WHEN on a glorify day at the end of December 1941, in a borrowed suit and shoes and without the wherewithal to buy a lunch I first met Albert Maxwell beneath Swift's epitaph in Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and he recruited me as first member of his staff as the newly appointed head of the Cathedral Grammar School, not only did I not for a moment suppose that I was going to be a teacher for some 45 years, still less could I have imagined that I would one day be asked to write an appreciation of this remarkable man's life for The Irish Times. He was five years younger than I.
The Grammar School, Ireland's oldest school, was in the 1940s a ramshackle building opposite the cathedral, with a leaking roof and the main classroom piled high with wet turf required for faintly warming the cathedral. In a junior schoolroom, two classrooms and a warren of dilapidated side rooms some 60 boys had to be taught and, as it was hoped, sit the Intermediate and Leaving Certificate examinations. Maxwell's virtual miracle was to make a veritable triumph of his seven years as head of this strange school, today a thriving co-educational community in a splendid building on the same old site, with all the comfort and equipment totally lacking in the 1940s.
The late sadly lamented Professor Rex Cathcart, of Queen's University, Belfast, was one of the astonishing band of successful scholars who throve in the free, experimental, hard working, ever questing atmosphere that Maxwell generated at Saint Patrick's. Fortunately, before his premature death Cathcart wrote a full history of the school, paying elegant tribute to the headmaster who so greatly helped him on his way.
Another pupil became one of the world's greatest hockey players and head of one of Dublin's most famous schools. Two remarkable brothers, one of whom is today a professor at Tromso and head meteorologist in Norway and the other well known in Dublin business circles, formed an extraordinary partnership in mathematical experiment with Maxwell, who in due course, sadly for his native country, went off to become lecturer in statistics, reader in biometrics, professor of psychological statistics and eventually emeritus professor at the University of London with a whole bunch of degrees and honours. He always paid tribute to those Armstrong brothers when anyone congratulated him on his own great successes.
Others of his Dublin pupils went on to The Irish Times, one went to sea and later became chief bell ringer at the cathedral, another became a celebrated concert singer, another developed an astonishing expertise in naval and military badges and buttons, another (again a mathematician) made a fortune in Chicago. I could go on. In unpromising premises, but as if Swift's restless spirit was enlivening them all, Maxwell's pupils were invited to make the very best of themselves, each in his own individual way.
Maxwell encouraged his staff to think, too, and as he told me years later quite casually, stood up for them vehemently when members of his very old fashioned school board relayed parents' complaints to him about the unorthodox views of some of the teachers he employed.
He told me how he had various complaints brought to him about his history teacher, who was an active Larkinite. I asked him what sort of complaints, and he said the one he recalled best was being told that his infamous history teacher had been heard criticising Winston Churchill in public, and on a Sunday.