Nick and I resigned from our respective broking firms to begin underwriting careers in the same month of 1996 and having not met very much before then, inexplicably thereafter seemed regularly to bump into one another in the same underwriting queues while we both served our respective notice periods, which is when I really began to get to know him. In the ensuing years, we met and travelled together quite often, most notably while we successfully negotiated a recovery over countless trips to Norway, on some cement carriers we had prefinanced in Vietnam, as a result of which Nick, Jim Masson and I personally became temporary shipowners of one recovered vessel after a gruelling 13 hour negotiation with the defaulting Vietnamese shipbuilder in neutral Singapore. Nick had a deep-seated and noble, duty-bound belief that through insurance he should provide an essential service to insureds in even the most difficult countries, as he once explained to me; I will always remember him for his kindness and gentleness to anyone he interacted with. Always cheerful and good-humoured, he was a family man without pretences, airs or graces. He often spoke fondly and lovingly of his wife and children of whom he was immensely proud and I wish for them and all his family the fortitude to bear the enormous loss and unanswerable questions they will be struggling with and hope that they may find some small comfort and solace from the many fitting tributes on these pages that Nick so justly merits. Knowing from Nick himself how closely he held them, there can be no doubt that the last thing he would have wanted was to cause his family pain and sorrow and one hopes that the many contributions on these pages will help them in some small way to find peace and closure. Rest in peace, Nick.