Alexander James Ashburner Nix

Sources

• Wikipedia: Alexander Nix
• Marriage announcement, The Daily Telegraph
• "Nix of Tilgate," Burke's Landed Gentry, 16th ed., 1939, p. 1686
• Pedigree of the family of Ashburner

Family

Alexander James Ashburner Nix was born on 1 May 1975 to a banking family that belonged to the English landed gentry, the Ashburner-Nix family of Crawley and London. His father Paul David Ashburner Nix (1944–2006) was an investment banker. He was raised in Notting Hill, London.

The Ashburner Nix family were wealthy bankers for several generations and the Ashburner family had long-standing ties to India as merchants and administrators in British-ruled India. The Ashburner Nix family owned Tilgate House, a large 2,185-acre estate in Crawley that employed around 150 people. It was purchased by the wealthy Indian-born businessman George Ashburner in 1862 and inherited by his daughter Sarah (born 1845 in Calcutta), who in 1865 married banker John Hennings Nix, one of the partners in the London private bank Fuller, Banbury, Nix & Co. Their son—Alexander Nix' great-grandfather—was the olympian Charles George Ashburner Nix who won a silver medal at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London; he sold Tilgate House in 1939.

Nix' great-grandmother Mildred Ashburner Nix (1876–1949) was a daughter of liberal politician James Clifton Brown (1841–1917) and a sister of The Viscount Ruffside. Through her mother Amelia Rowe (1845–1922) Mildred descended from slave owners, free people of color and black slaves in Jamaica; Amelia's father Charles Rowe, Jr. (1819–1876) was of mixed race, an Octoroon in the parlance of the time, and was born in Jamaica to the wealthy slave owner Charles Rowe, Sr. (1754–1821) and his 28-years younger mistress Mary Gauntlett (1782–1831), "a free Quadroon" who owned slaves herself. Mary's sister Susannah was the mistress to another member of the Rowe family; among women of colour in Jamaica it was considered more respectable to be the mistress of a white man than to marry a person of colour, and such relations were largely the rule for Jamaican women of colour at the time (see J. Stewart, A view of the past and present state of the island of Jamaica). Mary Gauntlett was herself born out of wedlock to Elizabeth Roche (De La Roche, Delaroche; 1761–1812), a half black woman described in 1795 as "a free mulatto", and Lieutenant William Gauntlett; Elizabeth Roche was the daughter of Mary, "a freed Negro" born around 1740, and white planter John De La Roche. After her lover's death in 1821, Mary Gauntlett moved to Liverpool, England with their children, where the family apparently passed as white; Charles Rowe, Jr. became a partner in the firm Graham, Rowe & Co. with his brothers and their English in-laws; based in Liverpool the company opened offices in Lima, Peru and Valparaíso, Chile, and notably imported sugar to England. Charles Rowe married 16-year old Sarah Amelia Pfeiffer in Liverpool in 1841; Pfeiffer was born in Lima in 1825 to Friedrich Pfeiffer, a flour merchant from Hanover who had moved to Peru around 1821.

Marriage

Alexander Nix is married to Caroline Victoria Olympia Paus (b. 1976 in Greece), a Norwegian shipping heiress who was raised in Holland Park, London. Her parents are Christopher Paus, an investor in the shipping and petroleum industry, and Cecilie Paus née Wilhelmsen, who became one of the main owners of the shipping company Wilh. Wilhelmsen in 1978.