SEEING Fergus Pyle back in the office after a break was always like seeing a bright and well liked but mildly ill organised boy back at boarding school after the summer hols.
He was always affably chaotic, as if his clever boyish brain were mildly distracted by some wizard scheme he had concocted to pipe water to the Afghan deserts by means of icebergs towed from Greenland, or perhaps he had been turning over in his mind the fourth irregular Greek conjugation, or, maybe he was thinking about the Ems telegram, and what reply he would have sent.
Fergus was like a pupil from Greyfriars, not a swot, not a bully, not a sporting tyro, not a sneak, not a toady, but a clever sort of Bob Cherry whom everybody in the class liked. He was cleverer than anybody else; around, but never wore his knowledge on his sleeve, and always helped other chaps with their prep.
Always running
And when it came to playing a game of footer in the play - ground, and the two best boys at footer had to choose teams, he wouldn't be the first to be selected. But he wouldn't be the last. After the best footballers had been grabbed, a team captain would always go for Fergus. He would have played full back or centre, his kicking enthusiastic if a little unskilled and inaccurate; and he would never stop running backwards and forwards. And if Fergus had fallen over, the other boys would have clustered fondly about his round and breathless form a rueful grin on his face as he rubbed at his latest set of bruises.
He would never shirk a tackle, never pretend injury, never lord it over other boys, never show another chap up in Latin or Greek. He was the embodiment of the collegiate values, of the old school of never letting a fellow down, and he never did.
He was also the embodiment, just about the last one in this newspaper, of what was once the core identity of The Irish Times. He came from that, Dublin Protestant society which to all extents and purposes no longer exists as a separate ethnic caste, and for which The Irish Times was once a community newspaper. The total social and ecumenical reorientation of the capital in the past few decades has created a secular, non religious, and even irreligious culture in which people are barely aware of one another's creed.
But the world in which Fergus grew up was a world where publicly unspoken loyalties and old identities burned within the coven of school and church and tennis club and Boys Brigade.
Dublin Protestants in 1935, the year of Fergus's birth, were Irish and felt themselves such. But they were an ethnic minority whose own ethical rules were; but they were treated by the all dominant, Catholic church and the political majoritarianism of Dail Eireann. They were not discriminated against in the way Northern Catholics were; but they were treated in a negligent and scornful manner.
Many of them were made not to feel at home within the Republic and throughout the 1920s and 1930s there was a steady movement of Dublin Protestants to the North and. Britain. Those who stayed did so for mixed reasons - economic interest of course being one; but pride in their Irishness, of who and what they had been and were, still burned in those covens of minority identity. Ireland might not have loved these Protestants very well, might have disregarded their civil rights, and might even have sneered at them in the Dail; but they loved Ireland more than well in return.
Once served Empire
Fergus was such a Protestant, and retained many of the characteristics of the caricature of that society. He was scholarly in a Moody Lyons Trinityesque way, and intellectually confident as befitted a class and caste which had once served empire, so well, and which expected its scions to know the name of the Belgian Finance Minister and what the implications of his policies towards the French franc might be.
And from that caste, that class, he drew upon a boyish innocence and bubbling humour that would bring a smile to all our faces when he bustled into the newsroom with a big cheery" grin on his face and with news of his latest wheeze.
He expected us, in a thoroughly chummy and unaffected manner, to be as easy in foreign languages as he was. He left me on more than one corner, a glassy smile on my face", concealing my incomprehension, as he retired to his little eyrie chortting with glee over a pun which he had just regaled me with from the pages of Le Matin or the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
If I wanted to discover a recondite piece of information, I would turn to Fergus. When I wanted the name of a piece of a 1930s French music hall song of which I knew just three bars, I hummed it to him - J'Attendrai, he said, and with his big cheery facing bursting with boyish pride, he sang me, the entire song. It is a haunting tune, steeped in a sense of loss, of a world which is passed gone, and will not return, even though, if J'Attendrai.
And the world from which Fergus came is well nigh gone, and for all sorts of reasons - the two world wars included. The Whitaker economic reforms of the 1960s began to alter the economic position of Protestants in Dublin and simultaneously, Vatican II and the calamity of the North reminded us how absurd and barbarous it is, to carry into social and political life our differences in religion.
Inky and Cheery
Yet, there was something to be said for that old Protestant society, not least its cultivation of collegiate qualities of which Fergus, a cheery schoolboy to the end, embodied. This newspaper once represented that society and recruited from it and now it is our melancholy duty to observe its last rites and to honour a man who personified all that was good about it. He was the last of the old Irish Times. H.is death is a huge personal and professional toss for us all but it is also a landmark in the social history of Ireland.
J'Attendrai; but come, what may, I will not see his like again.