The celebrated historian Benedict Anderson, reminiscing recently about his early years at Newtown school, Waterford, nearly 60 years ago, remarked: "The teacher I adored was Mrs Webster." He spoke for many. Eileen Webster, who died on October 25th, was born in 1905.
Her father, Henry Halliday, a Quaker shop-owner in Dún Laoghaire, died when she and her beloved sister Winnie were children. Eileen followed a classic Quaker educational track: Rathgar junior school, the Mount in York and then a moderatorship in history and political science at Trinity, graduating with a first and a gold medal in 1927.
She took a diploma in education at Moray House, Edinburgh, and was recruited by the legendary Arnold Marsh to teach at Newtown in 1932, retiring 40 years later.
She and her husband Rex Webster were Newtown institutions. Rex was an austere and brilliant classicist with an alarming line in sarcasm, while Eileen was passionately engaged with the school and, above all, her pupils.
Though she wrote about history- teaching in Ireland for The Bell in 1943, she channelled most of her formidable intellect into her subject. Her denunciation of the Penal Laws or her admiration for the Code Napoleon or her love of Voltaire kept the momentum at top speed. Pupils had to keep history notebooks with illustrations, cartoons, and maps as well as notes.
History excursions were made to local historical sites: third-form historians piled into staff cars or a hired bus; build- ings, monuments and street-plans would be measured and drawn, local historians interrogated, records consulted and the results bound between hard covers (overseen by Rex, a skilled bookbinder).
When necessary, Eileen was not constrained by the limitations of the Irish syllabus, which used to end tactfully before the Civil War: she was prone to interject: "Oh, you'd better not put that in an exam paper."
Taught by the radical feminist and nationalist Rosamund Jacob, Eileen - like many Quakers of her generation - was a liberal nationalist with a sceptical streak, strongly advocating Ireland's intellectual independence and its European inheritance.
The same went for Scotland: she memorably illustrated the "auld alliance" with France by telling her pupils that when the Edinburgh poor emptied their chamber-pots from tenement windows they shouted "Garrrdyvoo!"
Benedict Anderson was not the only future historian who passed through her hands; others included Ian Gibson, Donal Cruise O'Brien and Roy Foster. She and Rex exerted a life-changing influence on children of all kinds, notably the European refugees who began turning up in Waterford, often through Quaker networks, from 1933.
One of them, the brilliant Robert Weil, owed his own subsequent career as a Queen's academic to Rex's coaching for sizarship.
Newtown, then a far smaller institution, was correspondingly more familial; Liam O'Flaherty's daughter Pegeen, unhappy at school, moved into the Websters' home instead and remained a lifelong friend.
Tall, handsome and forceful, Eileen's humour, integrity and uncompromising principles radiated through a wide circle of friends. Energetically active in Water- ford cultural societies and a valued member of the local Friends' meeting, she became an inveterate traveller to Quaker friends and Newtown old scholars around the world after her retirement and Rex's death in 1976 .
Even though her last years were marred by decline, she always brightened for a visitor and retained memories of pupils she had taught. Her own memory is secure in their minds and hearts and those of the many people who loved her.
Eileen Webster: born September 11th, 1905; died October 25th, 2003