Nicoll was born at the Manse in Kelso, Scotland, the son of William Robertson Nicoll, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He studied science at Cambridge before going on to St. Bartholomew's Hospital and then to Vienna, Berlin and Zurich where he became a colleague of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung's psychological relevations and his own work with Jung during this period left a lasting influence on Nicoll as a young man.[1] After his Army Medical Service in the 1914 War, in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, he returned to England to become a psychiatrist. In 1921 he met Petr Demianovich Ouspensky, a student of G. I. Gurdjieff and he also became a pupil of Gurdjieff in the following year. In 1923 when Gurdjieff closed down his institute, Nicoll joined P.D. Ouspensky's group. In 1931 he followed Ouspensky's advice and started his own study groups in England. This was done through a program of work devoted to passing on the ideas that Nicoll had gathered and passing them on through his talks given weekly to his own study groups. Many of these talks were recorded verbatim and documented in a six-volume series of texts compiled in his books Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Nicoll also authored books and stories about his experiences in the Middle East using the pseudonym Martin Swayne. Though Nicoll advocated the theories of the Fourth Way he also maintained interests in essential Christian teachings, in Neoplatonism and in dream interpretation until the end of his life.[1]