DIGGING HISTORY'S TRENCHES

THE term amateur tends to have pejorative connotations. Quite unjustly, amateurism has come to imply incompetence rather than enthusiasm. But as Charles Chevenix Trench and the late Hubert Butler both demonstrate there is still a place for the gifted amateur, particularly in the field of history.

Chevenix Trench has just produced what he believes is his 17th book, the majority of them are biographies and historical studies although he has also written on fishing and horsemanship. This latest, Grace's Card, which looks at the survival of Irish Catholic landlords between the end of the Williamite wars and the Act of Union, is he insists, his last. If so, it will be a loss to amateurism even though Chevenix Trench says: "You can get away with more if you're not an academic."

"I'm convinced he has ended up as a more interesting person, comments Mary Trench on her husband's non-academic status. "And he has had a more interesting life." The latter remark is indisputably true. Although he was not born here, his family has been based in Ireland for almost four centuries. The Trenchs came to this country from France around 1600 to escape Huguenot persecution and settled in the Galway district. The Chevenix clan followed, after Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His great-grandfather Richard, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin in the middle of the 19th century, was the first to combine the Chevenix and Trench names.

Richard's mother, Melosina Chevenix had travelled through Napoleonic Europe and her diaries from the period, including barbed remarks about Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson whom she encountered in Naples, were published posthumously as The Remains of the Late Mrs Richard Trench.

Mrs Trench's writing skills were inherited by her descendant, who also continued the family tradition of global travel. Chevenix Trench's first book, published in 1958, was called My Mother Told Me and recounted childhood legends of another ancestor, Mrs Pocklington, who took to restless wandering after her widowhood in the late 19th century. "She was the greatest living expert on the branch lines of central Asia," he says of the woman known during her lifetime as the Redoubtable Mrs Pock.

Well settled in Ireland, the Trenchs had a history of military service. Charles Chevenix Trench tells of his grandfather marching a battalion from Belfast to Cork and managing to stay in a Trench house every night. Chevenix Trench peregrinations eventually marched the family out of this country; his father, born in Bermuda, joined the Indian army and then the sub-continent's political service. Charles Chevenix Trench was born in the hill town of Simla in 1914 "but I'd always from a very early age regarded myself as Irish and wanted to bring the family back here".

As a child he came to Ireland on a few occasions with his father. The two were on a fishing trip to Gweedore in Co Donegal when the second World War started. "I remember the gillie saying to me, Goodbye Mr Charles, and mind you shun the war."

There was no chance of that, because after taking a politics, philosophy and economics degree at Oxford, Charles Chevenix Trench had, like his father before him, joined the army in India. During the war, he saw service in the Middle East and won a Military Cross in Italy, where he was the first member of the Allied Forces to enter Assisi after it had been abandoned by the German forces. Following the war, Chevenix Trench joined the Indian Political Service before moving to Kenya where he became a district commissioner and married his wife Mary, who had also grown up in India.

It was while working in Africa that he first started to write. In addition to his book on Mrs Pocklington, he managed to write a biography of the 18th-century English politician John Wilkes, Portrait of a Patriot and A Royal Malady, which looked at the history of George III's mental illness. Most of the research for these two books had to be carried out in London while he was on leave.

AFTER 16 years in Kenya, he decided it was time to leave; the era of colonial service was drawing to a close as successive countries became autonomous and while the Chevenix Trenchs could have stayed on, they decided to move to England for the sake of their two young daughters' education.

Looking around for a new career there, he settled on school teaching and managed to get a job. Having prepared to teach economics, Chevenix Trench arrived for his first term to discover he would instead be taking classes in history and English. Over the course of the next few years, he also taught symbolic logic, Swahili - with just two students, he enjoyed a 100 per cent pass rate for A level - Urdu and Pashtu, polo, fox-hunting and fly-tying.

Plus, of course, he continued to write and when he and his wife learned of the Republic's tax concessions for creative artists, they decided it was finally time to move here. Having driven over to look at possible properties, "We spent the first night in an appalling B&B in Wexford. There were paper-thin partitions and the man in the next room snored so loudly that in the end we got up in the middle of the night, left our money and just drove away".

Hearing of another guesthouse in north Tipperary, they booked in and discovered, not only that the owner had also retired from Kenya, but that the property appeared to have belonged in thee 17th century to a bishop of Waterford who was a Trench. A few miles away, they found the former glebe house which has been their home for the past 26 years in an area containing two other former Trench estates.

Since then, Chevenix Trench has produced a regular stream of books covering such diverse subjects as the Indian and Kenyan administrations, the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion in the 17th century, General Gordon and Daniel O'Connell. "That was the bravest thing I've ever done," he remarks of the last of these works "taking on O'Connell in the face of all the professional historians."

In fact The Great Dan was universally well received. His new work, Grace's Card is inspired in part, he says, "by a guilty conscience. Irish Protestants didn't behave terribly well in the 18th century. The parliament here certainly only gave way to Catholics inch by inch when forced to do so by the English government. There wasn't the smallest chance of an Irish parliament delivering Catholic emancipation.

The book is dedicated to the three children of his first marriage to an Irish Catholic, so Chevenix Trench brings a degree of personal experience to the subject. He has found a branch of the Trench family in Co Mayo which became Catholic early in the 18th century; "among the witnesses to the vision of the Virgin at Knock was a Bridget Trench who had no English according to reports in The Irish Times at the time."

Grace's Card emphasises that a great many more Catholics than is popularly realised managed to hold onto their lands throughout the Penal Laws era. Often they were assisted by family members or neighbours who were sympathetic Protestants. Chevenix Trench stresses that anti-Catholic legislation was primarily inspired by a desire for property which was the only route to political authority at the time. Religious beliefs often took second place to economic self-interest.

Despite spending five years on research for Grace's Card, Chevenix Trench tends to play down the scholarship involved because he is not a professional historian. "I'm not regarded as a professional by academics, I'm quite certain - probably as a promising amateur." Now aged 82, he has no plans for another book, even while his wife Mary speaks of the need for a good popular history of the Huguenots in Ireland. Married for more than 40 years, the couple are touchingly affectionate, sharing sentences and stories in company and constantly referring to their two daughters, both of whom are now married and living overseas. Their parents hope that one or other will eventually move back to this country. Otherwise, the connection Charles Chevenix Trench reestablished with Ireland will once again be broken.