WINIFRED MacBride Greenwood was the first head of the first Department of Russian in an Irish university. This is a notable claim to fame; and, although the recent remarkable success and impressive expansion of her old department must be credited to the "second wave" of teachers who joined the staff from the mid-1970s on, it was Winifred who, with the loyal and scholarly support of the late Chris Roberts, laid the foundation. Moreover, the Department of Russian in Trinity, which may have seemed in its early days a frail plant, has now outlived the larger, more ambitious departments at NUU, QUB and NIHE Limerick.
Winifred loved and cherished her students, although she could also be a stern disciplinarian and a niggardly marker (as an extern examiner, I more than once put it to her that it was perverse to propose bare Pass marks for candidates whom, outside the examination context, she lauded to the skies!). In this attitude may be seen a reflection of her own personality, which intriguingly combined the rigorous work ethic of a Scots Protestant dominie with the generosity and expansive (shirokaya) nature of the Russian people to whom she was so devoted.
Winifred was a keen and energetic promoter of the importation of Russian culture into Ireland - particularly, with her husband Peter, of theatrical productions. During the long period of leave which she spent in Moscow, she acquired a substantial knowledge of the contemporary Russian theatrical scene, and it is regrettable that her subsequent ill health prevented her from producing the book which she had projected.
Winifred welcomed the establishment of the teaching of Russian elsewhere in Ireland, and I recall how, soon after my arrival in 1968, she came up to visit our infant department, cutting a dashing figure in her MG sports car (an image which will be unfamiliar to those who knew her only in her latter years of distressingly impaired mobility).
She bore her various and protracted maladies with the courage and grit which were the obverse of the obstinacy and combativeness with which she formerly debated matters of teaching policy. For her friends one happy memory will be of her appearance as guest of honour at the celebratory dinner held in Trinity College in July, 1991.