Madam, - At the end of a new teacher's first day at St Patrick's Cathedral Grammar School, Dublin in 1942, there were little groups from different classes gathered in the school yard.
"Who is this remarkable man?" was the general opinion expressed by the boys. His starting salary was £5.10s, with no pay for holidays.
That first impression of the 60-pupil school remained for the seven years he taught there, and many boys, after they left, kept in contact with him by letter. One wrote every week for two-and-a-half years while he was working abroad and received dozens of letters back.
This teacher taught geography by telling of his own experiences in the countries he had visited, and inspired extensive travels later by his pupils. He made history come alive by using anecdotes rarely found in school textbooks, never forgetting to stress how knowledge of seafaring had created empires and spread cultures globally. He taught us simple first aid, though it was not an official subject.
Much has been printed already in this newspaper about Dr John de Courcy Ireland's great achievements, but much has not been told. For instance, he rode a bicycle daily from Dalkey to the school, a distance of about eight miles, so he could use the fares money saved to buy postage stamps for letters soliciting artefacts for a future maritime museum. Some of these he deposited in the homes of friends for safe storage until required - as they were when that museum opened in Dun Laoghaire.
Before he took up teaching in Ireland, he interviewed Nikita Kruschev, then a party secretary in Georgia, USSR, as part of a travel series on the former Soviet Union for the Manchester Guardian. Kruschev turned up three hours late for the meeting, with no apologies, for this was the "norm".
John told us pupils that he had stoked a coal-burning boat through the Red Sea and the fans in the boiler room made it cooler down there than up on deck. But the story that stuck longest in our minds was, perhaps, this one. At the age of 10, when attending a boarding school in Baker Street, London, he was delivered to the train for Southampton to catch a trip to travel to Rome, where his mother was then living. When he missed the ship, he took a ferry across the English Channel, and then caught trains to Marseilles, where he explored the city while waiting for his scheduled ship to arrive. He joined it for the last stage of the voyage.
Once he walked into the senior class and told us that today we were going to discuss our futures and our ambitions, instead of learning history. It was a particularly bright class, so each boy had high aspirations for their careers. One boy, however, said that he wanted a job in Guinness or Player Wills. "Why is that?" asked the Doc curtly.
"Well," replied the 16-year-old, "you get a good pension with those firms." John, who loved this boy as he did the rest of us, stood up to his full height and said: "Thinking of your pension at your age - baah! If you had said your ambitions were to rob America's biggest bank, foment revolutions or make love to the world's most beautiful woman, I would have understood." He went to the classroom door, and formally put the boy outside for a minute amid great laughter.
When John was 75, a group of his St Patrick's pupils arranged a party, and one of those present was that same boy. He then held a senior engineering post in one of the world's largest tanker fleets. Another of his pupils from a different grouping became head chaplain to the Royal Navy, and received a knighthood. - Yours, etc,
ARTHUR REYNOLDS, Seapoint Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin.