James Eadie Todd, professor of modern history in Queen’s University, Belfast between 1919 and 1945, is scarcely remembered today, even in the university where he spent most of his professional life. He deserves to be better known. Section one of this essay outlines the reasons why. Section two discusses the sources that make it possible. The third summarises Todd’s career in the years before he came to Queen’s. The fourth reviews the practice of history in the United Kingdom during the first half of the twentieth century that provided the context in which Todd plied his craft. This leads, fifthly, to a consideration of Todd’s contribution to Irish historical scholarship and to his role in the Irish ‘historiographical revolution’. The essay concludes with a discussion of Todd’s effectiveness as a teacher and touches on changes in universities that have rendered scholars like Todd an extinct species.
I
James Eadie Todd was appointed to the Queen’s chair in 1919 aged thirty-four. He retired in 1945 in poor health and died in Edinburgh in October 1949. He was dean of the faculty of arts on three occasions and advisor of studies for several years during the 1930s.Footnote 1 During his long tenure of the chair he published nothing. His part in founding the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies in 1936, and in securing a grant from the university to support the publication of Irish Historical Studies two years later, has gone almost unnoticed and his wider importance in the development of Irish historical studies has not been explored in detail.Footnote 2
Todd was, in the words of H. A. Cronne, a student in Queen’s and later a colleague, ‘one of the most inspiring historical teachers in any British university’.Footnote 3 He established an important honours and graduate school in Belfast during the 1930s with a strong emphasis on Irish history. From 1921 he served as chief examiner in history for the Northern Ireland Department of Education; as his pupils were appointed to teaching posts in local schools his influence spread beyond the university.Footnote 4 Todd’s reputation extended beyond Northern Ireland. When a Festschrift edited by three former pupils was published posthumously in 1949, a reviewer commented that it testified to ‘the remarkable success of the late Professor J. E. Todd as an inspirer of historical research, which made the Queen’s University of Belfast a centre of historical inquiry out of all proportion to its resources’.Footnote 5
Five of Todd’s pupils at Queen’s went on to occupy chairs in Britain or Ireland.Footnote 6 H. A. Cronne was a student between 1922 and 1925. Following studies in Oxford and London he returned to Belfast as Todd’s assistant in 1928. He moved to King’s College, London in 1931 and was appointed to a chair of medieval history in Birmingham in 1946. Cronne did not publish in Irish history but did so extensively in his own field.Footnote 7 T. W. Moody was an undergraduate between 1926 and 1930 and after working for his Ph.D. in London at the Institute of Historical Research became Todd’s assistant in 1932.Footnote 8 He was appointed to a lectureship in Irish history in 1935.Footnote 9 In 1939 Moody moved to a fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin where, within a few months, he was elected to the chair of modern history. For more than three decades Moody was the most formidable figure in Irish historical scholarship. David Beers Quinn had an outstanding undergraduate career between 1927 and 1931, followed by graduate studies in London. After a spell as lecturer at Southampton University College, he succeeded Moody in 1939 as lecturer in Irish history at Queen’s. He was appointed to the chair of history at Swansea in 1944 and in 1957 moved to Liverpool. He did important work on Tudor Ireland, but made a wider reputation as an historian of European exploration of the Atlantic world. In the words of Nicholas Canny, ‘his achievements render him the only historian from Ireland of his generation to have gained international distinction in an area other than Irish history’.Footnote 10 Quinn’s successor was J. C. Beckett. He graduated in 1935 and took his M.A. in 1941; for a decade he worked as a schoolmaster. He was promoted to a personal chair of Irish history in 1958 and became a leading figure among the ‘second generation’ of Irish historians.Footnote 11 Beckett’s fellow student, Leslie McCracken, graduated in 1936 (M.A. 1941, Ph.D. 1948) and, like Beckett, was a schoolmaster until 1946 when he became a lecturer in history at the University of Witwatersrand. He returned to Ireland in 1950 to take up a research post at Trinity College, Dublin. Two years later he was appointed senior lecturer at Magee University College and to the chair in 1957. He moved to the New University of Ulster in 1968. When he retired, in 1979, he returned to South Africa as a research fellow at Rhodes University.Footnote 12
Todd had a knack of appointing assistants who progressed to chairs elsewhere. Edward Hughes, a Manchester graduate and lecturer at Stranmillis Training College, Belfast, served as Todd’s assistant between 1922 and 1925; he eventually became professor of history at Durham. G. R. Potter was assistant lecturer in medieval history between 1927 and 1931, when he was appointed to the chair of history at Sheffield. His successor was R. R. Betts who moved to Southampton in 1935 and then briefly to Birmingham, before being elected Masaryk Professor of Slavonic Studies in the University of London. Finally J. W. Blake, a London graduate, was from 1935 successively assistant lecturer, lecturer and senior lecturer until his appointment to the chair of history at the University College of North Staffordshire (later the University of Keele) in 1950.Footnote 13
II
A brief outline of Todd’s career can be found in the introduction to his Festschrift. However, a fuller exploration is possible because of the survival of a file containing almost 200 letters relating to the preparation of the Festschrift. The first was written in July 1944 by Quinn to Moody in Dublin mooting the idea. The last was dated 8 December 1947, also by Quinn, to Cronne in Birmingham discussing publication delays. The book was not published for another two years, so the surviving correspondence is probably incomplete. Two-thirds of the letters were written either by Cronne or Quinn to Moody or to each other. Twenty were from contributors to the editors. Another twenty were from Blake who acted as secretary to the project or R. J. Dickson, a teacher in Methodist College, Belfast, who looked after the finances. A dozen letters passed between the editors and possible publishers and printers. Ten were from Queen’s administrators or academic colleagues. Two letters were from would-be (but uninvited) contributors. The collection contains a couple of letters drafted by Moody and occasionally he scribbled drafts of a reply in the margins of the letters he received.Footnote 14 The file also contains a typed memoir written by Todd outlining his career up to his appointment to Queen’s. In 1959, Cronne published an edited version in History.Footnote 15 Cronne omitted some personal details, but they have been referred to here since they help to explain shifts in Todd’s early career. From Cronne’s editorial notes it is clear that Todd wrote the memoir shortly before his death.
Among other material in Belfast are tributes to Todd published in the Q.U.B. Annual Record when he retired and after his death.Footnote 16 Cronne provided an account of Todd in a memoir written in 1977.Footnote 17 The geographer E. Estyn Evans, who came to Queen’s in 1928, discussed Todd in a memoir written probably in 1978.Footnote 18 References to Todd appear in two autobiographical volumes by the Belfast playwright John Boyd. And Todd, thinly disguised as ‘Professor McAlinden’, is a character in a novel written by a former history student, Hugh Shearman.Footnote 19 Complementing the Belfast sources are eighty documents held by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Todd occupied the chair of history and economics between 1913 and 1919. They relate to his initial appointment, to the leave of absence he was granted in 1916, and to his move to Queen’s in 1919. Particularly useful are references written in support of Todd when he applied for his first appointment in Edinburgh in 1910, which he used to support his Dalhousie application.Footnote 20 Apart from those in the Dalhousie archive, there are a few surviving letters written by Todd.Footnote 21 One, dated May 1941, was written to Beckett congratulating him on his M.A. thesis, which Todd described as ‘an outstanding piece of work’. He told Beckett the university had commissioned Moody to write its centenary history and Moody wanted Beckett to assist him: ‘Happy as I am to have this important commission put into the hand of the most distinguished of my former pupils, my pleasure would be enhanced if the services of another distinguished former pupil could be enlisted in an auxiliary capacity.’Footnote 22
III
J. E. Todd was born in 1885, the eldest son of a minister of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland.Footnote 23 He entered Edinburgh University in 1903 to read English, intending to follow his father into the church. A timetable clash forced him to switch to history where, in his own words, ‘[I] met my fate’.Footnote 24 He came under the influence of Professor Richard Lodge; his undergraduate experience became ‘utterly and arrestingly different’. Later in life Todd told Lodge’s daughter that her father’s classes opened up a ‘new world of entrancing interest, which engaged the devotion of hitherto dormant intellectual energies … I went to my history lectures with an eager anticipation which today I would give almost anything to recapture. Nor was it merely that the subject-matter of the lectures was a powerful stimulant to thought. There was also the perfection of form and the charm of the delivery.’Footnote 25 Todd recalled that ‘Lodge’s inexorable unfolding of the sequences of cause and effect shattered my easy belief in the providential ordering of human affairs’. He abandoned the notion of the ministry and began to prepare for the Indian Civil Service examinations, remaining at Edinburgh for a fifth year to take additional subjects, including economic theory and economic history.Footnote 26
At this point Todd’s life took an unexpected turn. In his own words, ‘I, who in later years counselled several of my distinguished pupils to hasten slowly in matters matrimonial, set them a bad example by getting engaged before my 21st birthday! The sequel was to be tragic. Within a little more than a year, my fiancée developed consumption, and since life in India was not to be thought of for one of such a tendency, I cast about me for an alternative career.’ He lighted on the academic: ‘a doubtful but delectable prospect’. With much trepidation he approached Lodge to tell him of his intention of competing for an Open Exhibition at Pembroke College, Oxford: ‘His reply was favourable, but characteristically brief and to the point. “Yes, I think you carry the guns, but I can’t have you going to a second-rate College like Pembroke. I shall write to the Balliol dons and suggest they offer you an Exhibition. You should hear from them within a few days”.’Footnote 27 Three weeks later, ‘the irregularly elected Exhibitioner presented himself at Balliol College gate’.Footnote 28
Todd joined a group of brilliant young men taught by A. L. Smith. One of them, Lewis Namier, described Smith as ‘perhaps the best history teacher of our time’.Footnote 29 Todd agreed: ‘For Smith lecturing was only a subsidiary method of instruction, primarily adapted to the needs of the low-brows. Where he excelled, though naturally not with uniform brilliance, was in the critical tutorial method. For able pupils, prepared to work for him and who understood his method, Smith was for decades the finest History Tutor in Oxford.’ Smith introduced Todd to a style of teaching diametrically different from that of the lofty Lodge. He also initiated him into the research seminar conducted by Sir Paul Vinogradoff, the Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence. The seminar was based on the study of original documents and was an innovation in the Oxford of the time.Footnote 30 It was a singular honour for an undergraduate to be invited to attend and it resulted in the only publication coming from Todd’s pen when he contributed to an edition of a Welsh manorial survey in the fourteenth century.Footnote 31
Todd was active in college life. In 1910 he was awarded a prize of £10 ‘for good work in collections’.Footnote 32 He rubbed shoulders with scholars who were destined to stand among the giants of the historical profession, including Namier, Arnold J. Toynbee, G. N. Clark, Philip Guedalla, C. H. Firth and H. W. C. Davis. Smith took Todd on country walks ‘during which he drew me out and teased me by attacking my cherished convictions or Scottish prejudices’. He introduced Todd to some of the less exalted pupils of the college. He sent him to the Bull Inn, Oxford, for ten days in the company of the ‘able, charming but incurably dissolute son of a South African millionaire … to segregate him from the delights of Oxford, and induce him to do a little work before Schools’. On another occasion Smith placed an idle rugby international, who was in danger of being sent down, into Todd’s care: ‘If you want to have much success with him you will have to take a mild part in his dissipation, which incidentally will be thoroughly good for you.’Footnote 33 Smith described Todd as ‘full of friendliness and help to others, and [he] has won the admiration of his contemporaries, even the least bookish’.Footnote 34
After two years at Balliol, Todd gained an outstanding first to add to his Edinburgh M.A., had engaged in his only experience of original research, and shared the company of young historians who shaped the study of history in Britain for years to come.Footnote 35 Lodge offered him an assistantship at £100 a year. But despite Todd’s veneration for his old professor, he declined it. Lodge’s assistants, he observed, all wrote books, ‘but not one of them ever got a Chair, from which one might conclude that the position was not a very good jumping-off ground’. There was also a pressing personal reason for declining the offer: ‘My fiancée was an orphan, and her little store of capital had by this time almost vanished in sanatorium fees. Though her condition was much improved, it was essential that I should be able to marry and support her with the least possible delay.’ The Edinburgh lectureship in economic history held by George Unwin was vacant as he was moving to a chair at Manchester. The salary was £250 a year. ‘With an effrontery, the very thought of which sends shivers up my aged spine, I decided to apply.’Footnote 36
It was a bold move. Unwin in Edinburgh, William Cunningham in Cambridge, and William Ashley in Birmingham were the most influential economic historians of their age. Unwin had two major books to his name and the Manchester chair had been created for him.Footnote 37 Todd had no publications (the Denbigh Survey was not published until 1914). On the other hand he had been a member of Vinogradoff’s seminar, ‘then, a magical name’.Footnote 38 He also had outstanding references from Smith and H. W. C. Davis in Balliol, as well as from his Edinburgh tutors including Lodge, Hume Brown (Scottish history) and J. S. Nicholson (political economy).Footnote 39 Nicholson was particularly impressed that Todd had ploughed through his three-volume work on political economy, a task few readers apart from the author had attempted.Footnote 40 Thus armed, Todd applied and to his surprise he ‘was appointed over the heads of men very much more learned in the subject than I was, and many years my senior’.Footnote 41
Todd entered a frenzy of writing lectures for large classes. He also needed to prepare an inaugural lecture to be delivered before the university senate. At the end of the first session he married his fiancée, Frances Hannah Jagger. Then came tragedy: ‘Within six months my poor young wife was dead, slain by the fell disease with which she had battled for several years.’Footnote 42 Smith advised Todd to leave Edinburgh. Smith had been asked to recommend someone for a lectureship at McGill University in Montreal and he urged Todd to go for it.Footnote 43
Todd resigned his Edinburgh post and departed for McGill, only to discover that the appointment was for one year only. Fortunately, Dalhousie was looking for someone to fill its chair of history and economics; as a result of inquiries in Edinburgh it approached Todd.Footnote 44 Dalhousie offered him the post, which he accepted, although the thought of professing economics, ‘was a bit of a facer’; economics remained a ‘thorn in my flesh’ throughout his time in Dalhousie. Todd returned to Scotland in the summer of 1913 to prepare his lectures and to bolster his command of economics. Back in Canada he embarked on a heavy diet of teaching. Many of his students were of Scottish descent; he enjoyed their company and his contacts with local Burns clubs.Footnote 45
Todd was back in Scotland in the spring of 1914. On 1 June he married for the second time; his bride was Margaret Simpson Johnstone Maybin of Elderslie, Renfrewshire.Footnote 46 The two of them returned to Nova Scotia just at the outbreak of war and Todd resumed teaching. But the shadow of the conflict in Europe lay heavily upon him. ‘I was the only able-bodied male of our family connection not in khaki’, he recalled, and he was continually saddened by news of the deaths of Edinburgh and Oxford contemporaries. Footnote 47 In March 1916 he told Dalhousie he intended to resign his chair and return to Scotland to work in a munitions factory. The college suggested instead he take unpaid leave of absence.Footnote 48 Todd and his wife sold their possessions to pay the fare and the family, now including an infant son, crossed the Atlantic from New York, hoping to avoid submarine attack.
In Scotland the idea of a munitions factory was abandoned; instead Todd became a second lieutenant in the Scottish Fusiliers. In April 1917 a false report reached Canada that he had been killed at Vimy Ridge.Footnote 49 In fact he had been posted to Mesopotamia where he avoided bullets but not mosquitos. He contracted malaria, an illness that plagued him for the rest of his life and changed his personality. Whereas early accounts tell of a friendly, outgoing young man, the Todd of post-war years was known for his uneven temper and dark moods. Cronne remembered ‘times when recurrent bouts of malaria … made him deeply depressed and prone to be hypercritical. … Just before these bouts members of his staff, and more especially his Assistant … were likely to receive severe wiggings for faults that were largely imaginary’. Estyn Evans remarked on ‘Todd’s saturnine face and his bouts of ill-temper [which] were attributed to the recurrence of fever’.Footnote 50
Todd was repatriated to Scotland at the beginning of 1919, still seriously ill, and was not discharged from the army until his health improved in June. He began to think about returning to Dalhousie.Footnote 51 The prospect was unappealing on family and financial grounds.Footnote 52 But a failed application for a fellowship at Balliol left the Todds with no alternative but to book passages for their return to Canada where Dalhousie had offered him a resettlement grant. Their sailing date was already set when Mrs Todd saw an advertisement for the vacant chair at Queen’s. Todd applied and was called for interview at a date ten days after their planned departure. There were nine candidates, including Todd. On 24 September 1919 the university senate noted the appointment of Professor J. E. Todd M.A. to the chair of modern history at an annual salary of £600. A. L. Smith, now master of Balliol, described Todd as ‘certainly one of the very ablest students of History who ever attended Balliol, and that he possessed a great degree of strength and a wide and cosmopolitan experience’.Footnote 53 Todd cabled the news to his wife in Scotland. Another cable went to Dalhousie informing the president of his non-return.Footnote 54 ‘My wandering days were over’, he noted, ‘and this was to be my home and sphere for the rest of my working life.’Footnote 55
IV
On 14 October 1919 Todd wrote to President Mackenzie, ‘I begin my work at Queen’s today.’Footnote 56 Todd’s predecessor was F. M. Powicke (later Sir Maurice Powicke) who had been appointed in 1909 as the foundation professor. In 1915 he was seconded to the War Trade Intelligence Department and for three years Maude Clarke, an outstanding Queen’s history graduate, returned from Oxford to act as his substitute.Footnote 57 As late as February 1919, Queen’s expected Powicke to be back.Footnote 58 Instead he was elected to the chair of history at Manchester. There was no time for the university to name a successor in the calendar for 1919–20; instead it repeated brief details of Powicke’s courses, together with a statement that lectures on Ireland would be given and that book lists would be issued at the beginning of the session.Footnote 59
In 1920–1 Todd set out his own stall. There was a pass course on European history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an honours course consisting of a ‘special subject’, together with studies of the ‘Great Rebellion’, and the political and constitutional history of Great Britain and Ireland, 449–1603. There was also a class devoted to the study of documents based on Stubbs’s Charters and Prothero’s Statutes.Footnote 60 Todd’s teaching concentrated on modern European history and particularly seventeenth-century English history, which had ‘an enduring fascination’.Footnote 61 The presence of Stubbs and Prothero on the reading lists testified to his belief in the importance of documentary studies for advanced students. In this, he fitted readily into the mainstream of history teaching in British universities as it had developed in the later-nineteenth century. Stubbs had established the centrality of English medieval and constitutional history following his appointment to the regius chair at Oxford in 1866. For Stubbs and his many successors the emergence of political communities and self-governing institutions advanced in triumphal strides from Anglo-Saxon times, via Stephen Langton and Magna Carta, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, to the flowering of parliamentary democracy in the nineteenth century.Footnote 62
It was an enduring interpretation. As Kenyon puts it: ‘up to the Second World War, at least, most provincial universities were remarkably loyal to the traditions of late Victorian Oxford: whatever the cost English history must be taught in its entirety, wherever possible with the aid of original documents, and overseas history, including European history, must find a place where it could. Sir Richard Lodge and George Prothero even imposed early English constitutional history, complete with Stubbs, on the hapless Scots at Glasgow and Edinburgh.’Footnote 63 What Lodge and Prothero did to the Scots, Todd did in Northern Ireland.Footnote 64 The only substantial change for the rest of the decade was the introduction in 1927 of medieval courses in English and European history following the appointment of G. R. Potter as assistant lecturer in medieval history.Footnote 65
V
Major changes in the syllabus were introduced in 1935, designed to give greater importance to Irish history. Todd had then been in post for a decade and a half, which was a long time for someone who, in the words of a colleague, ‘felt strongly the need to study Irish History in an Irish university of the British Commonwealth’.Footnote 66 His Festschrift’s editors suggested the delay was because Todd’s resources were limited; and it is true that he had to cope with rising numbers of students without assistance until 1922.Footnote 67 This cannot be the whole story. In 1927, when Todd was able to hire an additional lecturer, he chose a medievalist and split his department into departments of medieval and modern history.Footnote 68 When Potter resigned three years later he was succeeded by another medievalist, R. R. Betts. The Stubbsian tradition remained strong.
Political events may have contributed to the delay. Todd’s early years at Queen’s coincided with partition and the immediate task for the university was to meet the needs of Northern Ireland. If anything, partition strengthened the case for teaching British constitutional history and to ignore Irish history except in the limited sphere of the political links between Ireland and Britain. In a related area of study, economic history – the responsibility of the department of economics – before the war there had been two courses covering both England and Ireland. Conrad Gill, well known for his book on the Irish linen industry, had delivered these. Following Gill’s departure in 1919 there was a single shared survey course on Britain and Ireland given by Joseph Lemburger who held a joint appointment in economic history and political science. In 1926 Irish economic history disappeared from the syllabus; thereafter there was nothing until the appointment of K. H. Connell in 1953.Footnote 69
But the most important reason for the delay was that for years there was no one properly qualified to teach Irish history. Most of Todd’s early students read for the pass degree and did not proceed to honours; an early exception was Cronne, but he went on to become a historian of medieval England. It was only at the end of the 1920s that two outstanding graduates, Moody and Quinn, were sent to London to write doctorates on Irish history. There was not much help to be had south of the border. Historians in University College, Dublin had, in the words of Dudley Edwards, ‘little connexion with historical research’. Trinity College contributed little to the study of modern Irish history. Edmund Curtis, an Oxford-trained historian, held the Lecky Chair of History. He was ‘a devoted student of medieval Irish history’, but ‘drifted helplessly in the cross-currents of Trinity academic life’. He was assisted by Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, newly returned from Cambridge, who eventually became a distinguished medievalist; and, for the modern period, by Constantia Maxwell. She wrote what has been described as ‘G. M. Trevelyan’s kind of social history’ and was appointed to a chair of economic history in 1939.Footnote 70 W. Alison Phillips was the Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History. His interests were in European history. He was an ‘undisguised and unashamed Englishman doing a job in a foreign land, and spending in Dublin only the minimum time needed for his lectures and examinations’.Footnote 71 It was only when Moody moved to Trinity in 1939 that the serious study of modern Irish history based on archival work was introduced.
In Belfast the planning for Irish courses started in 1932 with the return of Moody to the assistantship.Footnote 72 Todd probably had this development in mind ever since Moody had left for London in 1930. When Betts resigned the medieval lectureship in 1935 the post was converted into a lectureship in Irish history to which Moody was appointed. Todd took over the medieval teaching in addition to his existing commitments. Under the new arrangements pass students continued to receive hefty doses of English and European history.Footnote 73 Honours students were offered two courses on English constitutional history, with Stubbs and Prothero still figuring prominently, and yet more European history. But there was also a survey course on Ireland 1485–1800, and a special subject, ‘the policy of the early Stuarts in England and Ireland 1603–1641’, as well as a ‘special study of books and documents’ on Ireland.Footnote 74 Enthusiastic graduates could proceed to an M.A. by examination composed of six papers: an essay, two papers on European history, two more on the American Revolution, and one on the Tudor conquest of Ireland based on a study of prescribed books.Footnote 75 The Irish courses concentrated on the political relations between the three kingdoms. The detailed study of Gaelic society had to await a future generation of scholars.Footnote 76
More important than the number of papers was the approach Moody brought to the subject. His historical philosophy had been imbibed from Todd; and as Cronne put it, ‘if James stood for one thing more than any other in the teaching and study of History that thing was “disinterested interest” – the Greek – and the Stubbsian – attitude of mind’.Footnote 77 Moody honed his Stubbsian skills at the Institute by immersing himself in the archives of the London companies involved in the Ulster plantation. Just as important were his contacts ‘with many of the best minds outside Oxford and Cambridge who were then advancing the frontiers of British historical scholarship’. These included R. H. Tawney, A. P. Newton, J. E. Neale and Wallace Notestein.Footnote 78
Moody is the link between Todd and the future development of Irish historical studies. Moody has sometimes been described as writing ‘value-free’ history although he preferred to speak of demythologising the Irish past.Footnote 79 His aims were shared by Dudley Edwards, back in Dublin after his own studies at the Institute where he had become friends with Moody, by Quinn, and later by younger colleagues in Belfast, Dublin and elsewhere. They discussed their work at meetings of the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies and its sister society in Dublin and through the auspices of the Irish Committee for Historical Sciences established in 1938, and they published their findings in Irish Historical Studies.Footnote 80
By the 1980s the achievements of Moody, Edwards, their contemporaries and successors, had become almost a new orthodoxy. Their work even began to be denounced as ‘revisionism’, an odd charge to be directed against any historian. But revisionism had been given a particular meaning in Ireland. It had become a challenge to ‘the “Irish-Ireland” tradition of history, which claimed the Irish people are a unified Celtic nation viciously oppressed throughout their history by English/British imperialism’.Footnote 81 Its most trenchant critic, Brendan Bradshaw, described the whole approach as ‘vitiated by a faulty methodological procedure’.Footnote 82 It is not the purpose of this essay to revisit the debate on revisionism, but to point to the part played by Todd in its birth. He cannot be described as a revisionist since he neither published in nor taught Irish history. But he was a powerful influence on the young Moody who acknowledged his debt ‘to Todd’s inspiration and friendship [and] I owe more [to him] than I can ever express’.Footnote 83 Todd has a good claim to be regarded as the godfather of revisionism.
With his Irish lectureship secured, and an additional assistant lecturer appointed in 1935 (J. W. Blake), Todd was able to lay ‘the foundations in Queen’s of a School of History that was to contribute greatly to the renaissance and development of Irish historical studies in Ireland’.Footnote 84 The school became the busiest in the faculty of arts. In 1944, Quinn compiled a list of former graduate students as possible contributors to Todd’s Festschrift.Footnote 85 Cronne, Moody and Quinn were from the 1920s; but an inspection of the minutes of the faculty and academic council reveals twenty graduate students from the 1930s and early 1940s. All but two worked on Irish topics from the mid-seventeenth to the late nineteenth century; and only one chose to leave Belfast to study.Footnote 86 Fourteen former pupils, including Cronne, Moody and Quinn, were invited to contribute to the Festschrift; two contributions were eventually rejected as unsatisfactory.Footnote 87
VI
Sir David Keir, vice-chancellor during Todd’s final years, described him as ‘that great teacher, [and] the kindly guide to so many’.Footnote 88 The judgement carries weight; but vice-chancellors do not enjoy the perspective of undergraduates. Estyn Evans, as a young lecturer, was closer to their experience; he sometimes heard Todd’s lectures through the wall of the wooden building they shared. He recalled ‘some of the more remarkable of Professor Todd’s phrases, repeated at dictation speed … The Poles were “nothing more and nothing less than a pack of licentious, narrow-minded corrupt backwoodsmen – licentious – corrupt – backwoodsmen”.’ Todd, according to Evans, was among several Queen’s professors who ‘had long ceased to do original work, published little and spent their time polishing phrases in their set lectures to Pass students which were delivered in the oratorical style of the old Sorbonne’. Evans acknowledged, though, that Todd’s ‘abler students were devoted to him and he … encouraged them to take up the study of Irish history as he understood it’.Footnote 89
H.A. Cronne remembered Todd’s lectures fifty years after he first heard them:
Every lecture was a carefully prepared oratorical masterpiece, to which Todd’s Scottish voice added a distinctive tone, and each was a superb piece of historical exposition and, in its particular course, a vital constituent of an impressive historical synthesis. He lectured slowly, repeating his elegant phrases, so that every member of his audience had an opportunity of making copious notes. It was a practice that had its dangers, since so many students were tempted to rely upon their notes to an undesirable extent, and many accepted them quite uncritically, regurgitating them at examinations. … Those, on the other hand, who took Todd’s lectures as a guide, were provided with a splendid basis for further study, as was intended.Footnote 90
The introduction to the Festschrift, possibly written by Cronne, claimed that every one of Todd’s lectures was ‘a work of art, the product of a superb historical interpreter who was also a master-craftsman in the English language’. It recalled how ‘a large pass-degree class was, on one occasion, so enthralled as to remain without protest a full twenty minutes beyond the allotted time of a lecture; and when Todd closed with a reference to the “stopping” of Mazzini’s watch in 1848 and consulted his own timepiece, the laughter on both sides was spontaneous, and the applause from the benches a tribute such as on normal occasions the class would not have ventured to offer’.Footnote 91
Humour was an emotion not usually evident in Todd’s classes. Nevertheless, Teresa O’Connor, an undergraduate in the 1930s, claimed that students ‘thought the world of Professor Todd’.Footnote 92 John Boyd, later well known as a playwright and B.B.C. producer, did not agree.
In the modern history class the professor, a tall urbane Scot, paced to and fro, armed with a long pointer and reading out his lecture at a pedestrian pace twice, so that we could write down his every word in our notebooks. As I’d been told the lectures didn’t change from year to year, and as the task of writing them out to dictation was tedious in the extreme, I jumped at the offer of a second-year undergraduate – a set of written lectures for half a crown. As a result I was even more bored, having to listen for an hour to a discourse delivered in a melodious sleep-inducing Scottish accent, the ornate prose obviously providing the professor himself with a great deal of satisfaction. To pass the degree exam it was enough to regurgitate these lectures, thereby qualifying yourself to teach history. Absurd of course; for this dull academic political history, full of incomprehensible treaties and diplomatic entanglements, taught in isolation from social and economic history was useless.Footnote 93
A quasi-fictional description of Todd’s lectures by Hugh Shearman, a student in the late 1930s (and a contributor to the Festschrift) largely accords with Boyd’s description. Shearman’s novel, A bomb and a girl, is set in the Queen’s of the 1930s. The central character is a malevolent student, Stanislas McOstrich, who constructs a bomb to kill the professor of Latin who repeatedly fails his essays. The assassination is successful and McOstrich reflects on his achievement during a lecture delivered by a ‘Professor McAlinden’.
He dealt with Bismarck and the wars of Schleswig-Holstein and Königgratz and all the history of the North German Confederation and the events that led up to the founding of the German Empire. Stanislas scribbled down the lecture in his notebook, and, as Professor McAlinden uttered it word for word in his slow, metronomic enunciation, it seemed to form a background and a solemn triumphal chorus to his own massive feeling of elation and triumph.Footnote 94
Two conclusions may be drawn from these conflicting accounts. The first is that Todd did not enthuse his listeners in equal measure. This is not surprising; students possess varying degrees of scholarly commitment. The second is that the passing years left their mark. Todd’s final years were a continual worry to his friends. Margaret, his wife, died in 1940; his son was missing somewhere in the Far East; arthritis and a duodenal ulcer added to the malaria that had tortured him since 1919. He had become acutely sensitive to hurts, even when none were intended. Todd was irrationally upset when the vice-chancellor insisted on keeping him distant from the appointment of his successor. Cronne reported that Todd’s ‘many sorrows may have changed him somewhat’ and students had grown afraid of him.Footnote 95 Gone was the young teacher who ‘took such endless trouble’ with his pupils, ‘collectively and individually exhorting and encouraging them and striving for the development not merely of historical abilities but of the whole man, safeguarding their interests and furthering their careers’.Footnote 96 In his place was a man burdened by ill health, sorrow, and perhaps a sense of failure.
In retirement Todd lamented his failure to publish: ‘I got no systematic training in research, and was to feel the effects of this all through my career. Indeed, this was one of the reasons why I have no literary works to my name; the other being that far too many years elapsed before I was given adequate leisure from the teaching grind.’Footnote 97 As a young man A. L. Smith remarked on Todd’s ‘keen love of research’ and his skilful use of books and manuscripts. In 1912 he accepted a contract with Geo. Bell and Sons, publishers, to write a textbook on economic history; it was never completed.Footnote 98
In today’s academic world Todd would not survive. But it was different then. Universities accommodated dedicated teachers together with pioneering researchers, dull plodders and even dilettante scholars. Todd’s critical colleague, Estyn Evans, was a pioneer, the ‘first professor of geography in Ireland, archaeologist and folklorist, writer, artist and broadcaster’.Footnote 99 H. O. Meredith, professor of economics between 1911 and 1945, author, before he came to Queen’s, of a textbook on British economic history and another on protectionism in France, as well as a slim volume of poems, had lapsed into the dilettante class. His consuming passion was not economics but drama. Meredith published his own translations of plays of Euripides and in 1933 directed unemployed shipyard workers in performances of Sophocles and Marlow. He was president of the Queen’s Dramatic Society, and co-founder of the Northern Drama League.Footnote 100 Todd and Meredith did not get on. As Cronne reported to Moody, Todd, ‘had found M[eredith] at Queen’s and would leave him there, and that in the course of an association lasting over a quarter of a century they had never been in agreement on a single point’.Footnote 101
After Todd’s death, John Blake recalled, ‘his formalism made access to the inner man slow, and those who knew him … inside his family circle, sometimes found it hard to credit that this was also the professor who delivered formal lectures to his pass students. It took time to break down the barriers; once they were gone one found an infinitely kind, amazingly understanding and self-effacing person.’Footnote 102 Moody said of Todd that he ‘professed history as a high and holy calling’.Footnote 103 For some of his students Todd was a tedious bore; for others – perhaps a majority – his carefully constructed lectures were the safe pathway to a pass mark. But there were also those for whom Todd was the spark that kindled their historical curiosity, setting them on a journey leading to a fruitful flowering of Irish historical scholarship. Moody, Quinn, Beckett and the others were inspired by Todd, and they went on to inspire pupils of their own. The present generation of historians owes much to Todd, even though they may never have heard of him.
