WILLIAM J. WILLIAMS

Professor* of Education 1926-31*

 

 

William J. Williams was born in Galway in 1879. His father died while he was still a teenager and his mother raised William and his five younger siblings on the proceeds of a boarding house which they kept in the Montpelier district in the west of Galway City. William was educated at local schools and was given the advantage of a university education at the Royal College in the city, from which he graduated in 1902*.

For the next decade he engaged in a variety of appointments in the education sector, being regarded as a founder-member of the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland in 1909 and including a five-year term from 1912 as editor of the Irish Journal of Education. In 1914 he secured a position as tutor and supervisor of those students for the priesthood attending University College from All Hallows Missionary College in Dublin. This responsibility required involvement with the relatively small numbers of about a dozen or so assigned to this course of education alongside their seminary studies.

In 1919 he married Angela Murnaghan, one of six children of George Murnaghan of Lisanelly House near Omagh in County Tyrone.  Murnaghan had returned to his native area from America in 1888 at the age of forty, having made some money in commercial enterprises, including a housebuilding firm and a livery stable, in St. Louis and married (in 1877) Angela Mooney, an immigrant from Dublin, with whom he had eight children. Murnaghan became a Nationalist M.P. at Westminster from 1895 and becoming involved in the controversial developments that surrounded the ‘Healyite’ faction supported by the local Catholic clergy, until the denouement in the 1910 election, when his campaign as an independent candidate split the nationalist vote. Though he continued his political adventures until he retired from public life in 1924, his efforts were mainly local, though 1916 he was involved in the anti-partition ‘Omagh Remonstrance’ and in the setting up of the short-lived Irish Nation League, which merged with Sinn Fein.

In the meantime, William Williams was coming to terms with the nature of the brilliant family into which he had married which included brothers in law James Professor of Jurisprudence and Roman Law at UCD Law School from 1911 to 1924, and later a noted judge of the Supreme Court; and Francis, a mathematician awarded in 1914 a National University of Ireland (NUI) Travelling Studentship at Johns Hopkins University, where he became Assistant Professor in 1918 and full professor from 1928 until his retirement in 1949; and his wife’s bother in law Felix Edward Hackett, who also studied at John Hopkins University, where he was awarded a PhD in Physics in 1908 returning to Ireland to work as lecturer at the Royal College of Science, established in 1867 and from 1911 located in its new home (now Government Buildings) in Merrion Street, later being promoted to Professor of Physics in 1921 until his retirement in 1952.

In 1921 William and Angela Williams became the parents of a son whom they christened Thomas Desmond; he would go on to be a major figure in historical studies in Ireland. Apart from a period at a Dominican convent school, would appear to have been educated by his father until he enrolled at UCD in the first year of World War II, graduating in law and becoming involved with the legal profession for a brief period before joining the war effort as a junior diplomat and intelligence officer, again for a brief period.

It was at about this time that William Williams experienced his greatest academic trauma. His obituary gives his tenure at All Hallows as lasting ten years to 1924, combining his duties with part-time lecturing at the Royal College of Science (from 1919), and at the Albert College in Glasnevin. When these institutions merged with University College Dublin in 1926, his initial assignment was as lecturer there.

But the Catholic hierarchy were perhaps suspicious of the Jesuit influence at UCD and were faced with a growing demand for post-graduate education for priests destined to teach in diocesan colleges. Having observed his work at All Hallows, and with his family’s northern connections still active in an independent Ireland, they appointed William Williams in October of that year as the first formal Professor of Education at Maynooth, though in the following year the position was described as ‘Lecturer’. The appointment is not mentioned in any obituary, but would seem to have obtained until his replacement in 1931 by Fr. Martin Brenan, who, with Williams, would be numbered among the six remarkable men who guided that department for a period of eighty years: the others were Peter Birch, Seamus O’Suilleabhain and John Coolahan.

Williams returned to a position in UCD, where the Education faculty was dominated by the Jesuit Fr. Tim Corcoran, who had been in the position since the department was set up in 1909. The situation there, and the difficulty which William Williams had in laying claim to the professorship when Fr. Corcoran retired, became a contentious matter. What follows is based on an account in the Jesuit annals by Fr. Paul Andrews S.J., a prospective successor to Fr. Corcoran.

‘Tim Corcoran was a tough Tipperary man of high intelligence (first place in Ireland in the Intermediate exam, first class honours in all his university exams), hugely energetic and determined.

‘He made a profound mark not merely on secondary and primary teachers, but on government educational policy, especially in his insistence that all young children be taught through Irish, though many of their teachers could not speak it properly. His assistant lecturer W. J. Williams languished in Tim’s shadow for years, and was popular with the UCD staff, who felt he deserved the chair after suffering so long. When Tim reluctantly retired, a sick man, the advertisement laid down that his successor should be able to lecture in Irish. Williams did not claim to speak Irish, much less lecture in it.

‘A memorable row followed, illustrating many of the tensions in Irish society of 1943. There was the Lay .v. Cleric tension (the alternative to Williams was Fr Fergal McGrath SJ – though the Jesuits openly backed Williams, and when he applied for the job, McGrath withdrew his application). There was the tension between compulsory Irish and a freer approach. There was Fianna Fail (represented by Tim Corcoran and NUI Chancellor Eamonn De Valera) .v. Fine Gael (represented by the most influential UCD professors). The students took sides, and a battle was fought in Earlsfort Terrace with hosepipes and stones.

‘When the NUI Senate met to make the appointment, UCD’s president (Andrew Conway, who had himself taught science for a short period at Maynooth in the early 1900s), proposed Williams. De Valera proposed the reluctant Fergal McGrath, claiming that a candidate with Irish should have preference over a candidate without Irish - the principle then openly accepted in the Civil Service. The bishop of Galway (Michael Browne, who had been on the staff of Maynooth during Williams’ tenure there) seconded Dev’s proposal, but the vote went to Williams. He was already a sick man, and retired in 1948 (he died four years later).’

By then his son Desmond, his brief war duty over, had in 1944 he became a research student at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and following his failure to be awarded a fellowship there returned to Ireland, where he was appointed Professor of Modern History at UCD in the year after his father’s retirement.

Another Jesuit, Seán O Catháin, the son of a notable Gaelic enthusiast who had returned to Ireland from London and become an official of the Revenue Commissioners, was chosen to succeed Williams, but only as a lecturer – the school had been downgraded through the influence of President Michael Tierney, an old adversary of Tim Corcoran. Seán, who was an uncle of the prominent Irish businesswoman in Britain, Baroness Detta O’Catháin, was upgraded to professor in 1966.

After O’Cathain retired in the late 1970s, Paul Andrews himself was asked to lecture on curriculum and exams. He remembers motorbiking out to Belfield to face 550 Higher Diploma students in a huge lecture hall – and how his heart sank every June at the sight of 550 exam scripts. ‘In those days each paper carried the name of the candidate. Dublin is a small town, and he could identify several of the writers, including students with prominent political names like de Valera and Haughey: not a good system, ripe for change,’ he observed.

Now the chair of education was vacant again. Though Paul enjoyed the students and liked teaching, he knew he did not want to become an academic. However a group of UCD staff persuaded him to apply. It was interesting to go through the motions of seeking a job which he did not want. He motorbiked round the country showing his face to the members of the Governing Body who would have to vote on him. They put him on the final list of three.

After the crucial interview by the selection board, its chairman (who turned out to be none other than T. Desmond Williams!) wrote him a delightful letter reflecting on the interview: “You were obviously well qualified for the job, but clearly you did not really want it.”

‘The days of clerical and Jesuit appointments are well behind us,’ Paul Andrews wrote. ‘If you Google “UCD School of Education” today, you will find that out of a staff of 21, two thirds are lay women, which reflects nicely their dominance in the teaching profession. There’s a happy ending for you.’

The situation is much the same in Maynooth University, where the early attempts to make Education a vital subject in the formation of priests has flowered almost one hundred years later into a dynamic department at the heart of the diverse campus's mission.

 

*Date or title estimated, uncertain or disputed