Charles Acton, who was music critic of The Irish Times for more than 30 years from 1955, died on April 22nd, aged 84.
His ancestors had been Protestants in Co Wicklow since the reign of Charles I - the family includes the historian Lord Acton and various notabilities in Naples, including a cardinal. They owned Kilmacurragh since 1697. With David and Sir Frederick Moore, heads of the Glasnevin Botanic Gardens, his great-uncle, Thomas, made it one of the major European collections of conifers and heathers.
In 1916, when Charles was two, his father was killed at Ypres and in 1920 his mother emigrated, for financial reasons. He grew up in England, being educated at Rugby and Trinity College Cambridge.
There he read sciences, for which he found he was clearly unsuited, and failed to take his degree. But he lived a very full life of theatre and music there, and for more than a year was music critic of Varsity Weekly (where his notices include the first performance of Vaughan Williams's opera, The Poisoned Kiss.)
After not graduating he joined Thos Cook and Son, first in London and then as assistant manager in Haifa, Palestine.
In 1939 he returned to Ireland to work for Charles Budina, his tenant at Kilmacurragh (since 1932 a hotel). From 1942 to 1955 he was a rolling stone gathering no moss - as a partner in a charcoal business, growing prize-winning apples, selling (or rather not selling) the Encyclopaedia Britannica, managing a haymaking equipment company - until Joseph Groocock recommended Jack White, then Irish Times features editor, to recruit him as the paper's music critic, his real ambition.
In 1951 he had the great good fortune to marry Carol Little, violin teacher in the Royal Irish Academy of Music, for many years leader and librarian of the Dublin Orchestral Players, a well-known private teacher of piano and violin, who was also a critic and journalist. They became known as a remarkable partnership.
In 1955 also, he became a Members' Governor of the RIAM, later becoming a Coulson Governor, which he remained until he was elected Vice-President in 1998, and a member of the Council of the Music Association of Ireland in the days when it was an effective lobbying group for music. As such he was instrumental in assisting Aloys Fleischmann to get Radio Eireann to establish a quartet in Cork, the first resident quartet of any broadcasting station in the world.
In 1970 he was invited to become a member of the Critics' Circle of London; apart from Clive Barnes the only member of its music section working outside Britain. In 1980 he received the first Sean O'Boyle Award for his outstanding contribution to Irish traditional music, an honour of which he was extremely proud, as he was when in 1990 he was elected a Fellow of the RIAM.
Apart from The Irish Times, he contributed to the Times, the Guardian, Musical America, the Musical Times, Feasta, Musical Opinion, Eire Ireland and other periodicals.
He wrote Irish Music and Musicians for Eason's Irish Heritage series (a groundbreaking historical account of traditional and art music). In 1988, for the programme of the first GPA Dublin International Piano Competition, he wrote a pioneering monograph on Irish pianists, given more permanent form in Irish Arts Review. In 1998 appeared To Talent Alone, the sesquicentennial history of the RIAM, which he co-edited with Richard Pine.
In 1995 Dr John O'Conor FRIAM wrote a foreword to an anthology of Acton's notices in The Irish Times, published as Acton's Music. He well sums up Acton's aims and achievements by writing: "Of course, he could be infuriating and perplexing at times, but there is nobody who can match his experience, enthusiasm, compassion and exuberance".