. This was so successful that in 1929 he wrote an expanded and illustrated novella version, The Secret Valley. This too was a great success, and in 1930 Frederick Warne, publisher of the Beatrix Potter books produced a new edition.
Encouraged by Sir Hugh Walpole, whose own Lakeland historical novels were very popular at the time, in 1932 Size tackled another local Norse story, the supposed origin of the elegant cross at Gosforth. This had first appeared in the novella The Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran's Daughter, by local historian C.A. Parker, but Size's book Shelagh of Eskdale expanded on what Parker had written, to produce a short novel uniform with the second edition of Secret Valley, again published by Warne. Finally, about a year later, Warne published Ola the Russian, a longer novel in which the setting was broadened to include the whole Norse world, fictionalising the life of Olaf Trygvesson.
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