Neville Nankivell spent 40 years at the Financial Post, rising to editor-in-chief and eventually publisher.Jeff Wasserman/The Globe and Mail
Neville Nankivell, who died on May 3 at 91, was the long-time editor and publisher of the Financial Post. Perhaps its most important years were during the 1970s and 80s when it was a weekly broadsheet under his leadership. Mr. Nankivell and his colleague Dalton Robertson produced a serious weekly business newspaper that was must reading for corporate leaders, senior mandarins in Ottawa, politicians and investors.
One reason that it was so readable, and credible, was that it was politically neutral and well connected in business and politics.
“The Financial Post was the only newspaper that never wrote an endorsement of any political party at election time. The culture was about policy, not politics,” said Doug Knight, who started as a young journalist at the Financial Post and much later became its publisher.
“During the years when debt and deficit was a big thing and GST and free trade were big issues, Neville was in favour … of free trade and GST, and having nothing to do with Liberals or Tories," Mr. Knight said. “It was just a good policy.”
Neville Nankivell was born on Dec. 8, 1934, in Cottesloe, a suburb of Perth, in Western Australia. His father, John, ran a taxi business and his mother, Ivy Nankivell (née Savage), operated a pub in later life.
Young Neville went to a private school, Scotch College, where he started playing rugby, something he did until he was 56. He earned an economics degree at the University of Western Australia, where he was the publisher of the school paper, The Pelican.
After graduating, Neville and a friend set off for the United States, working on a Norwegian freighter. They stopped off in Hong Kong, where somehow they met the Canadian trade commissioner, who gave them a letter of introduction to get into Canada. They arrived in Vancouver in 1956.
Neville worked in the oilfields in Alberta and, being an educated man, soon landed a job with Canadian Press in Winnipeg. He transferred to CP’s Toronto office, and worked full time while juggling classes at the University of Toronto, where he earned a economics-related master’s degree. He also found time to play rugby and was the captain of the U of T rugby team that won a championship, earning induction into the University of Toronto Sports Hall of Fame.
He met his future wife, Joan Davidson around this time. Mr. Nankivell applied first to The Globe and Mail, but the newspaper offered him a job in sales in Northern Ontario. His future father-in-law had a subscription to the Financial Post, which Neville found interesting, and by 1959 he was working as a reporter for the paper.
Mr. Nankivell spent 40 years at the Financial Post, rising to editor-in-chief and eventually publisher. He worked closely with Mr. Robertson, who was executive editor of the paper. The two men hired people who didn’t necessarily have a journalism degree but who were well-educated and could learn the craft of journalism on the job.
One of those people was Barry Critchley, who had an economics degree but no journalism experience.
“Neville hired me in July of 1980,” said Mr. Critchley, who stayed with the paper in its various iterations until 2018. He said Mr. Nankivell’s newsroom was a great place to work.
“Neville ran a collegial ship. The paper came out on a Tuesday and the highlight of the week was getting a note of praise for your work from Neville,” said Mr. Critchley, who for many years wrote a Bay Street insider column.
In the era when Mr. Nankivell was editor and then publisher, business journalism was dominated by men. Not at the Financial Post.
“The other thing that was notable at the time was that Neville and Dalton were hiring women journalists at the Post more than anybody else,” Mr. Knight said. “Women like Anne Bower and Bea Riddell and Ann Shortell, or Patricia Best who, in those days if you looked around there just weren’t very many women in journalism never mind in business journalism,” Mr. Knight said.
“Neville was a courageous editor in the sense that he ran stories whether the establishment liked them or not,” Ms. Best said. “Bea Riddell ran stories very critical of Revenue Canada and in those days that wasn’t done as much. He cared about stuff that really mattered that most people couldn’t wrap their heads around.”
Giles Gherson was another inspired hire at the Financial Post. He joined as a 21-year-old intern and stayed at the paper for 11 years. Mr. Gherson would go on to become editor of the Toronto Star among other accomplishments. He had a lot of respect for the man who hired him.
“When Neville hired you, he put a lot of faith in you. He led by example and people knew what he wanted,” Mr. Gherson said. “Neville was hard-driving, ambitious, smart and incisive. He was very much ‘play by the rules’, as a good sportsman should be. So, that was the way the Post approached business journalism, not ideological at all but rather how does business grow and prosper; are they abiding by the rules and are the rules good or do they need to be reformed but very much taking the cues from the senior business leaders and he was quite close to a number of them. It was a different, more genteel period, let’s be honest.”
Mr. Nankivell, like many Australians, was keen on watching and playing sports, in his case, cricket and squash, as well as rugby.
He hired Peter Foster, a rugby-playing Briton, in 1976. The two played rugby against each other and with each other.
“We also played squash which he regarded like rugby as a full-contact sport and on one occasion he swung his racquet and I ended up with five stitches in my eyebrow. Shortly afterwards he gave me a pay raise,” Mr. Foster said.
At the Financial Post, Mr. Foster was assigned to the energy beat. He wrote a bestseller on the Alberta oil business, The Blue-eyed Sheiks, and went full-time freelance after the success of his book. He was always grateful to Mr. Nankivell and the Financial Post for his assignment to the energy beat.
The Financial Post went daily in 1988, by which time it had been sold by Maclean-Hunter and was controlled by the Toronto Sun, with the Financial Times of London and Conrad Black holding a minority interest. Mr. Nankivell stepped down as publisher that year and was later assigned to the London bureau of the paper as editor-at-large, working out of the offices of the Financial Times. He also became a member of the Middlesex Cricket Club and was a regular attendee at the famous Lord’s Cricket Ground. London was a posting he and his wife, Margret Brady, loved.
He returned to Canada and worked in the Ottawa bureau. He retired in 1999 at the age of 65, the compulsory retirement age at the time. In retirement, Mr. Nankivell continued to write on business subjects that interested him. He was a keen gardener and played tennis.
Mr. Nankivell attended conferences of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when he was publisher of the Financial Post, and was involved in a wide range of organizations from the Metropolitan District Health Council of Toronto, an advisory role at both the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia and the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Nankivell’s first wife, Joan, died of breast cancer in 1983. He married Ms. Brady, known as Peggy, in 1985. He leaves Ms. Brady; his sons, William and Jeff; a brother and two sisters; and four grandchildren.
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