When he was only a few years old R.B. McDowell was nearly carried off by the great Spanish flu epidemic. Despaired of by the doctors, he regained consciousness after several days, and he has scarcely stopped talking since. This crisis, which might have deprived us of one of our most distinguished historians, had an upside. For a while his education was entrusted to a governess, who awakened in him an intense interest in history. It seems also to have given him life long immunity to jail fever, postgraduate's lung, yellow jack, the quartan ague, chronic boredom and all the other things you can catch from the study of old documents. No one alive has waded through more collections of correspondence, legislation, administrative records, ecclesiastical and collegiate fasti, than Professor McDowell. His knowledge of the fine print of the 18th and 19th centuries is truly awesome.Once or twice I have been privileged to catch a glimpse of him at this perilous work, perched high on library steps, or submerged under cardboard boxes, and, as always, wearing his protective clothing - winter overcoat, muffler and distinctive fedora. (The rolled umbrella is for inclement weather out of doors.) Of course, history does not taken up all of the professor's life.
Once, at a conference of historians, I rescued him from the clutches of Dr Fu Manchu, but he ran back to the television, explaining to me that he simply had to find out the fate of the inspector who was trapped in an underground bunker rapidly filling with lethal gas.It is this lively sense of the real world beyond the cloister which has enraptured generations of Trinity College undergraduates, and made him the subject of so extensive an anecdotage. Universities, alas, can no longer nourish eccentricity, not even Trinity. But do not be fooled by the clever disguise. McDowell has one of the most judicious minds in the business, and his scholarship has the respect of the most rigorous practitioners.His first report from the coal face was published in 1944 as Irish Public Opinion 1750-1800. I still have my copy, marked with coffee cup rings from frequent student borrowings, and speckles with tiny pencil dots which mean "Use this in Finals". A series of distinguished works followed, on public opinion and government policy, on British conservatism, on the Church of Ireland and on Trinity College, along with biographies of Alice Stopford Green and J.P. Mahaffy. Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution (1979) was a masterly overview of the late 18th century, the period in which McDowell is most at home.It becomes clear that this monumental scholarly effort has a central theme, the long Recessional of Protestant power and influence in Ireland. This new book, Crisis and Decline, deals with the fate of the southern Unionists, which he sees in colonial terms. They are the people left over, like "Germans in Bohemia, Swedes in Finland, loyalists or tories in the American colonies, Greeks in Asia Minor, Muslims in the Balkans."What in the 18th century had been Ascendancy nationalism is slowly transmuted into a defence of the Union in the 19th century.
There were still plenty of Catholic Unionists, or at least enough, but Unionism was led by a social elite who thought themselves the "sounder part" of the body politic, and organised their defence accordingly.The events of 1912-1923 destroyed them. The bitterest blow they had to bear was abandonment by the northern Unionists, when they saved themselves. From 1919 on, loyalists were at the mercy of the IRA, and ultimately found protection and toleration from the State whose setting up they had so long opposed. After that, for most ex-Unionists, it was a matter of "staying on".At this point, unexpectedly, the historian suddenly descends from Olympus, and identifies with his subject. He is himself part of this ex-Unionist culture, for, though he was born in Belfast, all his life as an academic has been lived in Dublin. The last chapter devoted to his personal memories, is as effervescent as it is controversial, and makes one wish that he would write an autobiography.