Our first President, Dr Douglas Hyde, was the subject of an article in an English illustrated magazine of 1938 which said, among other things: "That the quiet, retiring Dr Hyde, a seventy-eight-year-old scholar, should have been chosen without a hint of dissension, shows the still small voice of reason can still be heard in a world that has fallen so ignobly to conquering aviators, speech makers and sabre rattlers." (This was Weekly Illustrated, October 15th 1938, from Odhams Press London.)
The nameless writer has it that "to this elderly scholar more that to any other living is due the triumph of Irish nationalism."
Five pages of pictures are devoted to him and his entourage, nearly all shot in and around the Aras. We have him lunching with his secretary, Mr Michael McDunphy and his aide-de-camp, Captain Eamon Butler, or Eamon de Buitlear - yes, the father of the present Eamon. He is seen scrutinising documents, talking to his official housekeeper, and always, we are told in "native Irish" or "Erse". The poet-president, we are told, is a gardener too, gardening and golf being his chief recreations, though many who knew him would put shooting on his list of sports. He stops his gardener for a chat. He is seen eating some of the fruits he grows: peaches, plums, pears and apples. Moreover, it is said that he also raises all the vegetables needed by the staff, and a photograph shows him reaching out over a mass of what appear to be cauliflowers to pick an apple from the tree. He takes pride, we are told, in showing off his crops.
He is seen in all the pictures wearing a check tweed suit and, when outdoors, a big flat cap. It is a friendly, informal occasion and the President is even asked to write out an Irish proverb for the cameraman. He obliges in Irish and English. In English, he writes it as: "Neither noble nor ignoble, but (just) up for a while and down for a while." A brief summary gives the story of his life, from the freedom of a youth spent talking to the country people of his native Roscommon, to his zest for the Irish language and his work in the Gaelic League and his life as a scholar.
He was, old-timers tell you, a welcome guest at the officers' mess in nearby McKee Barracks, where, while not a great drinker, he was said to be a good judge of whiskey, and to know something of the pure, clear version favoured in his native rural Roscommon. (That is not in the article, just hearsay - or folklore.)