R. B. McDowell

Life
1914-2011 [Robert Brendan McDowell], b. 14 Sept., in Co. Louth, son of tea-merchant at Musgrave’s (Belfast), with family connections in Birr, Co. Offaly; suffered double-pneumonia in childhood; ed. Belfast Academical Inst. where he was taught by John Pyper and made much use of the Linenhall Library, and TCD; grad. BA (History), 1936, having successfully taken Schol. that year; PhD supervised by Constantia Maxwell, on Irish Public Opinion, 1938 (publ. 1944); collaborated with Edmund Curtis on Irish Historical Documents (1943)- in fact producing most of the work - much frequenting Marsh’s Library, Dublin, 1938-42 - where he became a Keeper in 1958-74; appt. lecturer at Radley College, Oxfordshire, 1943, having been beaten by E.R.R Green to the vacancy at TCD occasioned by Curtis’s death; unfit for military service in WII whenn his only br. was shot down and killed in Coastal Command; evacuated to Berkshire;

returned to Dublin after the war and was appt. lecturer, TCD, Oct. 1945 on resignatiion of E.E.R Green; elected TCD Fellow, 1951; edited the Thomas Davis lecture series (Rado Eireann, pub. by Mercier); appt. Junior Dean, 1956-69; contrib. to RTE “Postbag” in the 1960s; Assoc. Prof. Modern History, 1962-82; issued The Irish Convention, 1917–18 (1970) and Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists (1997; also edited vols. of Burke’s Correspondence (vii & ix, 1969-70), and Vol. IX of Burke’s Writings and Speeches (1991); he also edited the Writings of Wolfe Tone in 3 vols. (1998, 2001, and 2007); honours incl. MRIA, LLD and D.Litt;

though eccentric in everyday attire - especially for the worn overcoat and battered trilby - he was famed as a dinner-party speaker and met with numerous celebrities incl. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful chez Desmond Guinness; appt. to Erasmus Chair of Oratory, 1981, and retired in the same year; settle din a basement flat in Kilburn (London) but returned to Trinity as an emeritus fellow, resuming occupancy of college up to 2008 [aetat. 94]; moved to Glenashling Nursing Home, Celbridge, Co. Kildare, where he died, 28 Aug. 2011; a series of homage-compilations were edited by Anne Leonard, viz., The Junior Dean, and The Magnificent McDowell (2006) also McDowell on McDowell: A Memoir (2008); there is a portrait by Derek Hill; d. 2 Aug. 2011; he retained his British passport throughout his lifetime; the Guardian obit. is by Richard Pine (14 Sept. 2011). DIW

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Criticism
Polemic, Daniel Corkery, ‘They Look to London’, in The Sunday Press (2 Aug. 1953); Corkery, ‘The Struggle between Native and Colonist’, in The Sunday Press (30 Aug. 1953) [responses to Irish Public Opinion 1750-1800 and Public Opinion in Ireland 1801-1846].

There is an irreverent portrait of McDowell by Peter Hinchcliffe, a TCD undergraduate (1957-61) and Radleian Old Boy. In it, McDowell asks him to organise a party for old Radleians at which McDowell is unceremonious suspended during the proceedingsby the lapel ‘of his tightly buttoned filthy blue overcoat from the hook at the back of my sitting-room door’. (Trinity Tales: Trinity College, Dublin, in the Sixties, ed. Sebastian Balfour et. al. (Lilliput Press 2009), p.15.

Homage, Anne Leonard, ed., Junior Dean R. B. McDowell: Encounters with a Legend (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2003), 176pp.; Leonard, ed., The Magnificent McDowell: Trinity in the Golden Era (London: Eccleston Press 2006), xi, 150pp.

See interview by David Dickson in History Ireland, 19:6 (Nov.-Dec. 2011) - online [or copy as attached]; also Guardian obituary by Richard Pine - online.

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Commentary
Hereward Senior, review of The Irish Administration (1964), in The Canadian Historical Review, 46:4 (Toronto UP Dec. 1965), pp.374-75: ‘;[...] Professor McDowell has maintained the high standard set in his previous works on public opinion in Ireland. In presenting what is necessarily a detailed account of thevarious departments of the Irish government, he has nowhere permitted the main features of the administration to be drowned in a sea of facts, and the style andorganization of the book might well provide a model for future studies in administrative history. In the eighteenth century and during the early days of the union, the administration had the twofold purpose of managing the affairs of Ireland and providing a living for various categories of persons possessing political influence. However, if sinecurists and pluralists contributed little to the efficiency of the bureaucracy, they added to its charm and there is something to be said for their services to society as a leisure class. Professor McDowell describes how reforming Irish secretaries and viceroys gradually abolished departments made redundant by the union, and pruned the administration of the ambiguities and abuses inherited from the previous century. By degrees, men of the Protestant ascendancy were pushed aside and a modern administration emerged with personnel selected more for qualifications than for political influence. Perhaps the outstanding achievement of the administration during the century was thecreation of a national police force in 1835, which became the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1867. Professor McDowell points out that concern for economy and the influence of laissez-faire did not permit the planned expansion of the bureaucracy; consequently, the growth of the administration did not keep pace with the needs of Irish society. Moreover, nationalist agitation was directed towards “Home Rule,” [375] rather than administrative reform, and the “Unionists” were reluctant to call attention to abuses in the existing system. For all that, most senior officials were men of ability and integrity who served Ireland well within the limits of their resources. The absence of an industrial revolution left Ireland an underdeveloped country, faced with a population explosion and a restless intelligentsia among whom political agitation was a favourite recreation and, in some cases, a profession. Although the administration failed to cope with the famine and was not shown at its best during the land war,it is difficult to see how an independent Ireland, dominated by an O’Connell or Parnell, could have created more effective agencies of government. And it was on the foundation provided by unionist administrators that twentieth-century Ireland built its independence. In The Irish Administration, Professor McDowell has avoided dullness in a field which does not lend itself to lively prose, and his study might be read withprofit not only by students with a special interest in Irish history, but also by those concerned with administration in any part of the world." (pp.374-75; available at MUSE - online; accessed 18.06.2024.)

Alvin Jackson, review of Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists (Lilliput 1997), in Irish Studies Review, 6, 3 (Dec. 1998), calls the author a ‘patriarch of Irish history’ and a ‘survivor of a heroic age’; counts Crisis and Decline and important work for its ‘sensitive and fair-minded analysis of the southern Unionist plight, and also for its frank insights into the personal history of the author ... not excessively self-indulgent’; notes remarks addressed to ‘neo-ex-Unionists’ in present time. Jackson considers that the autobiographical chapter ‘raises questions of definition which are nowhere systematically addressed, still less answered’, among them the meaning of the term Southern Unionist. If purely geographical, how can it include Edward Saunderson, Cavan-born Unionist who was MP for N. Armagh, 1885-1906? Concludes that McDowell regards the term as embracing a series of social and political attitudes that marked a ‘line of division’ which, though marked, was ‘less than perfect’ (in McDowell’s phrases). Jackson calls for an analysis of the continuities of Unionism, given the tendency among historians since the early 1970s to emphasise the distinctions. (p.319.)

Christopher Wheatley, ‘“Our own good, plain, old Irish English”: Charles Macklin/Cathal McLaughlin and Protestant Convert Accommodations’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 4, 1 (Autumn 1998), disputes McDowell’s claim that working-class Irish immigrants to Britain in the late eighteenth century did not feel themselves to be aliens. (Vide McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1979; Wheatley, op. cit., p.84.)

Who is he?; Seán de Fréine quotes McDowell in The Great Silence: the study of a relationship between language and nationality (Mercier 1978): ‘Dr. McDowell says, “it was so instinctive and rooted in his being that he never bothers to analyse and expound it systematically”’ [my italics] - and quotes further: ‘All the time Ireland, like the rest of Europe, was being quietly permeated by French cultural influences. Translations of French books were printed in Dublin and French authors filled the shelves of Irish libraries.’ (Public Opinion and Govt. Policy in Ireland, 1952; p.87 [?or De Fréine].)

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Quotations
Grattan: A Life (Dublin: Lilliput 2001) - McDowell writes: ‘Emancipation was a misleading term. The Catholics were not in a state of slavery. The privileges denied them were the right to sit in Parliament and to hold “the principal situations of trust and power under the crown”, the offices which might be regarded as constituting the government of the country. In short, the Catholics were not asking for civil rights - these they already possessed - but were demanding political power. Was it expedient this demand should be met? / There were two reasons for returning a negative answer to this question. Catholics, members of a hierarchical church whose head was the bishop of Rome, were subject in spiritual matters to “a foreign jurisdiction”.’ Further: ‘the spiritual sphere was surprisingly wide - for instance the decision on a matrimonial case could decide the disposition of property - and the Church of Rome claimed the right to fix its boundary. Secondly, one of the most essential features of the British constitution, “our free and happy constitution”, reflecting the “practical wisdom of mankind, under which we enjoy liberty toleration, wealth, tranquillity”, was the partnership between Church and State. But could Catholic legislators and office-holders be expected to protect an Anglican Established Church and defend its interests?’ (q.p.)

Protestant parliament: ‘It is remarkable how the members of this proud community were able to ignore the existence of their helots. Furious controversies on Irish politics could be carried on without reference to the Catholic question [...] When Protestants paid any attention to the Catholic question, they usually saw good reasons for preserving both their pride and the penal laws. The papists, they were convinced, hated their religion and coveted their property. And, given an opportunity, they would simultaneously persecute and confiscate.’ (Irish Public Opinion 1759-1800, ed. Moody et al., Faber & Faber 1943, p.10.) Further, ‘The Anglo-Irishman’s resentmen over the subordinate position occupied by his country was confused and mollified by the complexity of his emotions towards his neighbour. After all, to use a phrase that occurs time and time again, England was the mother-country. [...] The Protestant inhabitants of Ireland were intensely proud of their racial links with Britain, and of their share in the English cultural heritage. Great Britain and Ireland it was declared had much the same laws, quite the same language, the same religion, and the same prince.’ (Ibid., p.21; both the foregoing quoted in Pauline Holland, doc. diss., UU 2004.)

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Notes
Thomas Russell’s pocket-books, held in Trinity College Library, were first used by McDowell in a Hermethena article of May 1939, and more extensively in his Irish Public Opinion, 1750-1800 (1944). His transcription of the same was used by Frank McDermot in his Wolfe Tone and His Times [rev. edn.] (Tralee 1968). (See C. J. Woods, ed., Journals and Memoirs of Thomas Russell, 1791-5, Journals and Memoirs of Thomas Russell, 1791-95, Dublin: IAP 1991).

Portrait: Derek Hill (1916-2000), “Prof. R. B. McDowell leaving the Rubrics, Trinity College, Dublin” [painting], was auctioned at Christies S. Kensington (17 May 2001), made £23,500; see Irish Arts Review: Price Guide to Irish Art, Sept 2000-Aug. 2001.

The Irish Administration 1901-1914 (Routledge 2024) - publisher’s notice: ‘The developments and achievements of the Irish administration, overshadowed by the more spectacular aspects of Irish history have received comparatively little attention. But Irish conditions in the 19th Century encouraged and compelled the state to exert itself on a more extensive front than in contemporary England and a number of government departments played a very active and often creative part in Irish social and economic life. In this work, originally published in 1964, and based on a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, the author shows how the administrative structure was drastically rationalised and modernised. The author is also interested both in the work the administration performed and the men who staffed it. The Irish administration during the century came into contact with many different aspects of Irish society.’

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