ERIC LAMBERT, who died towards the end of last year, was born in Dublin in November 1909 into a family long well known in the capital. Dublin down the centuries has produced a proliferation of remarkable people in almost every sphere of human activity: engineering, scientific, literary, musical, naval, military, political, ecclesiastical, commercial - you name it: but Eric Lambert's career was undoubtedly unique.
I first met him in circumstances recorded - though I had long forgotten it till a newspaper cutting turned up in Eric's papers - by Quidnunc in The Irish Times in August 1964. He was on leave from the Foreign Office in London, had joined the Military History Society of Ireland, and was introduced to me by Professor Hayes McCoy as my first coworker in researching the achievements of our fellow countrymen (and women) in the history of the South American continent.
During that visit of Eric in 1964, and after his retirement, I gradually got to know the salient facts of his astonishing career. After education at the Royal School, Dungannon, and a year at Trinity College, he was games master at Kingstown School when he heard he had passed an examination as an assistant superintendent in the Indian Police. He was posted to the wild North East Frontier area where the Indian Government of today, as a recent terrible incident showed, finds it hard to keep on terms with remote tribes with very much their own habits.
Eric, mastering three tribal languages as well as Hindustani and Bengali, was able to win their confidence and affection. When in the 1939-45 War his area was threatened by Japanese invasion he rallied the locals, apparently to the last man, to oppose the invaders. During this period, perhaps the biggest of many spectacular feats was his discovery and rescue of a force of 5,000 Chinese soldiers, incongruously defending their country in alliance with Britain defending its empire against imperial Japan, from a vast jungle area where they were lost.
Eric's knowledge of and sympathy with allegedly primitive people led the US Government to seek his advice about its faltering policies in its North American Indian Reservations. Later the British Government recruited him into the Foreign Office, and sent him to South America to enable governments there to use his expertise. There he learned of, and initiated a profound study into, the here so ignominiously forgotten achievements of Irish volunteers in the grim struggle early in the last century to throw off Spanish imperial rule.
Eric mastered Spanish as he had Bengali and the others, and his three volume epic Voluntarios Britanicos e Irlandeses en la Gesta Boliviana is a model of deep and exacting scholarship. He won enthusiastic recognition in Venezuela, and in 1995, though seriously ill, travelled to Caracas to receive the Order of the Liberator from the hands of President Caldera.
Eric was for many years a Trustee of the National Library, served a spell on the Council of the Military History Society, was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He was decorated by the Kuomintang Chinese Government, and from Britain won the OBE, CMG and KPM.