Nigel was the second son of Anthony Reynell Threlfall Richards and his wife, Mariquita Elisabetta Angelica Caird. His Richards grandfather was Vicar of St. Helen’s, Nettlestone, Ryde on the Isle of Wight for many years, and Nigel was christened in Ryde on 12 June 1908.
He followed his brother to Summer Fields in the summer of 1917. His father had joined up in September 1914 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 9th [Cyclists] Hants Regiment.
Nigel went on to Winchester in 1921 and came up to Christ Church in 1926 and took a First in History.
Mention is made of Nigel in Jeremy Lewis’s “Cyril Connolly; A Life”
“In “The Rock Pool”, though the novel's protagonist, Naylor, clearly serves at least part of the time as a mouthpiece for his creator, he also was based at least in part on an acquaintance of Connolly named Nigel Richards.
It appears that Nigel abandoned stock broking to become a tea-planter in Burma, where his first wife, an alcoholic, fell overboard into a crocodile-infested river, and was eaten. Some time after the publication of The Rock Pool, Cyril Connolly and his wife, Jean, were having a drink in the Cafe Royal with Betty Fletcher-Mossop and Robin McDouall, [the source of the above information,] when Nigel Richards, unexpectedly, walked in: Connolly was, apparently, overcome with embarrassment, and blurted out "My God, I thought you were dead!"
Nigel married Betty Fletcher-Mossop in Truro early in 1937.
He joined the RAFVR and was a Pilot Officer [Air Bomber] with 7 Squadron and was the rear gunner when he was killed in action over Brunswick on 14 January 1944.
He is buried in Hanover War Cemetery Plot Coll. grave 3. G. 4-11.
His parents who lived in Florence moved to South Africa during the war living at Witte Boomen Lodge, Constantia. His father died in Cape Town, just a few months after Nigel, on 11 August 1944. After the war, his mother returned to Florence where she died on 26 January 1967 at the age of 87.
His brother, Robert Talbot Richards served in the RAF during the war. He had gained his Royal Aero Club Flying Certificate at Brooklands Flying School on 14 December 1931. In 1932, he was the pilot with Lady Chaytor on her flight to Australia. He married Mary Lennie of Wellington, New Zealand in London in 1933.