My Life: Mayor Nick Cope recounts stories from his life

He was on the hunt for information about the wartime career of Nick’s father, Kit Silverwood-Cope.

Kit, like many who faced harrowing tests of human conditioning during the Second World War, spoke rarely of his experiences.

But his experiences were remarkable.

A Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, son of a decorated World War One hero and brother to an MI6 agent, Kit was captured by the Nazis during the fall of France.

Imprisoned at Prisoner of War camp Stalag XX1-D, in occupied Poland, he and several inmates managed to escape.

He spent 14 months living amongst the underground Polish resistance, before he was captured by the Gestapo, facing brutal interrogation and torture.

He was sent to Colditz prison until his eventual release as the war neared its end.

Later in his career he worked as a diplomat for the Foreign Office, deployed in Canada and in Hungary during the 1956 revolution.

But his first posting was in Rome, where his second son, Nick, was born in 1949.

Brought up in Surrey, Nick was entered into a boarding school in Kent at the age of four.

After progressing through a Sussex prep school, he admits he started to “muck about” in his teenage years.

“I can remember a lot of heartbreak, being packed off to boarding school so young, after living a high life in places like Budapest,” he said.

“I did get my A-levels and went to the University of East Anglia to take up social studies, but dropped out after one year.”

He met his future wife and current mayoress, Elizabeth, at the university.

Nick initially eschewed the high-flying path his parents took and instead took up roles in Norwich as a bus conductor and a farm hand.

“You have to learn how to relate to people from every background and I suppose it was a way of rounding off my personality,” he said.

“On the farm I would feed the pigs, I would get a lift back home and stand by the side of the road with my thumb out and hitchhike back – covered in muck.

“My parents weren’t too chuffed, but they were more or less supportive.”

It was Nick’s older brother, David, who was considered the rising star, but tragedy struck the family in 1967 when he took his own life.

“He was the star – a scholarship at Oxford and only 18 or 19 at the time,” said Nick.

“Suicide is the most awful thing that can happen to anyone, it leaves a family totally bereft.

“It leaves you torn between intense sympathy for the person who has died and anger about the fact they couldn’t share what they were going through, and over who they leave behind.

“After all these years he was the golden boy, it never goes away and it never leaves you.”

Nick married Elizabeth in 1971, and decided to return to his university education.

He was aged around 22 when he moved to Colchester with Liz, and still studying history at a London polytechnic.

“Liz got work in the town and her parents moved to Colchester too, though sadly both died in quick succession of cancer in their early 50s,” said Nick.

“At the time I was still a student, which is totally crazy.

“I got married and had a child on the way and was working a part-time job as a petrol pump attendant at Layer Road Service Station.

“I needed the bank of dad to help me buy the house.”

Nick also spent time working for Colchester Oyster Fishery, cleaning the oysters in preparation for their sale.

“I am sure I will be corrected, but I believe I am the only mayor who has actually worked on Colchester’s oysters,” he said.

“It was pretty hard work. There I was, from a public school background, going down to work on the docks.

“We would get on the boat at Brightlingsea and go to work.

“I would clean the oysters of their barnacles and take them down to the flats to be washed by the incoming tide.”

After graduating, Nick followed in his father’s footsteps and began a career as a civil servant from 1973.

He worked in the Home Office as an Executive Officer, but was frustrated in his attempts to move up the ladder.

The towering achievements of Nick’s father cast a long shadow.

“It was a different branch of the civil service to my dad,” said Nick.

“He had become the overseas director of the CBI and was instrumental in negotiations of entering the common market during the Heath government.

“I found it endlessly frustrating, the structure of it drove you potty with the annual report system and the lack of a promotion was very disappointing.

“I tried many times but never got a promotion.

“I thought I was a bright spark, but perhaps others didn’t.”

Nick was persuaded to stand for election to the former Colchester Council ward of St Mary’s in 1994.

He was drawn to the Liberal Democrats through his opposition to the privatisation of British Rail and his enthusiasm for a shift to the Proportional Representation voting system.

From 1994 until his retirement in 2010, he juggled his councillor duties with his civil service work in London.

“I had a double job of being civil servant in London, answering MPs questions about all sorts of things, then I would come back here and be doing the opposite sort of work, asking those type of questions of local government officers on behalf of residents,” he said.

The pinnacle of his time as a councillor came last year, when he was due to take up his mayoralty.

It so nearly didn’t happen.

“I was coming up for this election at the same time I was going to be mayor, I was deputy mayor the year before,” he said.

“It was a big hurdle I had to jump in order to become mayor, it was assumed I would lose that year.

“During an interval at the Mercury Theatre I was advised by Tim Young to switch parties to Labour, but I didn’t follow that advice.

“There was a guy from Colchester called Westley Sandford, who had to fight an election at the time he was due to become mayor, but was beaten by Tory Sonia Lewis, people started talking to me about that an awful lot.

“But I did win, and I think I was very lucky.

“My wife is massively significant in our joint entry into politics, I even said I was thinking of putting out a leaflet which said ‘vote Nick, get Liz’.

“She helps me in all sorts of ways.”

Nick’s father died in 1992, and his mother in 2013.

They never saw their son live out his proudest moment.

“It was the proudest moment of my life, there is nothing to follow this up,” he said.

“I think my parents would have been delighted.

“I think I benefitted from not just being the old boy from a public school background, the Oxbridge type.

“My experiences were broader than somebody who might have just kept on the same track.”

After recounting his experiences and memories of his father to the surprise Polish researcher, Nick realised how little he knew about his dad’s wartime career.

“My parents married before the war and I have some lovely letters which he used to write to her,” he said.

“There were these little official German postcards they were allowed to send from prison camps.

“They would have to tick a box to say ‘I’m well, I’m eating.’

“My father worked hard, and I don’t know how he did it, I wish I could say more to him now.

“The visit opened up a lot of thoughts and feelings.

“It seems like as a generation, we have been so lucky in so many ways.

“In not having to fight a war, and having come out of what our parent’s generation went through, it was horrifying to us.

“The opportunity we had to basically just muck about was fantastic and I appreciate I’m a lucky man.”