The unhappiness of Trimble’s domestic life contrasted sharply with the growing satisfaction which he derived from his professional duties in the Department of Property Law headed by Lee Sheridan. It was perhaps all the more remarkable because he never became part of the ‘in-set’ around Calvert and Sheridan who played bridge and squash. He has always felt an outsider, whether at Ballyholme Primary, Bangor Grammar, Queen’s, even in the Ulster Unionist Party. ‘In those years I was suffering from an inferiority complex,’ remembers Trimble. ‘Not because the people around me are English – though that’s a wee bit of it. No, it’s because the people around me are confident. I’m a bit unsure of myself. Francis Newark asked me if I played bridge. I felt uneasy about saying no, but at the same time I wasn’t going to learn it just to please him.’ Even today, he looks at himself and says: ‘It’s a curious thing: deep down inside I believe I’m very good but somehow I’m not always managing to reflect that in what I do.’17 Certainly, he was then unsophisticated. Claire Palley recalls how she and Trimble went to a French restaurant in the Strand after they completed their Bar exams: Trimble preferred the traditional British fare of steak and chips.18 The contrast with today’s Trimble – who has to order the most exotic items from the menu – could not be greater.
As throughout his life, Trimble gained self-confidence – and thus respect – by mastering his subject. His Chancery-type of mind, in contradistinction to the kind of horsedealing required at the criminal Bar, was perfectly suited to his dry-as-dust subjects. Students would often sense self-doubt in a lecturer, but Trimble kept order by asking questions which he knew nobody could answer. And when he himself then gave the response he would be able to cite the relevant case from his phenomenal memory and without referring to the textbook. Later, in judging moots, he would search on the Lexis Nexis database to check if there were any unreported decisions so he could pull the students up short; he hates nothing more than to be wrong-footed. Some, such as Alex Attwood – who became a prominent SDLP politician – thought him colourless; but as Attwood concedes, Trimble’s subjects were not necessarily those which would inspire someone imbued with great reforming or radical zeal.19 Others, such as Alban Maginness, who subsequently became the first SDLP Lord Mayor of Belfast, enjoyed his lectures.20 This was because he invested his subject with such enthusiasm, and would bound about his room waving his arms around. Another plus point for many students, recalls Judith Eve – later Dean of the Law School – was that Trimble was young and local.21 In 1971, he was promoted to Lecturer and in 1973 he was elected Assistant Dean of the Faculty, with responsibility for admissions. This appointment was a tribute to the impartiality with which he conducted his duties. Trimble later became a controversial figure in the University, but in this period his outside political activities were relatively low profile and in any case he was always assiduous in keeping his views out of the classroom (though that was easier when teaching subjects such as Property and Equity, rather than the thornier area of constitutional law). Few, if any, in this period thought twice that he conveyed the ’wrong image’ – least of all to have him go round schools of all kinds and denominations to extol the virtues of law as a career.
The effects of his term as Dean for admissions were significant. Only about 10 per cent of 500–600 hopefuls were accepted in this period. But according to Claire Palley, who regularly returned to Belfast, the percentage of Roman Catholic entrants rose markedly.22 Of course, this had little to do with Trimble, and owed far more to broader sociological circumstances. But this supposed ‘bigot’ did nothing to retard these developments and was renowned for meticulously sifting every application (only mature students did interviews). Indeed, so assiduous was he in discharging his responsibilities to students that when one of them was interned for alleged Republican sympathies, Trimble went down to Long Kesh to give him one-to-one tutorials; even at the height of the Troubles, he also regularly went to nationalist west Belfast to the Ballymurphy Welfare Rights Centre as part of a university scheme to help the underprivileged, taking the bus up the Falls to the Whiterock Road. And despite the subsequent growth of a highly litigious ‘grievance culture’, no one can remember any accusations of sectarian remarks, still less of discrimination; he was never subjected to a Fair Employment Commission case of any kind. This is why he was so vexed when Alex Attwood accused him of being distant towards nationalist students: Trimble would have been impartially cold towards all.23 ‘There was a level of reserve there, undoubtedly,’ remembers Alban Maginness. ‘It was fitting enough for a lecturer in the Law Faculty. He didn’t engage in simulated informality in a classroom context.’24 Nor, notes Claire Palley, a one-time colleague, was he any sort of misogynist – and he shared none of the condescending attitudes of some Ulster males towards female colleagues.25 The truth is that he is an old-fashioned meritocrat, who deplores the excesses of discrimination and anti-discrimination alike.
Trimble may have been the only member of the Orange Order on the Law Faculty staff, but that did not preclude good relationships with those colleagues who most certainly did not share his views (others were, of course, unionists with a lower case ‘u’, in the sense that they believed in the maintenance of the constitutional status quo, but were not Loyalists in the way that Trimble was). Thus, he enjoyed a good, bantering relationship with Kevin Boyle, a left-wing Catholic from Newry. Indeed, when his first marriage was breaking up, Trimble would even turn to Boyle for advice.26 Trimble’s best-known academic work, Northern Ireland Housing Law: The Public and Private Rented Sectors (SLS:1986), was written with Tom Hadden, a liberal Protestant, who also did not share his views.27
Trimble and Hadden had also clashed at faculty meetings over the Fair Employment Agency’s attempt to review recruitment practices at Queen’s, when Trimble was one of the few with either the courage or the intellect to challenge the assumptions of that body.28 Moreover, whereas Trimble was a ‘black letter lawyer’, Hadden was very much more in the jurisprudential tradition. But for the purposes of this project, their complementary skills worked very well. Trimble was teaching housing law in the context of his property courses – such as how to sue landlords – and Hadden was covering the same terrain in the context of social policy. Trimble wrote three chapters, including those dealing with planning issues relating to clearance and development and technical landlord-tenant matters in the private sector (Northern Ireland’s housing then differed from that of the rest of the United Kingdom in having a substantial rented sector). It was an authoritative consolidation of this amalgam of the old Stormont legislation with the Orders in Council which came in with the introduction of direct rule from Westminster in 1972; and it vindicated the expectations of the publishers, SLS (run from the Queen’s Law Faculty), that it would be of use to practitioners, and sold its entire print run.29 So impartial was Trimble in the conduct of his duties that when eventually