A ‘spectacularly productive’ historian – Brian Maye on Trinity provost FSL Lyons

FSL Lyons, who was born 100 years ago on November 11th, was one of the greatest scholars of modern Irish history. “The quality that distinguished all his published work, and which indeed became his hallmark, was a scrupulous scholarship informed by a lucid and balanced thoughtfulness”, Emmet Larkin wrote in an appreciation in the Irish Literary Supplement (March 1st, 1984) shortly after his death.

He was born in Derry, into a family of Presbyterian and Church of Ireland background, the elder of two sons of Stewart Lyons, a bank official, and Florence Leland.

He was educated mainly in England, at Rose Hill in Tunbridge Wells and then Dover College but spent his final year at Dublin’s High School. Following a stellar academic attendance at Trinity College Dublin, which culminated in a PhD in 1947, he lectured at the University of Hull for four years before joining the staff at TCD. In 1954, he married Jennifer McAlister, and they had two sons.

Ten years later, he became the founding professor of modern history at the University of Kent and was master of Eliot College there from 1969 to 1972. Elected provost of TCD in 1974, he was to remain there for the rest of his life. His long sojourn in England greatly influenced his approach to Irish history, according to Roy Foster, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography: “A certain detachment and a half-concealed irony were combined with a devotion to stringent archival work and a strenuous attempt at impartiality.”

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His early publications were concerned with the Home Rule movement and included The Irish Parliamentary Party 1890-1910 (1951), The Fall of Parnell (1964) and John Dillon: A Biography (1968), but his synthesis, Ireland Since the Famine (1971) was probably his masterpiece. It certainly established him as “the foremost Irish historian of his generation”, as Roy Foster said. To Oliver MacDonagh, it was “an incomparable survey of Irish history and historiography . . . comprehensive in its sympathy, just in judgements, unwearyingly wise, and often witty”.

Terence de Vere White ended his review in this paper with the striking line: “Anyone who gives a damn about the country will have this book on their shelves tomorrow.” It was not just the breadth of the research and scholarship that was noteworthy but also the lucid and superb style of the writing.

His biography Charles Stewart Parnell (1977) was well received and highly praised but a growing interest in cultural history moved him away from his hitherto main focus on political history. A few years before the publication of the Parnell biography, he’d accepted the commission for an authorised, major new biography of WB Yeats and in 1978 he was given the honour of – what was possibly unique for an Irish historian up to that time – delivering the Ford Lectures at Oxford. He chose as his subject “Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1891-1939″, which looked at the clash of various cultures in Ireland, north and south, during that period, in which Yeats figured prominently, and he also addressed the issue of the unfolding tragedy in Northern Ireland.

The essence of the latter he saw as “the collision of a variety of cultures within an island whose very smallness makes their juxtaposition potentially, and often actually, lethal”. When the lectures appeared in book form in 1979, it won the Wolfson History Prize and the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. “Much the shortest of his books, it is possibly the most influential,” according to Roy Foster.

He gave up his provostship of TCD in 1980, wanting to devote himself to further research, especially the Yeats biography.

By that time, he was a member of the British Academy and had received no fewer than six honorary doctorates. Within a week of being nominated, unopposed, as chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast, he died on September 21st, 1983, having suffered from acute pancreatitis; he was a little under two months short of his 60th birthday. His ashes were buried beside Trinity College chapel.

“Lyons’s oeuvre remains distinguished for its complexity, sophistication and mastery of a diverse range of sources, woven into a fluent whole . . . Despite its tragically sudden and premature end, his life was spectacularly productive and his influence on Irish perceptions of the national history was fully acknowledged and remains immense,” is Roy Foster’s conclusion.

Eliot College, University of Kent has a portrait of him by Peter Jackson, as has TCD by Derek Hill.

His memorial grave marker at Trinity College chapel ends with the line: “Renowned as a scholar, esteemed as a teacher, beloved as a man.”