Downing 2010 cover opt b_Layout 1 - Downing College - University ...

DOWNING COLLEGE ASSOCIATIONundergraduate degree in Irish History, Politics and Society. His collection ofprimary historical sources, The Conflict of Nationality in Modem Ireland, waspublished in 1980. With two colleagues he was the prime mover in foundingthe Centre for the Study of Conflict in 1979, to encourage, coordinate andconduct research into the Northern Irish conflict. He also helped establisheda link with the Sorbonne Nouvelle, focussed on comparative approaches to thestudy of conflict. In 1988 he left Ulster to take up an appointment as Head ofthe Department of Social Studies at what shortly became the University ofSunderland. Unassuming and entertaining as a lecturer, he is remembered asan outstanding supervisor of postgraduates. Wholly devoid of self importance,he was encouraging and meticulous, insisting, as one post graduate put it, that‘every sentence should be clear and mean something.’ His own writing, a modelof clarity and fluency, had not been achieved without effort. In 1994 he spenta short period as visiting fellow at the European University in Florence. He wasgiven a personal chair in Irish History at Sunderland in 1996. In 1997 he wasawarded a visiting Residency at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio. Yet anotheracademic link with Italy was the Irish College in Rome, where for several years,the archives provided important material for his final book.His knowledge of urban history, quantitative analysis and the demography andsocial structure of Belfast resulted in A Past Apart: Studies in the History of CatholicBelfast 1850–1950, published in 1996, and a collection of essays, Contested Citiesin the Modern West in 2004. In 2005 Tony returned briefly to Cambridge as avisiting fellow at the CRASSH Institute and hugely enjoyed the hospitality hereceived from the Master and Fellows at Downing. He was made ProfessorEmeritus at the University of Sunderland after retiring in 2006, when heconcentrated his energies on his long-cherished biography of Joe Devlin, thenationalist MP. He was diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease in June 2007 andwas working on the proofs of the book when he died. Catholic Belfast and NationalistIreland in the era of Joe Devlin, 1871–1934, has been described by Patrick Maume as‘a fitting culmination of a lifetime’s research...a learned and humane work [which]is his monument’. It was published posthumously in September 2008.Tony is survived by his wife Felicity, his son Fred and two grandchildren.John Scampion (1959) writes:From the beginning Tony was ambitious to become an academic. I knownow that the ambition derived from a genuine love of learning; then, in ourundergraduate way, he would joke that it was because he didn’t want to get aproper job – an early illustration of the self-deprecating ironic style that was tobecome something of his hallmark. It was an observation of course utterlyundermined by the succession of posts he held in an energetic, professionally34