Nicholas Mansergh

Life
1910-1991 [Philip Nicholas Seton Mansergh, OBE]; descendant of a Cromwellian soldier settled in Co. Tipperary; pursued an academic career in Oxford and Cambridge; author of works on Irish and Commonwealth history; b. 27 June, at Grenane House; son of Philip St. George Mansergh, an engineer who worked in Australia and East Africa and Ethel Margaret Otway Mansergh, his cousin; ed. Abbey school, Tipperary, and St. Columba’s Coll., Dublin; grad. Pembroke College, Oxford (Mod. Hist.; 1932); B.Litt., 1933; D.Phil., 1936 - studying under W. G. S. Adams who advised Lloyd George on Ireland;  tutor in politics at Pembroke College in 1937;

m.  Diana Mary [née] Keeton, dg. of the late headmaster of Reading School, with whom two dgs. and three sons; served in empire division of Ministry of Information, dealing with Ireland, 1941; employed at Chatham House, seat of  the Royal Institute of International Affairs, before becoming first holder of the Smuts Chair of Commonwealth History at Cambridge Univ., 1953-70; elected Fellow of St John’s, 1955; elected Master of St John‘s College, Cambridge, 1969-79; served as political adviser to Charles Haughey in government; d. 16 Jan. 1991; the loss of his ‘clear unflinching gaze’ regretted by many; his son Martin Mansergh [q.v.] was an adviser to the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in succession to Charles Haughey.

Dr. Nicholas Mansergh gave an invited lecture on the topic of “Ireland, Its Past and Future: The Past”, in Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders Ser., at Institute of Race Relations (Carleton Hse., London), 2 March 1972 - in tandem with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s lecture, “Ireland, Its Past and Future: The Future” on the same occasion. See Institute of Race Relations, July 1972 - online].

Footnote cites a lecture by Mansergh given at the Tenth Irish Conference of Historians at University College, Cork, in May 1971, entitled “The Government of Ireland Act 1920: Its Origins and Purposes. The Working of the Official Mind”.

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Criticism

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Commentary
Antoine Mioche, ‘India or North America? Reflections on Nicholas Mansergh’s Partition Paradigm’, in Éire-Ireland, 42; 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2007, pp.290-310: ‘The Prelude to Partitions: Concepts and Aims in Ireland and India, the essay issuing from Mansergh’s lectures [Commonwealth Lecture, Cambridge U., 1976; publ. Cambridge 1978] is magisterial in the simplicity and the quiet daring of its thesis - the notion that partition, in the last analysis, is the product, not of a malignant British desire to divide and rule the nations succeeding to her imperial mantle, but rather of a political process driven by an evolving balance of forces and interests between rival nationalisms and a retreating metropolitan power seeking to achieve a reasonably smooth transfer of sovereignty.’ (Op. cit., p.290.)

Keith Jeffrey, “Nicholas Mansergh” [entry] in Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2004; online edn. 2009): ‘[...] One of Mansergh’s great strengths as a historian was his passionate conviction that history was not merely about the “past”. The violent and painful experience of Ireland, especially in the twentieth century, placed a special responsibility on the historian to assist the understanding of the circumstances that had led to this situation. In the 1975 preface to The Irish question, at a time when serious violence had afflicted Northern Ireland for some years, Mansergh modestly expressed his hope that the approach that he had adopted in the book would prove “fruitful” to “an assessment of the nature of the Irish question and to an understanding of the difficulties of resolving it peacefully”. / The relating of “history” to the violent politics of modern and contemporary Ireland is made explicit in The unresolved question, which extended Mansergh’s commentary on Anglo–Irish relations to the twentieth century. Reflecting on his own experience as a schoolboy in Tipperary, close to Soloheadbeg, where the first shots of the 1919–21 Irish war of independence were fired, he wrote: “the author may perhaps be relied upon to think of the events of those days as near realities, not as distant phenomena or as issues in high politics”. [...] Powerfully informed by Mansergh’s own humane and liberal sympathies, the book is an indispensable guide to relations between Britain and Ireland from the home rule crisis before the first world war to the formal secession of Ireland from the British commonwealth in 1949.’ (Available at DIB - online; accessed 25.11.2025.)

Quotations
Ireland and India: ‘At the time of partition both countries were within a single polity, the British imperials system, and and in each case the partition took place coincidentally in time with a transfer of power, albeit limited in the Irish case, to indigenous authorities [...] In a triangular pre-transfer of power situation there is, all affinities supposed or actual apart, a tendency for the second and third parties the minority and the outgoing impenal power, to be drawn together in resistance to the demands of the first, the majority Nationalist party. Indeed it is close to a law of politics [...; q. source.]

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Notes
The Irish Question (new edn. 1968): cited as ‘the first, and arguably still the best venture into Irish intellectual history’ in W. J. McCormack, Battle of the Books (1986), with the further remark that its ‘chapter on romanticism of Young Ireland [is] especially commendable.’ (p.40.)

Kith & Kin (1): ‘Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, was author of an eloquent pre-restoration manifesto on difficulties in church and state, signed by 44 Munster army officers in February 1660, one of whom, an ancestor, was Captain James Mansergh.’ (See Liam Irwin [essay], in History and the Public Sphere: Essays in Honour of John A Murphy, ed. Tom Dunne & Laurence M. Geary, Cork UP 2005 - reviewing which in Irish Times, 27 Aug. 2005, Martin Mansergh calls his namesake an ancestor.]

Kith & Kin (2): Nicholas Mansergh made the nomination speech for the Tory candidates Francis Prittie and John Hely Hutchinson in Clonmel in Aug. 1830, when Michael Doheny [q.v.] emerged as a speaker for the Repeal candidate Thomas Wyse who took the second seat, defeating Hely Hutchinson.

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