Tindal (-Carill-Worsley), Nicolas Henry Joseph ('Nick') (1911–2006), RAF pilot and farmer, was born 7 March 1911, the only son of Ralph Tindal-Carill-Worsley (1881–1966), an officer in the Royal Navy, and his wife Kathleen (née Mangan) (d. 1961), the third daughter of Simon Mangan, of Dunboyne Castle, lord lieutenant of Co. Meath. His parents married 9 July 1906 in St Francis Xavier Church, Gardiner Street, Dublin. By 1911, when Nicolas was born, Kathleen was living with relatives at 14 Lower Churchtown Road, Milltown, Dublin, while Ralph was on active service aboard the royal yacht. The marriage, which also produced two daughters, broke down about this time. Ralph retired from the navy in August 1912 as an acting lieutenant-commander and was declared bankrupt in February 1914 after amassing considerable gambling debts.
Nicolas was reared in Ireland and England among a large extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins. He was educated at St John's, Beaumont, Berkshire, a Jesuit preparatory school, and Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and entered TCD in 1928. Stocky and athletic, he was a fine tennis player and played rugby at Trinity and in the RAF. In 1930 he applied for and won an RAF commission open to university students, and during the summers undertook flight training on Gipsy Moths at Filton near Bristol. Graduating BA in autumn 1932, he moved to England, and in July 1935 became engaged to Winifred Mary (b. 1913), the only daughter of Major Harold Cooper, originally of Ballyconneely, Co. Galway; they married in London on 27 June 1936 and had seven children, four boys and three girls, from 1937 to 1953.
After attending flying training school at Grantham, Lincolnshire, Tindal completed further training at Old Sarum, Wiltshire, and became such an accomplished pilot that he was made an instructor at the Central Flying School, Upavon, Wiltshire. In 1937 he was posted to RAF Abbotsinch near Glasgow. He served for a time with RAF Coastal Command but, after the outbreak of war in September 1939, trained on bombers and, promoted to squadron leader, commanded a bomber squadron based at Cottesmore in Rutland. He was shot down on a bombing raid over northern France on the night of 7 December 1940. After interrogation, he was transferred to Dulag Luft in Oberursel, near Frankfurt, a transit camp for captured Allied airmen. With sixteen others, he managed to escape through a tunnel in June 1941, only to be recaptured in the Black Forest after hitching a ride on a goods train that ended up in one of the Wehrmacht's main training areas. He spent two weeks in solitary confinement. Winifred knew her husband had been captured, having been informed privately by the Air Ministry and publicly by Lord Haw Haw (qv) in his weekly roundup of captured POWs. Tindal spent most of the next three years in Stalag Luft I, near Barth, Western Pomerania, where he planned and undertook several unsuccessful escape attempts, hiding in a dung cart on one occasion and disguising himself as a German officer on another. He endured further spells in solitary confinement and was mentioned in despatches for his determined efforts to escape.
Transferred to Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Lower Silesia (latterly Żagań, Poland), he assisted in preparations for the famous 'great escape' of 24–5 March 1944 by digging tunnels and forging stamps and documents, an activity in which he had gained considerable expertise. 200 prisoners were to make the escape attempt through three tunnels and, although allotted a place, Tindal gave it to a fellow Czech airman who was anxious to return to England to see his wife and child. During the night seventy-six prisoners managed to escape; seventy-three were captured, and fifty of these were summarily executed by the Gestapo, among them the Czech airman who had taken Tindal's place. Tindal was on the parade ground when the ashes of the executed men were returned, and remembered the heavy pall of gloom that hung over the camp for months afterwards and caused some of the prisoners to lose their senses and make suicidal escape attempts.
The westward advance of the USSR's Red Army led the Germans to evacuate Stalag Luft III at the end of January 1945 to prevent the return of highly trained airmen to the Allied cause. The ensuing forced night marches in bitter winter led to much suffering and loss of life; food and sustenance had often to be obtained from sympathetic locals as Wehrmacht discipline and order gave way. Tindal and the other POWs who survived the four-week march were eventually liberated by British forces.
After the war Tindal was promoted to wing commander and posted to Flying Training School, Shrewsbury. He became commander of 324 Fighter Wing (1946–7) and of E Sector of RAF Fighter Command (1947). He saw service in Palestine, Italy and Austria, before returning to England as commanding officer at RAF Coltishall. He retired from the service in 1948 with the rank of group captain.
After his retirement he moved to Ireland to be close to his elderly mother. He sold property he had inherited in England and bought Ballyloughan House and an accompanying mixed fruit and dairy farm at Bruckless, near Killybegs, Co. Donegal; here he raised his growing family. (He later described the area as 'bad land lovely part of the world good fishing' (Look west radio documentary)). He had studied agriculture while a prisoner of war, and proved to be an innovative farmer and a good businessman, pioneering progressive methods such as zero grazing and organic livestock farming, both largely unknown in Ireland at this time. He was one of the first fruit growers in Ireland to introduce cold storage, and his orchards were highly successful until wiped out by Hurricane Debbie in 1961. Undaunted, Tindal responded by turning part of the farm over to battery hens. Active in the National Farmers' Association (NFA; latterly, the IFA), he defended farm subsidies in the 1960s, before Ireland acceded to the EEC, as a means of reducing consumer food costs, and he was prominent in Donegal NFA protests against Charles Haughey as minister for agriculture in October 1966.
Known locally as 'the Captain', Tindal was a popular figure in Donegal, notorious in his family for chatting for hours with anyone he met on the road. Although he was known to sack unreliable workers and prosecute poachers, he was a compassionate man who was always willing to help those less fortunate than himself. From 1952 he worked tirelessly as Donegal county representative for the RAF Benevolent Fund. In 1975 he and his wife retired to Bofeenaun on the shores of Lough Conn, near Pontoon, in Co. Mayo, where they built a secluded lakefront home. There he enjoyed fishing and gardening. He was a devout catholic and daily mass-goer and was deeply devoted to his wife Winifred, to whom he was married for over sixty years. After she died in 1997, he gradually shed most of his possessions. Nicolas Tindal died 28 January 2006 at Dunkirk Memorial Home, Bishops Lydeard, Somerset, a British Legion care home. He was survived by three sons and two daughters, and was laid to rest with his wife after a requiem mass in the graveyard adjoining the church of St Joseph and St Conal, Bruckless, Co. Donegal.