This is a most welcome and timely volume which has brought together many of the most important essays written by Professor Mansergh on a range of Commonwealth issues and areas. It might be read in conjunction with another volume of his work Nationalism and Independence - Selected Irish Papers. Alas, Professor Mansergh died in 1991 and the appearance of both volumes is due to the industry of his wife, Diana, who has provided a very valuable service by collecting and selecting a number of his works which were published over a lifetime of scholarship.
Professor Mansergh is indisputably among the most important Irish historians of the 20th century. A Tipperary man, he was born in 1910 and later spent all of his academic life in England where he had an outstanding career at Oxford, London and Cambridge. In the latter university he was the first to hold the Smuts Chair of Commonwealth History.
The strength of Mansergh's academic approach lay in his ability to work comfortably in the history of Ireland, India, South Africa or other countries formerly or then associated with the British Commonwealth. He was, moreover, an excellent comparativist and that gave him a perspective on Irish history often not enjoyed by his peers. Mansergh also chose to write about Ireland on an all-Ireland basis and he was authoritative when he wrote about Ango-Irish relations.
He may be distinguished from his more cautious and conservative historian colleagues in the 1930s by his willingness to write about contemporary history. He published his first book on the Irish Free State in 1934 at the age of 34. Many of the essays in the volume under review fit into the category of contemporary history.
Apart from the diversity and quality of the lectures in this current volume, there is another very good reason for reading Mansergh; he is a most outstanding stylist who has an excellent sense of humour and is often quite self-deprecating. Take, for example, this passage from his diary, for June 29th, 1937 (Tipperary): "The (M-Ms of B) came to lunch. He was pleasant. She was English and had in full measure that rather insolent contempt for all things Irish. The election campaign is quiet - therefore it is described as `ominous'. If it were noisy she would say `so Irish'.
One would not mind this sort of thing if the people who said it could possibly be regarded as industrious, competent or of more than average intelligence; but with rare exceptions the products of the `gentry' here seem to me the most incompetent, the most critical and in many instances the most idle people I have met. I am one of them myself."
One cannot but be won over by such mocking self-deprecation. It is also natural to admire his description of William T. Cosgrave as having a quiet sub-acid humour - a trait which continues to run in that family, based on the recent showing of the Seven Ages series on RTE.
Mansergh, in another diary entry, spoke about attending service at Belfast cathedral: "Very loyal sermon and bored to extinction. The Cathedral is hideous, lacks proportion, style and beauty." After attending service in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin on November 24th 1935, he noted: "Very empty as usual and I thought the preacher unduly complacent. I am not sure that that is not half of the trouble with the Church of Ireland."
On his way home from that service, he met a docker who was not "quite himself". Stopping in the middle of the road when he met Mansergh, he declaimed: "Glory be to God; sure it's himself". The docker was not proclaiming that he had met his Maker; rather that he thought he was in the presence of Eamon de Valera, where there was a strong physical resemblance.
The excerpts from the diary, quoted above, have been published in Nationalism and Independence. I recommend that that volume and the book under review ought to be read together. Congratulations to Diana Mansergh on her energy, industry and scholarship for bringing both edited volumes to press. It is to be hoped that Mansergh's earlier books will also soon be reissued by an enterprising publishing house. He has made an enduring contribution to historical scholarship - and appositely - to a better understanding on this island between north and south.
Dermot Keogh is Professor of History at University College Cork, and is currently writing biographies of John Charles McQuaid and Jack Lynch