ABSTRACT
Hyperbolic as these statements may be, they are indicative of how Hume was perceived as a man of ideas. Questioned about him for BBC Radio’s The World this Weekend, broadcast on 5 October 1969 – the one-year anniversary of clashes in the city between civil rights protestors and the Royal Ulster Constabulary – Frank Curran, then editor of the Derry Journal, described the city’s political sensation as someone ‘open to new ideas all the time … one of the few people who will be able to meet the challenges that are obviously coming in the political life of Northern Ireland’. Hume arose as an educated, articulate, and instrumental citizen of Derry before entering Stormont. His forceful, two-part article, ‘The Northern Catholic’, was published by the Irish Times in May 1964.9 He was simultaneously preparing his MA thesis in Modern History, ‘Social and Economic Aspects of the Growth of Derry, 1825–1850’.
