Kenneth Darwin, born September 24th, 1921; died August 29th, 2009:He joined the Northern Ireland civil service in 1948 - partly, friends have speculated, because being a public servant in an outpost may have appealed more to his life-long anti-establishment temperament than reporting for duty in Whitehall.
KEN DARWIN, who has died at the age of 88, was an indefatigable head of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for 15 years until 1970 during which he played a key role in setting up structures for collecting, preserving and archiving records in the North.
His contribution to maintaining historical records continued long after retirement when he served as a trustee of the Ulster Museum and edited Familia, the excellent journal of the Ulster Historical Foundation. He also served for many years on the Irish Manuscripts Commission.
He was likely to have been one of the comparatively few senior public servants in Northern Ireland between 1950 and 1980 who regarded himself as a socialist.
Born in Yorkshire as the son of a commercial traveller, his family had personal experience of economic depression in the 1930s and he regretted that the British Labour Party did not set up in Northern Ireland.
On retirement he became a keen member of the Alliance Party, no armchair supporter but an activist. He was a frequent visitor to Dublin, and participated in the work of the Irish Association.
Along with Herbert Wood in Dublin and David Alfred Chart in Belfast, he is one of the three great names in archival work in 20th century Ireland. Some might say that he was administrator more than archivist, but his achievements were immense, no matter how he might be classified.
Kenneth Darwin graduated with a master's degree in history from the University of Durham under a scheme for ex-servicemen whose studies had been interrupted by the second World War.
He had been commissioned into the British army in 1942 and rose to the rank of captain. He was captured in the Tunisia campaign and spent two years as a prisoner of war in Germany.
He was posted to the Public Record Office in Belfast where unexpected events - the death of the newly appointed and comparatively young head -- led to him taking over the top job in 1955.
Darwin took to the work with immense energy and organisational skill. He set about organising the collection of private papers in addition to public records; he ensured a stream of full and prompt annual reports on the growing wealth of records in the collection; and he put an emphasis on an extension of services to schools and local societies.
The office's modest space off a long corridor in the Law Courts building could not accommodate the collections and in the short term he used a disused "big house" in Co Armagh for off-site storage. And meantime he pushed ahead with planning for the new Public Record Office which opened in 1972.
He left the post in 1970 to move on promotion to a number of senior positions in Stormont ministries. Fundamentally, he was torn between the challenges of administrative work and the satisfactions of more academic tasks. He hoped in 1972 to secure a position which would have involved organising academic research but this did not come about.
As assistant secretary in the ministry of commerce he had to cope with the many practical problems created by the Ulster Workers' Council strike in 1974. He held the rank of under secretary when he opted for early and active retirement in 1981.
He was unmarried.