Life
1921-1995; b. Burnley, Lancashire, of working-class parents; ed Burnley Grammar School and Manchester University; assistant principal, Board of Trade, London; transferred to Ministery of Commerce, Belfast, 1948; permanet secretary of Minister of Health; retired 1984; member of British Council from 1985; member of board of British Advisory Committee; also chairman of Bryson House; published poetry, A Prospect of the West (1970); Corncrake in October (1978); Running Repairs (1983); Limbo (1991), with epigraph from Cavafy (‘Always you must have Ithaca in your mind./Arrival there is your predestined end.’); Collected Poems (Lagan Press 1997).
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Criticism
Philip Hobsbaum, ‘The Belfast Group: A Recollection’, Éire-Ireland 32, 2&3 (Summer/Autumn 1997), pp.173-82.
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Commentary
Padraic Fiacc, ‘Goodbye to Norman Dugdale’, column in Fortnight Review (April 1997), p.40; notes Dugdale’s Collected Poems issued by Lagan Press; Fortnight also prints ‘Louis MacNeice’, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’; ‘How to become an Alexandrian’; ‘Beginnings and Ends’; ‘Afternoon in Early March: East Belfast’; ‘Theodotos’. (p.41); note that Fiacc dedicated Red Earth (1997) to Dugdale.
Robert Greacen, reviewing Collected Poems, quotes Maurice Hayes: ‘[he was] a wonderful man to work for and one deeply committed to producing an fairer and more equal society. As well as that he was a poet of some quality, a widely and deeply read man, and the translator of the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy.’ (Minority Verdict); further, called himself a ‘metic’, Greek for ‘resident alien’. (Books Ireland, May 1998, pp.126-27.)
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