SIR ROBERT KIDD: Sir Robert Kidd, head of the Northern Ireland civil service from 1976 to 1979, who died in Belfast on February 28th in his 87th year, played a key role in organising the security of Queen Elizabeth during her visit in 1977 at a tense moment in the Troubles.
According to those closest to him, he took greatest pride in a busy retirement in his work encouraging cross-Border links through Co-operation North.
Intensely proud of the honours he received for his years of public service, Bob Kidd was far from being a distant mandarin. A man who addressed everyone with equal courtesy and rejected pomposity, he was involved with the lives of his five children, 10 grand-children and three great-grandchildren and proud of his wife Harriet's weekly columns in the Belfast Telegraph of the early 1960s on the gardening they jointly enjoyed.
He was born in Belfast, schooled in "Inst", the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, then Trinity. His mother was born in Montreal, his father in Derry. The family had a wholesale leather business in Ann Street, Belfast into the 1960s: the classical sizarship and Trinity entrance scholarship Robert won were boons to family finances. He was awarded a first class honours degree and gold medal, coming first "in a good year", as his professor testified. "I cannot pretend to give his various percentages," said Sir William Tate, senior fellow, "but I can safely say that they have seldom, if ever, been surpassed."
In Trinity he met "his beloved Harriet", as Brian Trainor of the Ulster Historical Foundation told the attendance at his memorial service, her father then Presbyterian minister in Ballina, Co Mayo, though a Northerner by birth. The marriage confirmed an all-Ireland dimension in Robert Kidd, proud Belfast and Ulsterman. Trainor described him as "always at ease anywhere in Ireland."
After graduation Kidd was commissioned into the Royal Ulster Rifles and attached to the Intelligence Corps of the South East Asia Command, in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Singapore and Ceylon.
On demobilisation he applied, unsuccessfully, for a job in the colonial civil service. Later he would tell of how he was asked what his particular contribution in India might be. He thought his reply that the most important task must be to help prepare the country for independence did not go down well. At 29 he joined the Northern Ireland civil service at assistant principal grade.
He spent most of his career in the finance department, heading it from 1968. His proudest contributions included the creation of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in the mid-1950s, the establishment of the New University of Ulster, the expansion of the Ulster Museum in the early 1960s, and the financing of a custom-built Public Record Office.
His one brush with controversy was involvement in the Lockwood Committee report which gave the new university to Coleraine rather than Derry, seen by nationalists as blatant favouritism to a Protestant town.
Brian Trainor had another perspective on the man. "When Robert Kidd joined the civil service in 1947 Northern Ireland had really no national cultural institutions. All of these were in Dublin. It had the National Library, the National Museum and the National Gallery, but we had only the Linen Hall Library and the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery."
Trainor, director of the Public Record Office in the '70s, credited Kidd with countering a proposal to site it inside Queen's University and with ingenious schemes to finance the two museums. The Kidd family treasures the tale that he secured the find of the Spanish galleon Girona for the Ulster Museum against a claim from the Greenwich Maritime Museum, by memoing them curtly that the ship was sunk "by Irish rocks".
The head of the NI civil service from 1976, in the following year with his deputy Ewart Bell, now deceased, he arranged the silver jubilee visit of the queen after much agonising among security advisers. He was made Commander of the Bath (CB) in 1976, retired in 1979 and was knighted (KBE) the same year.
From 1980 to 1984 he was Northern Ireland chairman of Co-operation North which he established jointly with Brendan O'Regan, a labour of love in the midst of similar tasks which together amounted to a healthy new career.
Development of the Ulster American Folk Park used free labour provided by the Enterprise Ulster government job creation scheme and finance from agencies including the Mellon Trust.
It draws 20,000 school-children annually and houses a well-regarded Centre for Migration Studies.
Pro-chancellor of the New University of Ulster, Kidd was central to the difficult task of amalgamating it with the Ulster Polytechnic in the years 1980-84, the first fusion of a polytechnic and a university in the UK. He was a member of the Scots-Irish Trust which administers the Mellon endowment, director of the Allied Irish Bank, trustee and chairman of the Ulster Historical Foundation.
He is survived by his wife Harriet, daughters Margery and Sheila, and sons Ian, Niall and Robert.
Robert Kidd: born February 3rd, 1918; died February 28th, 2004.