OLIVER MACDONAGH: Oliver MacDonagh, who died on May 22nd aged 77, was one of the outstanding historians of his generation, with a major international reputation, particularly for his innovative work on the development of the State in the early 19th century. He made significant ntributions to British, Irish and Australian history, and his range of expertise was prodigious, covering demographic, administrative, economic, social, political, intellectual and literary studies.
Responding to one of several Festschriften in his honour in 1989, the year he retired from his chair in the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Australian National University, Canberra, he wrote of his disbelief at such honours. "I had no teachers; I have no disciples; I founded no school; I possess no theory of history; I am master of no field; from time to time I catch a horrid vision of myself as a sort of pinchback ultimum Romanorum, a last general practitioner among consultants, a chance survivor from a vanished world."
The modesty was genuine, but there was, in fact, a great depth and coherence to his work, which focused heavily on the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with Ireland usually at its centre. Yet, because his career was mainly abroad, he was less well known in Ireland than he deserved. Historical writing has a built-in obsolescence, but Oliver MacDonagh will be read for a very long time, not only for his insights, but for the remarkable literary qualities of his work. He was one of the best writers of prose that Ireland has produced.
He was born on August 23rd, 1924, in Carlow, although his father, Michael, an official in the National Bank, was stationed in Limerick. His mother, Loretto Oliver (formerly an employee of Bank of Ireland) came from Carlow and returned there for the birth of her first child. His father was made manager in Roscommon town, and Oliver MacDonagh spent his childhood there, attending the Christian Brothers School. Before his death, he had in preparation a volume of reminiscences of that time, two chapters of which appeared in The Irish Review (No. 26).
He completed his secondary schooling at Clongowes Wood, before moving to University College Dublin, where he graduated with a BA in 1944. He was called to the Bar the following year. As a student he was an occasional, and unlikely racing tipster for The Irish Times, and sport remained a lifelong enthusiasm, especially Munster rugby.
The core of Oliver MacDonagh's MA thesis later appeared as a seminal contribution on emigration, in R.D. Edwards and T.W. Moody (eds), The Great Famine (1956). Awarded a travelling studentship by the National University of Ireland in 1947, he moved to Peterhouse, Cambridge, for his Ph.D, his thesis forming the basis of his first major publication, A Pattern of Government Growth 1800-1860: the Passenger Acts and their enforcement (1961). Over the following 30 years his model of how the role of the State expanded in this crucial period stimulated debates and major research projects worldwide, resulting in a long list of monographs and conference volumes. He took account of these responses and refined his model further in his Early Victorian Government (1977).
Oliver MacDonagh spent 16 happy years in Cambridge, moving to St Catherine's College as college lecturer and fellow in 1950 (he was made an honorary life fellow there in 1987). In 1952, he married Carmel Hamilton, and five of their seven children were born in Cambridge.
In 1963, he began his long association with Australia, going first as visiting fellow to the Australian National University, and the following year became Foundation Professor of History at the new Flinders University, Adelaide. In 1968, he moved to the chair of modern history, at University College Cork, the same year as he published his masterly survey, later expanded and republished as Ireland: the Union and its aftermath (1977). His stay in Cork was brief, but during it he contributed greatly to the development of the history syllabus and the modernisation of the college under M.D. McCarthy. He continued to publish, though feeling ill-suited to the combined roles of teaching, administration and research.
His innovative O'Donnell lecture, The nineteenth century novel and Irish social history (1970) opened up a new field, while his survey, Emigration (1973) consolidated his early work.
In 1973, he returned to Australia to the prestigious post of W.K. Hancock professor in the Research School of Social Sciences, Canberra, but he continued to write Irish history, The Inspector-General: Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick and Social Reform 1783-1802 (1981), being followed by States of Mind: a Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict (1983). The latter, a series of radical interpretative essays on concepts of time and place and on the cultural basis of politics, won the Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize in 1985, and seems destined to remain an enduring part of his legacy.
His two-volume biography of Daniel O'Connell (1988-'89) was a different kind of tour de force, a highly readable narrative, blending the private and public lives, and reflecting his empathy with O'Connell, especially as lawyer, family man and committed Catholic.
While still at Cambridge, he had begun (with S.R. Dennison) work on a commissioned history of Guinnesses since 1886, but when the book was finished its publication was vetoed by the company. It was a particular pleasure for him when the volume Guinness 1886-1939 was published, by Cork University Press6 in 1998.
During his Canberra years, Oliver MacDonagh also began publishing on aspects of Irish-Australia, and organising a series of conferences, editing the proceedings with Bill Mandle. But his main contribution to Australian history was the conception and overall management of the collaborative, 10-volume, Australians (1988), with its focus on the lives of ordinary people, and its foregrounding of the work of young historians. Produced to a strict deadline for the bicentenary, it revealed a tough-minded side to Oliver MacDonagh, usually hidden by his innate courtesy and gentleness.
In 1991, he published Jane Austen, real and imagined worlds, in some ways his most characteristic work, drawing together the remarkable range of his scholarly interests. An Austen devotee (though not "a besotted Janeite", as he protested) all his life, he even claimed that her novels first inspired his interest in early Victorian government and society, and the book (begun as a hobby when confined to bed by the back trouble that often made writing extremely painful) combined a polished style with unshowy substance in a manner that would surely have pleased Austen herself. Sadly, declining health, especially problems with his eyes, prevented completion of a similar volume on Trollope.
Oliver MacDonagh was an intensely private man, and could appear distant, even aloof. But to close colleagues, to the many research students he nurtured and encouraged and to his many friends he showed a warmth, kindliness and often uproarious humour, that will always stay with them.
Paradoxically, he was an electrifying public speaker, with a wonderful resonant bass-baritone voice, and was a regular broadcaster on national radio in Australia.
He was a man of intense religious faith, in the intellectual tradition of his other great literary exemplar, John Henry Newman, and he was pleased, after his retirement from Canberra in 1989 (the year in which he was awarded an honorary D.Litt by the National University of Ireland), to be pressed into service as foundation professor of the new Catholic University in Sydney.
The other rock on which his life was built was his family, and he was immensely proud of his children, Clodagh, Oliver, Mary, Emer, Frank, John and Melissa, who survive him, as does his wife Carmel and his sister Pat and brother Donogh.
Oliver MacDonagh: born 1924; died, May 2002