Welch, Robert Anthony ('Bob')

by Niav Gallagher

Welch, Robert Anthony ('Bob') (1947–2013), academic, poet, critic and writer, was born on 25 November 1947 in Cork City, to Patrick Welch, a factory worker at the Dunlop Rubber Company, and Kathleen Welch (née Kearney). He was educated by the Presentation Brothers at Coláiste Críost Rí in Cork and went on to study for a BA in English, Irish and music at UCC, graduating in 1968. He remained in UCC for another three years, studying under Seán Lucy (d. 2001) and received an MA in literature in 1971, before moving to the University of Leeds to study for a Ph.D. (1974). His doctoral thesis focused on the interaction between Gaelic tradition and Irish poetry in English, and was supervised by the renowned Dublin-born Yeats scholar Alexander Norman Jeffares (qv). Welch's fluency in Irish, combined with his wide knowledge of English literature, enabled him to carve out an almost-unique area of study. His Ph.D. thesis was later published as A history of verse translation from the Irish: 1789–1897 (1988).

Welch's teaching career began when he moved to Leeds to undertake his doctoral research. After lecturing in the School of English at Leeds (1971–3), he taught for a year at the University of Ife in Nigeria, and then returned to Leeds to take up a lecturing post for the next ten years. In 1984 he took advantage of an exciting opportunity when the New University of Ulster at Magee College, Derry, and Ulster Polytechnic merged into the University of Ulster. Welch was appointed professor of English and head of the newly-formed Department of English, Media and Theatre Studies.

He was a gifted academic who published widely across a range of subjects and genres. His first published work, Irish poetry from Moore to Yeats (1980) was a comprehensive examination of seven Irish poets. It was generally well received, although one reviewer argued that Welch had only 'mixed success' in his attempts to treat the poets as a cohesive unit (Kilroy, 252–4). Follow-up works, such as his History of verse translation from the Irish (1988) and Changing states: transformations in modern Irish writing (1993), demonstrated his authority and versatility in both English and Irish poetry, and were valuable additions to the field of poetic studies. He also advanced the study of W. B. Yeats (qv) in a volume he edited for Penguin Books entitled W. B. Yeats: writings on Irish folklore, legend and myth (1993), which brought together a selection of Yeats's published prose writings. Perhaps his greatest contribution to literary criticism was, however, the enormously valuable Oxford companion to Irish literature (1996), and its concise version published in 2000. Declan Kiberd described the work as 'a heroic volume [that] surpasses previous exercises of a similar nature in the richness of its detail and the ecumenism of its approach' (TLS, 19 April 1996). Welch also made a notable contribution to the multi-volume Oxford history of the Irish book (2006–11), conceiving the series and acting as a general editor with Brian Walker of QUB.

In addition to his academic work, he wrote five volumes of original poetry. A review of the first of these, Muskerry (1991), described it as 'sensitive and well-wrought', while suggesting that Welch was 'a poet still working to find his target' (Johnston, 423–4). That 'target' appears to have been located by 1999 when Welch published his third collection, The blue formica table, exploring his difficult relationship with his father. He described his father's transition from a life of relative luxury in India as a member of the minor raj to 'working-class, semi-slum life' when his family moved back to Cork. Life as a factory worker led to bitterness and, as Welch describes it, the dissolution of his parents' marriage into 'the grief of silence between two people' (Ir. Times, 25 September 2012). His final collection of poems, Constanza (2010), was perhaps the most poignant of all, coming three years after his son's death.

Welch also wrote several novels, the first of which, The Kilcolman notebook (1994), was a highly original study of Edmund Spenser (qv) in which Welch imagined the poet sitting in his study at Kilcolman Castle and writing of his relationships with Sir Walter Raleigh (qv) and Queen Elizabeth. Demonstrating his linguistic and creative versatility, Welch's second novel Tearmann (1997) was written in Irish, and was a dark and gritty thriller. His third work of fiction, Groundwork (1997), was named amongst the most notable books of 1998 by the New York Times Book Review, and, as a testament to its international appeal, it was translated and serialised for Slovakian national radio. Welch also wrote for the theatre. His play 'Protestants: a play in seven scenes', premiered in the Old Museum Arts Centre in Belfast in 2004 under the direction of his daughter Rachel O'Riordan, and then toured Northern Ireland, London's West End and Edinburgh to some acclaim, the British Theatre Guide described it as a 'stunning piece of theatre.'

Welch's final two works, the first published just months before his death and the second published posthumously, brought together the two great loves of his life – family, and the poetry and literature of Ireland. Kicking the black mamba (2012) was an account of his son Egan's long struggle with alcoholism, ending with his untimely death by drowning in 2007. Welch wrote it, he said, not for therapeutic reasons but as 'a search for meaning in the death of a greatly-loved son'. His final book, The cold of Mayday Monday (2014), looked at Irish literary history through the notion of the 'cailleach' or 'hag'. One reviewer described the book as 'an education, not just in literary history but in the psychology of the island'. It was, he believed, the kind of book that 'could only have been written after a lifetime's reading, thinking and feeling' (Hanna, 195–7).

Throughout his career, Welch demonstrated a talent for leadership and administration. Under his guidance the University of Ulster campuses at Coleraine and Derry flourished and, when he was appointed dean of the Faculty of Humanities (later Arts), he applied for and won several infrastructural grants. This enabled the faculty to develop major centres such as the Art and Design Research Centre in Belfast, the Centre for Media Research in Coleraine and the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages (AICH) at Magee, Derry, which he regarded as one of his greatest achievements. Equally, his academic and literary output were widely recognised and rewarded. In 1992 he received the Oireachtas prize for criticism, and his book Japhy Ryder ar Shleasaibh na Mangartan, a book of biographical and critical essays, won the Oireachtas prize for prose in 2011. In 2003 he was made a senior distinguished research fellow of the University of Ulster, and five years later was awarded membership of the Royal Irish Academy.

Welch died on 3 February 2013 in Coleraine, survived by his wife Angela and three of their children. While the world knew the scholar, poet and novelist, friends such as Alan Titley knew Welch from childhood. Titley wrote of being in a class of seventy-five or eighty pupils with him, and recalled that while he and his friends made a beeline for the 'messing' desks at the back of the room, Welch headed for the first desk in the front row right in sight of the teacher, simply because he was so hungry to learn (Ir. Times, 28 March 2014).