For 50 years I thought I knew my grandfather. John Arthur Nix. Gentleman journalist, three-piece suit, cane, hat, an air of sophistication, erudite. An elegant man. That was about it. I was seven when he died.
And then my aunt Rachel passed away and we found the devil’s advocate in the attic – letters; profound and controversial articles written for a myriad of publications; books, the classics, French and English literature, all with his Pittman shorthand notes in the margins; the manuscript; and a cantankerous letter – from Dev.
A total stranger jumped off every page.
John A Nix was the author of the novel, The Master’s Choice, launched last month by me, his grandson, who found the manuscript among her papers when aunt Rachel died in New Ross a few years back. It’s a self-publishing project, available from Amazon and on Kindle and soon in bookshops.
Because my dad, Arthur Nix, had died three years before my grandfather’s death in 1956, the direct paternal family link and history had become diffused. But now the garret door beckoned us into the revolutionary and journalistic world where the real John A Nix lived his 72 years. And what fun it was. It was that Wizard moment when drab, grey Kansas transformed into Technicolor Oz. And we skipped down the Yellow Brick Road – me and Indiana Jones.
Turns out Granddad had been acting editor of the Galway Express newspaper in 1920 when the Black and Tans came and smashed it up. During the Civil War his house in New Ross was the county HQ of the Anti-Treaty Party. It was searched often and arrests ordered which caused a fatality. He bought a printing works in nearby Adamstown but lost a packet on it. As manager of the Wicklow Newsletter he clandestinely printed Robert Barton literature for the 1923 election. The imprint was illegally omitted and the type “pied” immediately afterwards. The paper lost the county council advertising over it and he “incurred the displeasure of my non-Catholic Unionist employers”.
"As managing editor of the Clare Record, alias the Bishop's Paper," his papers disclose, "I worked in devious ways for the Fianna Fáil cause in 1927-29. Lost favour with His Lordship and had to sever my connection with said newspaper."
But nowhere does he mention the fact, which I discovered only recently on googling “Galway Express Nix”, that he was charged with sedition after the Black and Tan incident. A cross-reference pointing to the British national archives for 1920 elicited the information that that material is not yet digitised. But the curators tell me I’m welcome to come to Kew in London and see it for myself, which I will soon, to establish the end result.
Grandfather charged with sedition during British rule? How proud can you be?
But it was The Irish Press episode when he annoyed the arse off Dev which has us all here on this page today. “I became a three-figure shareholder in The Irish Press two years before it was started,” his Social and Political Background document reveals. “I was incontinently ignored in respect of a position in that paper later on the mere ipsi dixit of one man whom I had befriended; without a test of any kind. Whole position falsified before the controlling Director. Expect to be now vindicated even at this belated hour.”
But that vindication never came.
Two letters from Eamon de Valera are in the collection. The first, dated January 9th, 1931, informed my grandfather that the leader writers and sub-editors for the nascent Irish Press were unlikely to be chosen much before May and that the policy of the board would be to interfere as little as possible with the discretion of the editor in all such matters.
But the second letter, dated August 14th, 1931, just three weeks before The Irish Press presses began to roll, is a much more forceful epistle – and obviously a reply to a cantankerous letter my grandfather had sent him, apparently blaming a named individual from standing in his way. “There are no ‘favourites’ and no other form of ‘hand-picking’,” it declares. “In fact the point in the one or two complaints that I have received seems to be precisely this – that some form of favouritism has not been shown.”
John A Nix never did get to write for The Irish Press. He did, however, write articles for the Irish Independent, sometimes using the pseudonym Sean Sneachta (sneachta being the Irish word for snow; nix being its Latin equivalent).
But he didn’t just sit around and brood about his disappointment. The Master’s Choice is testament to that and the book actually tells us so. The tract is ostensibly a novel, but in the final pages we discover that it is partly autobiographical too. A lot of the fun for me has been figuring out how much of our fictional hero, Marley Swanton, was John A Nix.
“Marley Swanton” in the last pages reflects on his “over-flowing bowl of sorrows”, including his acceptance that he is not going to get a job in this “new newspaper starting in Dublin”, despite knowing the managing director well and having “often befriended him in the past when he was a poor struggling politician”. He had even addressed meetings on his behalf during general elections in backward parts of the county where he was not known. And he had a hundred pounds worth of stock in the paper. “Life up to the present has been an unbroken series of disappointment and inhibitions for me,” he declares. For want of something better to do, the book says, he jumped up, made a grab at a pen and a wad of paper and proceeded to write his first novel, making it partially autobiographical.
Now, 84 years later, here it is, The Master’s Choice appearing in public for the first time.
The Irish Press, of course, is dead 20 years now. But if we weren’t represented there at the start, Granddad, we were there at the finish. Ironically, I worked as an IP journalist for 22 happy years up to its demise in 1995 and without ever hearing a word of how the organisation hurt you so. Sorry, Granddad, I just didn’t know.
But thank you, Granddad, for this beautiful book you left us. I love every word of it – the story, the characterisation, the social history, your searingly accurate insight into the human condition, your command of the language and your understanding of rural Irish life. You really were the master.
The Master’s Choice by John A Nix is available on Amazon and Kindle and in bookshops soon
