In the 1986 Dáil debate that led to the establishment of the National Archives of Ireland, taoiseach Garret FitzGerald singled out University College Dublin professor emeritus Robert Dudley Edwards, who, he said, “has never ceased to press me to have this legislation enacted”.
Edwards had spent more than 50 years “planning and fighting for” the establishment of the archives, and he died on June 5th, 1988, four days after FitzGerald’s National Archives Act came into force to preserve and make publicly available millions of State documents from pre- and post-independence Ireland. “Dudley’s life mission was complete,” his granddaughter writes in this densely detailed and exhaustively sourced and annotated biography.
As professor of modern Irish history at UCD from 1944 to 1979 Edwards also established the UCD Archive Department (which houses the papers of Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera, William T Cosgrave, Eoin MacNeill, Kevin Barry, pre-1922 Sinn Féin and others) and he was “the original proposer and main mover” of the Bureau of Military History, which records the reminiscences of veterans of the 1913-1923 conflicts.
He also helped establish the Irish Historical Studies journal and the Irish Historical Society, forged strong links with international historians and wrote (often anonymously or pseudonymously) for the Irish Press, Sunday Press, Sunday Independent and the Leader.
The eldest son of a Co Clare-born, London-trained nurse and an English Midlands schoolmaster turned civil servant, Edwards was six years old when his parents sheltered him in their home on Dartmouth Square in Dublin, within earshot of the British assault on the 1916 rebels in the Royal College of Surgeons on St Stephen’s Green. He was aged 13 when the State records in the Four Courts burned to cinders in the assault that began the Civil War on June 30th, 1922.
Teetotal in early adulthood, his later alcoholism affected his family life and public behaviour. Further family sadness and dysfunction followed with eldest daughter Mary’s descent into derangement, suicide attempts, involuntary hospital admissions and near-filicidal attacks on her daughter Neasa, who refers to herself in the third person throughout.
This is an essential book for anybody interested in history, historiography, or independent Ireland’s first century.
