LIAISON OFFICER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 315, 28 March 1928, Page 11

LIAISON OFFICER

DOMINION AND BRITAIN ARRIVAL OF MR. NICHOLS (From Our Resident Reporter.) WELLINGTON, Tuesday. Mr. P. B. B. Nichols, who has been appointed by the Imperial Government to act as liaison officer attached to the Prime Minister’s Department in Wellington, arrived by the Maunganui after making the voyage from England via Suez and Australia. The Prime Minister, the Right Hon. J. G. Coates, stated this afternoon that Mr. Nichols had been seconded for duty on Imperial affairs in an advisory and consultative capacity, the period of the appointment being two years. Mr. Nichols is 33 years ot age, and was born of English parents. He received his education at Winchester, and at Balliol College, Oxford, and served in the Great War from August. 1914, until March, 1919, first as a subaltern in the 7th Suffolk Regiment, and then as from the close of 1916, on brigade staff as staff captain, and subsequently as brigade major. He was wounded in action, was awarded the Military Cross, and was twice mentioned in dispatches. After the war Mr. Nichols returned to Balliol for one term, and then went abroad to France and Spain. In May, 1920, he entered the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, and in October of the same year he acted as secretary to his Majesty’s Legation in Vienna, where he remained until September. 1923. Returning to the Foreign Office, he was appointed secretary for a few months to the Anglo-American Pecuniary Claims Arbitration Tribunal, and subsequently he was employed in the Foreign Office first in the Egyptian Department, and latterly in the Far Eastern Department, where he was stationed when he received orders to proceed to New Zealand. Mr. Nichols has also travelled in Mexico and Central America.