The department was greatly saddened to learn that our friend and former colleague Nicola Verdon was killed in a cycling accident on 29^th December.  Nicola was a research fellow in the Department from 2001 to 2004 and returned to us as an external examiner between 2018 and 2022. She also had a long connection with the Museum of English Rural Life, holding a fellowship in there 2005/6, curating an exhibition in 2011 and serving for several years on the MERL Advisory Committee.

Nicola was one of the most distinguished rural historians of her generation.  She was President of the British Agricultural History Society at the time of her death and had a long record of notable publications, especially in relation to the history of rural women and farmworkers.  Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-century England: Gender, Work and Wages (2002) and Working the Land: A History of the Farmworker in England from 1850 to the Present Day (2017) are likely to remain the standard works on these subjects for many years to come and she also leaves a rich legacy of journal articles and book chapters, mainly on rural women’s work.

Matt Worley writes: I shared an office with Nicola, back in our early days as scholars trying to find our way … lending each other mutual support as we endeavoured to secure a foothold in academia. Since then we always kept in touch and it was brilliant to see Nicola become a foremost historian, someone whose research was always engaging and genuinely groundbreaking. On a personal level, I will miss meeting up with Nicola at irregular intervals to put the world to rights. More importantly, I’ll miss her insights, humour and humanity. I know I speak for many when I say Nicola was an impeccable friend and colleague, someone who reminds us why we do what we do and why history matters.

Jeremy Burchardt writes: I first met Nicola when I began attending British Agricultural History Society conferences back in the 1990s.  She was one of Alun Howkins’s students at Sussex, carrying forward the great tradition of rural ‘history from below’ he had pioneered in the 1970s/80s, taking it into new areas particularly with respect to women farmworkers, who had been almost written out of history previously. Nicola made an outstanding and irreplaceable institutional contribution to rural history too – she was a mainstay of the BAHS, serving for years as the Society’s secretary (probably the most onerous job) and was ever-present on the executive committee. I was exams officer during the four years she spent as our external here at Reading and was very grateful for her unfailing friendliness, courtesy, reliability and efficiency and for the experienced eye she cast over our examination and assessment practices, suggesting ways we could update and streamline our processes without compromising on academic standards.  She epitomised professionalism in everything she did and will be greatly missed across the sector, especially among rural historians, though her humane and path-breaking scholarship will live on.