Much of this behaviour was the result of a drink problem. Even when sober, he flirted with female students. He also turned up late for lectures and was prone to speak in riddles. He did not fulfil his promise as a scholar, publishing little for years after he had secured his lifetime chair in 1944 at the age of 35. Sadly that was not unusual in UCD in those days.
All this obscures Dudley’s enormous contribution at a leadership level to historical scholarship in Ireland, making it more professional and scientific and so correcting myths that fuelled hostility within the island and with our British neighbours. He was also tireless and ultimately effective, campaigning for the preservation of records and promoting archives such as the one he founded in UCD. His almost missionary zeal for objective and well-researched history was inspired by a conviction that Irish society, like that of many other countries, had been damaged by violence and prejudice with roots in misunderstood history.
Largely through his efforts, the history school in UCD excelled above other parts of the college in the individual attention given to students, including small group tutorials, and its unusual recruitment of lecturers from outside the UCD gene pool, including a number from English universities, some of whom were not Catholics. He enriched the experience of his students by mingling with them outside the classroom, even if his behaviour doing so sometimes exposed him to criticism.
This biography, written by a grand-daughter who was less than thirty when he died in 1988, displays an objectivity that is not easy for a family member to achieve. Her candour, even pinpointing the streak of cruelty in his nature, contrasts with the rather undiluted acclaim she records from the recollections of the many former students and fellow academics interviewed.
The book profits from the author’s insight into her grandfather’s unusual background and family life. She has been able to draw on a journal he kept until he was almost 50. Dudley’s mother, an Irish nurse from Cork who emigrated to London, persuaded a separated civil servant in her care in a London hospital to return to live with her in Dublin in the first decade of the twentieth century. They never married, a fact not revealed for many years to Dudley who was the elder of their two sons. He harboured a lifelong deep resentment towards his republican mother, who preferred her other son who died young.
After taking a first class degree in history at UCD, Dudley decamped to London University, where he earned a doctorate for his research on the effect of the Reformation in Ireland. This led to a well-regarded book on Church and State in Tudor Ireland. He formed a friendship in London with Belfast Protestant Theo Moody. This resulted ultimately in an all-Ireland historical association and a journal of learned historical scholarship that they edited jointly for many years. The friendship terminated in the 1950s, when Moody was professor in Trinity, following a difference of opinion about Conor Cruise O’Brien’s doctoral thesis for which Dudley was the external examiner.
Dudley married Sheila O’Sullivan, a teacher from Cork, who was a few years older than himself. While it was a reasonably happy marriage and endured for 60 years, it suffered from his anxiety that she preferred other men and from the mental illness of their eldest child, the mother of the author. The honesty with which this sad family saga is narrated, detailing a childhood during which the author’s mother tried to kill her, so that she had to be brought up by her grandparents and other family members, is an outstanding feature of a remarkable, well-constructed and, at times, moving book.