Donald in 1995
The following is the text of the tribute paid to Donald at his funeral by Prof Alistair Rowan:
We have come together today to pay tribute to give thanks for the life of Donald Girvan and to pay tribute to his memory. Donald was a remarkable man - brother, brother-in-law, uncle, great uncle and, above all else, the very good, loyal and most considerate friend of many of us here. It is an honour to have been asked by Florence and George to speak about him.
Donald and I first came across each other as small boys at Cabin Hill, the prep. school for Campbell College. I went there at the age of 8 in 1946 and I think Donald arrived a year later in September 1947. We thought he was very brainy and indeed he proved to be one of the most intelligent and naturally talented boys in the whole school. He was someone whom masters automatically turned to when the class got stuck, for Donald always knew the answer, or could make an intelligent stab at it, and he seemed never to have any trouble in coming top in most subjects. Where some of us struggled, he sailed through the 11 plus and, just after taking that novel state exam, he took his first lessons in the piano from the school's music master Mr. Lynch. That would have been in the autumn of 1949 and it marked the beginning of an intellectual love affair, which lasted for all his life.
In September 1951, we both went up to Campbell: Donald straight into the Upper Fourth, I to the Lower Fourth but we would meet in the bike sheds, after school, to cycle home together. I was disorganised, Donald was always in control, neat and tidy, his satchel with just the number of books he needed for prep, neatly wrapped in brown paper covers, mine a mess and heavy with confusion. We were very different boys but, I think, we were good for each other and we remained firm friends.
One thing we always had in common was out dislike of compulsory games. Take Rugby or Hockey, though this was a disappointment to his father, who was a great sportsman, for us that meant standing, chatting together about the edge of a field and certainly keeping well out of the way of any action. And when it was too wet to play either of these games cross country runs were the order of the day. With Donald that meant walking round the perimeter of the school grounds for he would never move himself and was always, even as a school boy, disinclined to take strenuous physical exercise. Where I pedalled up hills, Donald would dismount at the bottom and walk.
But when something engaged his interest, he would work at it relentlessly and put unfathomable stores of energy into its completion. That was one paradox in his make up and it stayed with him all his life. In his last two years at Campbell, on top of the work for Senior Certificate and A Levels, he decided to study the organ and went regularly on his bicycle to St. Marks Dundela for lessons with the organist, Mr. Gill. Of course, as soon as he could play the pedal parts, I had to go to listen to him and, typically for Donald, had to endure that organ playing at full blast with all the stops out and making an incredible din. Later he was to treat many of us to similarly overwhelming musical assaults drawn from his astonishing collection of records in Portstewart.
When reviewing the life of someone I have known for more than 50 years, memories of personal qualities and particular moments come bubbling effortlessly into my mind. I have many recollections for Donald but I am sure that it is his brilliance as a musician, his knowledge and above all his love of music, that defines his life and, perhaps it was this that provided for him his moments of greatest joy. In this church for years, as a school boy, Donald played the piano for the Sunday School and that weekly stint of hymn playing laid the foundation for his spectacular capacity at sight reading, which many a professional pianist might have envied. As a musician he was supremely competent: when one boy who was to play a Mozart piano concerto at a Campbell concert fell ill 4 days before the performance, Donald, aged 18, played it perfectly and I can still remember his dogged practising, in the central hall of Campbell, of the bright little turn that introduced the third movement and which he found exceedingly difficult to get his fingers round. We talked about it peddling home on our bikes and, on the night, he pulled it off brilliantly.
I suppose that little story, catches an important aspect for Donald was a perfectionist - possibly too much of a perfectionist for his own good - but like the paradox of his physical sloth and keenly focused energies, his desire, indeed his demand, that things should be done well was an essential part of his character. He received an excellent education at the University of St. Andrews where, besides obtaining a good 2.1. in Classics in 1960, he was for two years President of the University Music Society, a member of the university choir at St. Salvator's Chapel and a frequent performer of piano concerts usually of challenging works for four hands. Donald loved the little stone-built sea-side town of St. Andrews, the procession that the University choir took in their red flannel student gowns down to the harbour and out along the pier after church, the debates and cut and thrust of academic life and it was there, as he often said himself, that he became a man.
He went on to take a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at the University of London from 1960 to 1961. He did his teaching practice at Watford Grammar School and then was appointed second Classics master at High Storrs School in Sheffield where he stayed for four years. His closest colleague there was the head of Classics, John Nicholls to whom he became a firm friend. John and Donald went together to the Hallé Orchestra Concerts in Sheffield and, typical of the caring man we all knew, Donald would often baby sit for John and Maureen Nicholls during those Sheffield years. In April 1964 he returned to Northern Ireland to take up a post as Classics master at Coleraine Inst. where the Headmaster was the redoubtable Dr. George Humphreys, who had previously been head of the Physics Department at Campbell. They got on well together.
At Coleraine Donald worked with Trevor Surgenor, the Head of Classics, and was a Resident master in the Boarding Department. I can remember tales of the other young masters with whom he formed a group: Dermot Jennings and John Birch in History, Stuart Coulter in Geography, Robert Park, whose speed on the Coleraine to Dublin run was phenomenal, Richard Bennet now at Portora and Donald Mc Donagh and Sam McClements, who sadly have both died. Donald spoke of them all with admiration and affection and he talked too of many self-indulgent trips for tea and scones, when he would hold court, after school at the Trocadero in Portrush, of school masters' outings for dinner at the Salmon Leap - a little later, Ann Martha and I were often to be his guests there - and of games of touch rugby played on the sands which somehow he and Stuart Coulter always managed to avoid. Everyone found him excellent company, a person to have a good laugh with and, at the same time, a very gentle, concerned and supportive friend. He stayed happily at the School until he took early retirement in August 1991 at the age of 54.
When I married in London in July 1968, Donald was my best man and, after the wedding, he took his mother on what was to be the first of many summer jaunts round English country houses and cathedral cities. They were great friends and Donald was a most devoted son. These summer jaunts cultivated an interest in architecture which Donald had caught from me. I trained as an architect and before I was married we had taken a number of holidays together looking at cultural things in the rather self conscious way that characterised young men in our generation. We had gone to Glyndebourne, changing into our dinner jackets in a wood beside the road, and getting there with little more than 10 minutes to spare before the curtain went up on Rosenkavalier and together we gulped down Gothic architecture and Palladian country houses. Later when we had graduated to continental Europe, Donald was bowled over by the visual extravagance of the Baroque. He used to joke about his taste for the showy and ornate - a contrast perhaps to the essentially Puritan world of the Belfast we grew up in - and he loved overloaded things in music and in art. I remember very well on one holiday in Rome in 1966 in the middle of the night he suddenly spoke out in his sleep - 'Oh. Alistair, isn't that just fabulous. Do lets stop and take a photograph'.
Architecture and photography were his other two great interests. When the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society was founded in 1969 Donald was a founder member. Soon he was drawn into helping with the UAHS Lists and soon after had taken on a number on his own. The first he did was Antrim & Ballymena where - and this was typical of him - he insisted on putting my name on the cover as well as his own though it was substantially his work and his own photography that went into the publication. I think he got a great deal of enjoyment out of architecture and buildings and he developed a formidable capacity for detailed historical scholarship and perceptive criticism. Once again it was his professionalism that came to the fore, marking his work for its excellence and care. And these characteristics were found as much in the work he did for the Derry Committee of the National Trust for Northern Ireland, in the comments which he prepared on planning applications relating to listed buildings in the area, and in the text which he had begun for the Buildings of Ireland volume on Antrim and Down.
One thing which I never understood about Donald - perhaps because he was such a bright boy at school - was the self-deprecating modesty with which he regarded his own contribution to the several disciplines in which he had made himself supremely well qualified later in his career. As Classics became less and less an element in the School curriculum Donald took over the Art History teaching at Coleraine, he was Form 5 form master and he took on, too, the role of Head of the Careers Department. Anything he did, he did thoroughly yet he always deferred to the knowledge of others who often knew far less than he did despite the academic titles they enjoyed.
Here once again it was his intellectual energy and appetite for work that set him apart and, yet, I don't think he ever valued himself sufficiently. Mavis Abernethy was his mentor in matters to do with art and I am sure she will agree with my judgement here. Donald had immense talent yet he was the master of jokes against himself and that was one of his most endearing and enduring characteristics.
His career moved one way, mine in another. This is the period when long meticulously written letters in his tiny hand - letters which we must all know - kept me in touch. I cannot speak with any command of detail for the later Coleraine years. One thing is paramount however, his dedication as a teacher and the unstinting way he gave himself to supporting and developing the careers of the boys who were fortunate enough to be his senior students. Donald was a very good teacher: in private life he had a quiet, unassuming manner that did not seek the limelight though he enjoyed giving public lectures and his audiences enjoyed listening to them and viewing his very beautiful slides - but he was not a showy man.
Yet in school he had natural authority. Even from his earliest years he had never any problem in controlling a class, catching and holding its attention and ultimately, in gaining the affection of his pupils. Again and again in my career in the University world I have met boys from Coleraine Inst who had been taught by 'Mr. Girvan' and, though it is a sad reflection on standards today, again and again I have heard them say how their University lecturers were not a patch on Donald, nor did they know as much. Of course a lot of his pupils went back to visit him and I know how much it pleased Donald to be told, as he often was, that it was his teaching, or his advice, that had set them on their careers. For the boys that came across him there is no doubt that he was a wonderful and an inspiring man. And what a legacy a great teacher leaves behind!
For those of us who had the privilege to be
his friends, what can I say? Donald was a man of immense talents
and learning who, I cannot help feeling, was dealt a hard hand
in life. He lacked the restraining influence of a partner or close
friend and, I believe, worked himself too hard. A lot of us do
this yet with Donald the drive and compulsion to complete things
on time, the refusal to accept less than the best and the demanding
standards which he imposed upon himself each took their toll.
His health buckled under the strain and really, from his first
illness in 1976, and certainly for the last decades of his life,
he could never be completely confident that, in terms of his physical
well-being, he was fully in control. If he pushed himself too
hard, as was his wont, his health suffered, he lost morale and
then there began the slow agonising return to his former physical
and emotional equilibrium. His family and his friends in Coleraine
knew that pattern all too well and it is they who have helped
him most. What we must salute therefore is Donald's unyielding
spirit. His determination to continue to play his part; to get
better from whatever set-back assailed him; and to be there functioning,
to the best of his ability and for the service of his friends.
For there was never a more generous, more concerned and more affectionate
person than he was. He often visited us in Dublin never without
some present for our daughter Harried, always thoughtful and well-chosen,
and when he was with us he would take time to be with her too
and, like the born-teacher he was, to draw her out and make her
feel that it was her ideas that interested him. That was his great
trick with everyone.
And now, after his first heart attack and stroke in February,
and a sadly protracted half-life in hospital, he has died in his
63rd year. Of course we had all hoped to enjoy his friendship
for much longer. He has been buried this morning and what is left?
Fond memories of his affectionate manner and his sense of fun,
the twinkle in his eye, his kindness to his friends, his astonishing
knowledge, his collections of books, records and slides, his intellectual
and moral integrity, his love of teaching and his brilliant musical
talent. Donald led his life seriously, responsibly and well. His
achievement was great and surely it is secure in all our hearts.
Alistair Rowan, 20 June 2000
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