Mcdowell McDowell On McDowell

A Memoir
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84351-292-9
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Between clubs, dining halls, libraries, institutions and good addresses in the country, R.B. McDowell, born in September 1913, had led the charmed and energized existence of a distinguished bachelor don, embellishing the lives of generations of students - chiefly Trinity College undergraduates - fellow historians, academic colleagues and friends. In McDowell on McDowell, A Memoir, he describes this life, almost entirely shaped by a seventy-five year association with Trinity College, Dublin, with interludes at Radley, Oxfordshire during the second world war, in London after official retirement in 1981 and on the Continent for vacations. With spare, poised prose, which reveals as it conceals, he tells of origins in Edwardian Belfast and evokes memories of secondary education at Elmwood Sunday School, annual visits to London, and summers at Fahan and Portadown. He survives the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and experiences widening social and intellectual contours informed by avid reading in military history, eighteenth-century British politics, nineteenth-century fiction, Adam Smith, Marx and Spengler. In 1932 he progresses to TCD as lecturer, historian and writer, coming to identify with eighteenth-century Ireland - its buildings, politics and people - as the primary focus of his interest and work in a moving expression of its ethos and his own. He also provides fascinating, vivid cameos of Europe in crisis: visiting Cologne in January 1939, and in May 1968 joining student radicals on the Boulevard St Germain in Paris, an experience turned to account as he dealt with home-grown Internationalists in his capacity as Junior Dean (1956-69). This entertaining essay is self-portraiture, conveyed with the perception and ease of an after-dinner speaker and raconteur, alive to the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of his profession, is a valuable record of a unique Irishman and citizen of the world at the close of his days. R.B. MCDOWELL, who has been the subject of two volumes of tributes and reminiscences edited by Anne Leonard (The Junior Dean: Encounters with a Legend, 2003, and The Magnificent McDowell: Trinity in the Golden Era, 2006), is Emeritus Fellow and former Professor of History at Trinity College, Dublin. His own writings, from Irish Public Opinion 1750-1980 (1944) to Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1790-1801 (1979), include editions of Edmund Burke's letters and Theobald Wolfe Tone's journals, and biographies of Alice Stopford-Green (1967) and (with W.B. Stanford) J.P. Mahaffy (1971). The Lilliput Press has published four of his previous works: Land and Learning: Two Irish Clubs (1993), Crisis and Decline: The Fate of Southern Unionists (1997), Grattan: A Life (2001) and Historical Essays, 1838-2001 (2003).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mcdowell, R. B.

Leseproben

Undergraduate

IN THE SUMMER of 1932 I left ‘Inst’ and that autumn entered Trinity College Dublin. If, as I understand was the case, only about one in twenty of my generation went to university, I belonged to a privileged group – but that didn’t occur to me. An uncle had been a medical graduate in Edinburgh, and a cousin was studying engineering in Queen’s University Belfast. The children of a number of my parents’ friends were at a university and almost all my school friends had gone or were going to a university, so I took it for granted that a university was the next stage for me. Moreover, no other course of action suggested itself. Long ago I had realized that I was debarred on health grounds from the army, nobody thought that I had any aptitude for business, so it was assumed without debate that I was destined for a university. The question was which one? Only a few outstanding boys from ‘Inst’ went to Oxford or Cambridge, which were to me distant, unfamiliar and presumably very expensive; on the other hand to go to Queen’s, only a few minutes walk from No. 88, seemed decidedly unadventurous. Trinity offered a compromise, it was not too far away and it was one of ‘the older universities’. My imagination had been fired by Lever’s stories of Trinity life, and the old Trinity people I knew spoke of the college and the life within its walls with the greatest enthusiasm. Finally I must add that my father unhesitatingly agreed to pay my fees and supply me with an adequate allowance. He was not sure what this should be, so he opened an account in my name in a Grafton Street bank and presented me with a cheque book, telling me to be sensible. The arrangement worked well; I was by nature financially cautious and readily adopted the living standards of level-headed contemporaries. I was extremely grateful to my father for granting me financial responsibility and elbow room.

On entering Trinity I had to settle on my objectives. These were simple: enjoy intellectual and social life, study history and get a good degree. But because people often asked what I intended to do after university, I felt obliged to have an occupational objective. So I said I intended to take orders. I was impressed or tempted by seeing opportunities for leadership, and especially through preaching (the school debating society had encouraged my oratorical proclivity). But to be fair to myself I saw vague possibilities to being able to help people. However, halfway through my undergraduate career a college contemporary, distinguished for intellectual integrity, asked me conversationally did I seriously intend to take orders; given my temperament and cast of mind he said it would be scandalous for me to do so. I should, he said, aim at becoming a fellow in history. I took his advice, he became a bishop, and we remained good friends for the next sixty years or so.

The Trinity I entered was, of course, no longer in the United Kingdom but since 1922 in the Irish Free State. But the new constitutional set-up had only been in existence for ten years, so many people scarcely realized its implications. In any event all over the British Isles universities had comparatively little contact with government, so for Trinity people in general, both those working in the college and scattered far and wide, the college in ‘splendid isolation’ formed an academic enclave in Dublin, with few visitors passing through its gates; the age of mass tourism had not yet arrived. In addition to the customary gap between town and gown there were between the college and most Dubliners long-standing differences on important political and cultural issues. Still there were many ties, not only between the college and the old Trinity people living in Dublin, but between Trinity and the wider urban community. After all, they shared wind and weather, shops, theatres, restaurants and games. Constant contact with the world extramural may have done something to correct the academic man’s sense of complacent superiority. But it also tended to intensify the provinciality of the college.

I was lucky in one respect. At that time the supply of rooms in college about equalled the demand so I was granted rooms in the Graduates’ Memorial Building a few weeks after the beginning of my first lecture term. Those weeks I had spent in a boarding house in Northumberland Road. The landlady, a rector’s widow, was kindly, though at nineteen years old, conscious that I was a paying guest, I was at times rather irritated by her assumption of maternal prerogatives. My fellow guests included a retired Indian police officer who every evening had two boiled eggs at his high tea, a monotonous diet; a rector’s sister who carried around a magnificent, talkative parrot in a cage; an excessively polite UCD medical student and an admiral’s widow, the daughter of a papal duke. She was very vivacious and we gossiped happily together – about Dublin and County Kildare social life. During my stay she decided to move lodgings and I helped the cabman to take her trunk down the stairs; when we hit the banisters, the landlady called out from the hall in a very acid voice, ‘If you are leaving, Mrs [my friend’s name], you need not take the whole house with you!’

On entering Trinity I was overwhelmed by the size of the buildings and the extent of the grounds, with acres of open space and clumps of stunted bushes at odd corners, ‘wildernesses’, occupied by college cats, with the old parade ground at the east end where the Trinity College OTC had trained – ‘The only OTC’, Sir Robert Tate declared one evening, ‘which ever went into action as a body [in 1916], but gentlemen, we better not talk of that now.’ At night, with the squares dimly lit and the Park illuminated only by the poor lighting of adjacent streets, Trinity was steeped in a romantic darkness that exaggerated its size. I was also overwhelmed by the number of people, the size of the population being accentuated by a concentration of activities that led especially about midday to streams of people criss-crossing Front Square (which as a purist I learnt to term ‘Parliament Square’ and ‘Library Square’). In fact, the total undergraduate population was only about 1500, of which 350 were women whose participation in college life was limited by regulations, including the well-known ‘six o’clock rule’. The steady emancipation of women in Trinity since the mid twentieth century has afforded much satisfaction to those who are confident that the human situation is in every respect steadily improving.

However, it is quite interesting to try to recapture the outlook and mood of many at the time I am writing about. Since 1918, women had obtained admission to a number of spheres of public life, but middle-class parents, while happy that their daughters could enjoy more freedom than their grandparents, were anxious that they should be protected against the dangers lurking in what might be a too free-and-easy society. Victorian, Tennysonian ideals of womanhood and manhood were still prevalent, and college rules reflected parental as well as academic concern. One result of partial segregation was what I am inclined to consider as an entertaining social diversity. There were in college three worlds – a solely male world, a solely female world and a section of life in which men and women mingled, at lectures, parties and dances. In the third world, women were at an advantage because though a professional equality was coming into being, chivalry persisted; doors were opened for women and on numerous pleasant occasions, to the annoyance perhaps of an ardent feminist, men were expected to pay the bill. Moreover the threefold division of undergraduate society sharpened social sensibilities.

One aspect of the college made a deep impression on Trinity men and women and indeed on many Irish people: its traditions. It was a venerable institution of three and a half centuries, in a country where war and turmoil had made it difficult for institutions to become established. Trinity’s age was reflected in a long line of distinguished graduates, in its buildings, customs and routine – the wearing of gowns, the great bell tolling, chapel, roll-call, commons, the liveried porters in hunting caps. Three particular institutions were deeply embedded in college life – chapel, commons and night-roll. Chapel (morning prayer on Sundays) was compulsory for all resident episcopalian undergraduates. Though the attendance rule was enforced with reasonable flexibility, it was an obvious target for student radicals.

However, most undergraduates went readily enough; they were accustomed to regular church attendance at home and the service was impressive – the chapel filled by undergraduates in white or off-white surpluses, good music (the choir being composed of men and boys from St Patrick’s) and very often a good sermon. When the preacher was led to the pulpit by the college mace, the Anglican conception of Church and State, the academic and the ecclesiastical, was well symbolized. Though I attended regularly I did not approve of compulsion, so when I became Junior Dean in 1956 I agreed with the Senior Dean that I would not supply him with attendance lists, and he would not press me to do so. I have one very pleasant memory of my undergraduate...