W.B. Stanford was, as they say, a man of many parts: classical scholar and distinguished academic, author of various books, a senator for many years, a public figure and a spokesman for Irish Protestants when they had relatively few articulate champions in public life, and finally Chancellor of the university to which he dedicated most of his life, TCD. Only one plum escaped him, and that was the Provostship - which, in any case, as he himself says, he did not particularly covet.
Would such an all-rounder be possible in today's ruthlessly specialised world? Probably not, yet Stanford's reputation as a Greek scholar appears to have lasted well and there was no suspicion of the dilettante don about him. "I don't like much what he stands for," I remember a now-dead NUI academic saying irritably once, "but you can't take it away from him -- he's a scholar, a solid scholar." His edition of the Odyssey is respected academically and his study The Ulysses Theme (1954) is still readable, and still read. Meanwhile, this posthumously published memoir (Stanford died in 1984) is the well-written, though at times slightly staid, testimonial to a life lived to the full.
Though born in Belfast, he was the son of a Dublin-born clergyman and was, in some respects, typical of the Southern Protestant clerical and academic type at its best. His childhood was spent mostly at his father's rectory, both in Waterford and Tipperary, where he grew up the only boy among sisters. He does not gloss over his schooling at Bishop Foy's School in Waterford, or the cheerful thuggery of many or most of his fellow pupils there, and he was not sorry in the end to leave it. He was not a mere delicate aesthete and could hold his own in the friendly rough-housing, but he was also academically bright and won a sizarship to Trinity, even if a special teacher had to be called in to coach him in Greek.
Trinity in the early 1930s was a rather inbred place, with a small Catholic minority, ruled rather despotically by privileged, often bearish dons who lived in large suites of rooms and had access to an excellent wine cellar. One of his Classics classmates was George Otto Simms, later Primate of all Ireland, and another was Maurice (Noel) Hartnett, later prominent in politics. Religious divides in Irish society then were wide - in fact almost impassible - with Catholic absolutism and Protestant exclusiveness hard to reconcile. Stanford from the start was struck by the apparent defeatism of Protestant Ireland in the face of the new order, and from the start he campaigned to give his co-religionists a more optimistic, assertive outlook.
Unlike many of them, he had no time for a nostalgic West Brit outlook and he argued strongly with those who denigrated the attempt to revive the Irish language. Equally, however, he fought the bog-Irish ignorance of those who saw the Irish Protestant as the natural-born enemy of their own religion and politics - a battle which lasted for whole decades of his life. At one stage, it even involved him in a controversy with Sean ╙ Faolain, who later became a close friend.
Meanwhile, he became a Fellow of TCD at the age of 24, after a gruelling sequence of examinations climaxed by a public address in which he spoke on Virgil while his rival, Douglas Graham, who happened to be a close friend, spoke on Horace. (Stanford was of course primarily a Greek scholar, but since the audience was largely composed of non-classicists, he pitched his address on a more popular level.) Graham had the backing of the sporty section of the college, Stanford of the literati. On the day the result was to be publicly known, he hid himself away indoors, unable to face the official announcement, until from his window he saw a crowd of cheering friends and supporters advancing towards him. He had won, and there was to be no looking back academically until his appointment as Regius Professor of Greek, a post he held from 1940 to 1980 when he retired.
Shortly afterwards he married, and his married life seems to have been exceptionally happy up to the end. His role as spokesman - though not an uncritical one - for Irish Protestantism had made him something of a public figure, and eventually a colleague persuaded him that this mission might best be served by becoming a member of the Irish Senate. So after a few unsuccessful bids he became a senator in 1948, and as such was soon faced by a professional dilemma. Costello, the Inter-party Taoiseach, had declared a republic - a move which frightened or antagonised many of Stanford's co-religionists, since it cut them off from their traditional ties with the Commonwealth. In defiance of their stance, he voted for the Republic of Ireland Bill and by doing so antagonised many Protestants who felt he had betrayed them. During the 1950s, however, he had the courage to come out publicly against the notorious Fethard Boycott and he also demanded an inquiry into the assault on Jehovah's Witnesses in Clare. In both cases, de Valera proved sympathetic personally but declined to take any public action.
Nevertheless, Stanford was much impressed by "The Chief" when he met him face to face. There is also a pen-picture of Sean T. O'Kelly, whom he liked, and another of Ernest Blythe, with whom he discussed the Civil War and its aftermath. Blythe, he recalls, was wholly unrepentant about the execution of republicans and spoke as impersonally about "the Troubles" as though he were discussing the Peloponnesian War. (Incidentally Stanford, who had always assumed Blythe to be a Presbyterian, was surprised to find out that he was in fact Church of Ireland, like himself.)
Stanford states explicitly that he did not want the job of Provost, and when Dr Alton hinted that he considered him as a possible successor, he pleaded that he was too busy researching and writing his Ulysses book. Nevertheless, the appointment of Dr A.J. McConnell in 1952 seems rather to have taken him by surprise and he was not happy about some of the changes made, or the way in which respected members of the Old Regime were swept aside or sidelined. In time, however, he came to realise that McConnell, an astute mathematician from the North, had in fact saved Trinity from virtual obsolescence and had made it move with the times. Meanwhile, his own public career had taken a new dimension with his activities as a delegate to the Council of Europe, while he also became more and more in demand as a lecturer abroad - both on Hellenic cruises, where he spoke mainly to lay audiences, and at various academic fastnesses in America. (He records proudly that between 1964 and 1983 he and his wife visited 52 campuses and 25 states in the US.)
Stanford comes over as a nice man and a principled one, which he was generally agreed to be in his lifetime - though with a tough, competitive, ambitious side, and a shrewd manager of his own career. Plainly, too, he possessed a good opinion of himself. While he played the role of public man with a good deal of success, he seems to have cared relatively little for academic infighting or university politics as such - something which can hardly be said of some of his famous classicist predecessors in TCD. And while almost a workaholic, he still enjoyed life - including tennis, swimming and good parties - and appears to have been a devoted family man. He was also, incidentally, a part-time poet - at least one of his poems has appeared in Irish anthologies - and this volume prints a good deal of his poetry, which is fluent, sensitive but not verbally memorable. It also includes a memorial tribute by his respected colleague, J.V . Luce.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic