Charles Chenevix Trench: Charles Chenevix Trench, who died on November 26th at his home in Ballymackey, Co Tipperary, at the age of 89, reviewed books for The Irish Times until recently and was himself the author of almost 20 books, mainly about history and field sports.
His short biography of Daniel O'Connell, entitled The Great Dan, and a more general work, Grace's Card: Irish Catholic Landlords, 1690-1800, were insightful contributions to Irish history aimed at a general audience.
Attracted by the tax exemption for artists, Trench had settled in Ireland around 1970. Although neither he nor his father was born in this country he had always counted himself Irish. His great-grandfather, Richard Chenevix Trench - the scion of the two Huguenot families in his name and the man about whom the poet Tennyson said that it was impossible to look upon him and not to love him - was Archbishop of Dublin from 1863 to 1886.
The Archbishop's grandson, Sir Richard Chenevix Trench, was a member of the Indian Political Service. Charles, his only son, was born in Simla in October 1914. He was educated at Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford. In neither establishment did he show any appetite for bookwork: hunting, shooting and fishing were his absorbing interests.
From Oxford he joined a regiment of the Indian Army known as Hodson's Horse and served through the second World War. He was awarded the Military Cross for his leadership and courage in an action leading up to the capture of Assisi in Italy in 1944.
At the end of the war he followed his father into the Indian Political Service. It was responsible for relations with the princely states which were resisting absorption into the emerging independent India.
In his book The Viceroy's Agent, Trench is scathing about the way Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy, betrayed the trust of the rulers of the princely states to appease Nehru in the negotiations leading to independence.
After the disbandment of the Indian Political Service in 1947, Trench spent 16 years in Kenya where he was a district commissioner. He learned several African languages in a determined quest for an understanding of the native peoples, especially the Somalis in the north.
In 1964, at the end of his time in Kenya, he wrote a memoir, The Desert's Dusty Face. The book, it was well said, reflected a man who gulped life rather than sipped it. He was a fine story-teller. This, and My Mother Told Me, a book about the travels in the East of his intrepid maternal grandmother, launched him on a literary career.
Having moved in 1964 to teach at Millfield, an experimental public school in Somerset, he produced a succession of books on 18th-century history and on field sports. He combined both interests in a book entitled The Poacher and the Squire, a history of poaching and game preservation in England. He did not pretend that he himself had never poached.
In Ireland, he kept up his interest in field sports as a member of the North Tipperary Hunt, mounted on his beloved mare, Philomena. It was, he reflected, the happiest time of his life.
Although he rejoiced in reclaiming his ancestral role as an Irish country gentleman, he also made it his business to understand the Catholic Ireland of which his ancestors had not been part.
He was helped by having two daughters at the reconstructed Trinity of the 1970s, who brought home Irish friends. Attired in a jumper and jeans, he liked to be trendy rather than square. This tallied with his open inquiring disposition and general good will. His genial countenance, impish sense of humour and well-bred modesty about his own achievements helped.
It was this desire to understand Catholic Ireland as well as finding some kindred spirits among the remains of the Catholic gentry that led him to write about Daniel O'Connell and the class that spawned O'Connell.
Simply by surviving, Trench concluded, this endangered species kept alive the possibility that Irishmen might one day run their own country. He was full of remorse that his own Protestant ascendancy had behaved so badly in the 18th century.
He published further books on India and Kenya under British rule. Bruce Arnold at the Irish Independent first recruited Trench as a reviewer. He had a very special talent in this genre. He could capture in a few succinct words the essence of a book, and then out of his vast range of experience and reading give the subject an original, often humorous, twist of his own.
He married in 1946 Jane Gretton, whose mother was an Irish Catholic. Of this marriage there was one son, who predeceased him, and two daughters. After his divorce, he married Mary Kirkbride, who had also been brought up in India under the Raj and by whom he is survived together with their two daughters. He is buried beside Borrisofarney church, Moneygall, near several of his Trench kinsfolk.
Charles Chenevix Trench: born October 1914; died November 26th, 2003.