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DAVID BEERS QUINN AND IRELAND
Professor Mary Daly
Born in Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital in 1909, David Quinn spent his childhood in Clara, a town - to English people probably a village - in the Irish Midlands, approximately forty miles from Dublin. In ‘Clara: a Midland Industrial Town, 1900-1923’, published in 1998, he provides a wonderful picture of the town. Clara is on the flood plain of the river Brusna, a tributary of the river Shannon, beside the great Bog of Allen, and it was atypical of Irish towns outside Ulster, because it was an industrial town, with textiles mills and a jute factory. David Quinn links the story of Clara and its people, with events such as the 1914-18 war, the rise of Sinn Féin and the Anglo-Irish War, in an essay that combines vivid personal memories and the skills of an outstanding historian. The history of Clara and the surrounding countryside seems to anticipate some of D. B. Quinn’s research interests. Clara was situated in what was then known as King’s County (now Offaly), a county named after Philip II of Spain. During the reign of Mary Tudor this territory on the edge of the Pale - the area under English rule - was planted with English settlers in order to end the incursions by the native families, and from that time King’s county and the adjoining Queen’s county contained a significantly larger concentration of Protestant settlers than most parts of Ireland outside Ulster. During the seventeenth century King’s and Queen’s counties attracted significant Quaker and Huguenot settlement, and it was to a local Quaker family, Goodbody, that Clara owed its industrial success. D. B. Quinn’s father was employed as master gardener to the Goodbodys. The concentration of factories and mills also brought skilled engineers and other industrial workers to Clara from the north of England. Quinn pioneered the study of settlement, migration, colonization - evidence of all of these forces could be seen in the town where he spent his first thirteen years.
In 1922 the family moved to Belfast. In that year more people migrated from Ireland and within Ireland than probably at any time other than the great famine of the 1840s. British soldiers, policemen, civil servants, and some landed families moved to Britain; Catholic families left Belfast for the Irish Free State, and a number of Protestant families including the Quinn family, moved to Northern Ireland, as did some former policemen and civil servants, Catholic and Protestant. In Clara, secondary schooling for David Quinn would have entailed boarding-school - an option open to David Quinn’s class-mate Vivian Mercier, son of the local clergyman, who was to become a distinguished professor of English at the University of California - but not to the son of a gardener. Belfast offered the best traditions of grammar school education, and a local university. From Belfast Academical Institute - a school that produced two other distinguished Irish historians - Theo Moody and R. B. McDowell - he was awarded a scholarship to Queen’s University where he graduated with First Class Honours.
The years at Queen’s had a major influence on D. B. Quinn’s intellectual formation, because he studied geography together with history, and one of the lecturers in geography was the remarkable scholar Estyn Evans, whose work combined geography, folklore, anthropology, history in a very imaginative manner. Although Quinn’s professional career was in departments of history, like Evans his work can be described as multi-disciplinary.
Irish history did not form part of Quinn’s undergraduate curriculum at Queen’s, and perhaps this is why he elected to make Tudor administration in Ireland the topic of his Ph.D. He was awarded a scholarship to King’s College London and he enrolled at the Institute for Historical Research, which at the time provided the best professional training in Britain for historians. It also provided a meeting place for young Irish scholars. At the Institute he was a contemporary of Robin Dudley Edwards - a graduate of University College Dublin - and Theo Moody, a graduate of Queen’s. The revolution in Irish historical scholarship in the 1930s, which led to the formation in Belfast in February 1936 of the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies; the Dublin-based Irish Historical Society in November 1936, and the journal Irish Historical Studies, which appeared as a joint publication of the two societies in 1938, was forged at the Institute of Historical Research. At this time Irish history was characterized by strong ideological commitments and passions - 700 years of English mis-rule, a determination to trace the origins of Irish nationalism back to pre-Christian times, or alternatively to showing how Anglo-Norman settlement and British rule had civilized the lawless Irish, or indeed that Ulster was indeed a place apart and had been since the time of Cuchulainn. These young scholars were determined to transform Irish history into a scientific discipline based on careful examination of the sources; with an emphasis on value-free history. The organization of their journal Irish Historical Studies - one editor from Belfast, one from Dublin, a committee with equal membership drawn from both historical societies survives to this day.
None of these appears remarkable now, and since the late 1980s the goal that Quinn, Edwards and Moody set of presenting value-free history with arguments that were supported by comprehensive documentary evidence, has been subjected to considerable criticism from those who want a more passionate and engaged history, but during the 1930s, a time of deep divisions in Irish society, between north and south, Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist, and indeed among nationalists, this was a remarkable achievement. D. B. Quinn is universally acknowledged as a key figure in the transformation of Irish history into a discipline with rigorous standards of scholarship; if his role was less prominent than Moody’s or Edward’s, this was because he was not in Ireland during the crucial years, and they were, but he remained in regular contact with Edwards and Moody and he provided important support to Irish Historical Studies as a contributor, and a reviewer. He also remarkably managed to remain on good terms with both men, which was quite an achievement; one obituary noted that when he and Alison visited Dublin they stayed on alternate visits with the Edwards and the Moodys.
Perhaps of greater significance was the high scholarly standard that Quinn - and especially Quinn, set - because he published substantially more than either Moody or Edwards. This set the standard to which later generations of Irish historians aspired. But having helped to establish Irish history as a scholarly discipline, D. B. Quinn made two further very significant contributions. The first was to integrate Irish history into the history of early modern Britain, and the history of European expansion; the second, was to broaden the range of sources to be examined and the range of questions that should be addressed.
While the 1930s generation of scholars who remained in Ireland were very effective at achieving the goal of establishing high academic standards, they failed to integrate the discipline into a wider international context, a failing that may be seen as reflecting the introverted nature of Irish society and Irish culture at the time. Irish history as taught in Irish universities, did of course take full account of political and religious developments in Britain, but it generally failed to place the story within a wider international context. Quinn, perhaps because he spent most of his career in England and therefore had to show that Irish history had a wider significance - placed Tudor Ireland, and English settlement in Tudor Ireland in the context of Tudor expansion into the Americas; he was a fore-runner of John Pocock’s Atlantic archipelago; and the inspiration for more recent scholarship pursued by scholars like Nicholas Canny.
Secondly, he had no qualms about using a wide range of sources. One of the less welcome consequences of the Edwards/Moody emphasis on sources, was an unduly selective attitude to documentary material - State papers and Calendars of State Papers were fine; likewise private papers of senior political figures, but literary evidence was more suspect, and use of visual material even more so. D. B. Quinn had no such qualms. His 1966 book The Elizabethans and the Irish, used contemporary illustrations from a range of libraries throughout Europe, together with literary sources in order to compare the attitudes that the Elizabethans displayed towards the native Irish and towards native Americans. This was a truly pioneering work; it is regrettable that it took so many years for scholars to build on this work - really not until the late 1980s, even the 1990s. In recent years this field has provided fruitful material, not simply for historians but for literary scholars and others who are interested in colonization; it has also given rise to some heated argument.
I would like to make a brief reference to the Institute of Irish Studies in Liverpool, where D. B. Quinn served as the first chairman of the board. Although Irish politicians were happy to speak about Irish immigrants in order to boost Ireland’s international standing, and they were even happier to tap them for funds, or use them in the campaign to bring about an end to partition, the Irish state and scholars based in Ireland were extremely slow to recognize the importance of Irish studies as a means of sustaining links between the Irish overseas or their descendants. The Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool, established during the 1980s, a difficult period for the Irish living in Britain, marked the recognition by a distinguished university of the academic importance of Irish studies.
Finally, I wish to mention the Royal Irish Academy. David Quinn was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1941 - a young scholar of immense promise, which he amply fulfilled. His involvement with the Academy was somewhat restricted by the fact that he spent most of his career in Britain, but it was nonetheless significant: he published in the Proceedings, there is a copy of his thesis in the Library, and he wrote key chapters in Volumes II and III of the Academy’s New History of Ireland - the volumes dealing with medieval and early modern Ireland. So when the officers of the Academy met in 2001 to determine which members should be awarded the Cunningham Medal, - the Academy’s premier award, given to recognize outstanding contributions to scholarship and to the objectives of the Academy - D. B. Quinn was the obvious candidate in the Section of Polite Literature and Antiquities. Sadly he was unable to attend the presentation, but when I spoke on that occasion I concluded, as I shall today by noting that the Academy’s motto is ‘We Will Endeavour’. Few members of the Royal Irish Academy, few Irish scholars of the twentieth century have done as much to live up to this motto as David Quinn. |
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