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CHAPTER 3

THE COLLEGE OF THE

HOLY AND UNDIVIDED

After another year at Mountjoy, and getting some sort of results in the Leaving Certificate, I went up to Trinity in October 1963. I was too young – I had been seventeen the previous May – and Mr Tate’s assessment that ‘He is unlikely to contribute anything to the university’ proved in time to be both justified and accurate. In the absence of any career guidance (I don’t think such a thing existed in those days), I made a mess of deciding what to read and ended up with an impossible workload and studying some subjects – among them the law – in which I had no interest at all. In addition, I was a solicitor’s apprentice, which involved working in a law office at the same time as studying. I am at a loss to explain how my choices came about, but I was doing a pass law degree, which involved in the first two years three separate subjects: contract, property and torts; I was simultaneously doing a pass arts degree, which also involved three separate subjects, in my case (in the first two years) economics, French and English. Had I fixed on doing an honours degree in legal science or English, my life would have been very much simpler. The first thing to go was the solicitor’s apprenticeship: I just stopped going in to Matheson, Ormsby and Prentice. (They didn’t seem to mind.) Next went the law studies: without owning up to the fact (either to my mother or to my brother Elliott, who was paying my fees), I just dropped out of the courses. At the end of my senior freshman year, I failed French: I could speak it, but too colloquially; I did not write it well; and I was felled by some of the literature. I liked Racine’s Phèdre (I felt sorry for Hippolyte) and I could handle Maupassant, but the poets, Lamartine, Baudelaire and Verlaine defeated me. Even in English, I am not poetic.

But then a glimmer of light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

It was 1965 and word spread that, in a temporary lecture theatre in the basement of the New Library (the Berkeley), the most engaging lectures were being delivered on Monday and Thursday afternoons at five o’clock. The subject was the history of art and the lecturer, recently enticed to the college from the Ulster Museum, was a formidable, elegant, entertaining, mildly eccentric, knowledgeable enthusiast, a lady approaching her fortieth year, with a voice (and the diction to go with it) that was quite simply electrifying. She was called Anne Crookshank.¹ I sneaked into the back for one lecture. A slide of Titian’s great Assumption of the Virgin from the Church of the Frari in Venice was on the screen. ‘And here we have the Virgin Mary,’ intoned Miss Crookshank, speaking mainly through her nose, ‘making her way to heaven, clearly under her own steam’.

This is for me, I thought, as I sat there in the dark and I immediately decided to join her course.

It was her second year of teaching when I joined and I was, therefore among her earliest pupils. The course, which she taught single-handedly with only occasional support from a guest lecturer, covered the history of Western Art from the Early Greeks to the present day. It could have been called ‘From the Kouros to Kinetic’ and Anne travelled with ease and fully in command from one century to another, from one country to another. The way she pronounced Malevich and Goncharova still rings in my ears and I recall writing an essay on Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence and comparing them with another fresco cycle, (I can’t remember which: perhaps Piero della Francescca in Arezzo.)

The course was taught over the two sophister years of the general studies degree: students dropped a subject after their freshmen years and replaced it with Anne. But dropping a subject was quite different to failing one, and I was not allowed to exchange my failed French for art history: I had to repeat my senior freshman year and somehow pass three subjects (I replaced French with history) and then moved to history of art. Doing that meant that my undergraduate studies took five, rather than the customary four years. But, at least – and at last – I was on the right track and, of the three subjects I was now taking for a general studies degree – history of art, English and economics – two of them were perfect for me, and I loved them.

Anne made an enormous impression on me, as she did on everyone who encountered her. Her lectures were not filled with dry facts and her slides very often appeared on the screen back to front. The result was that one looked up the facts in the library afterwards (and remembered them); and for years afterwards, one would come across pictures in museums that looked familiar but yet were not quite right. It caused one to look all the harder before realising that, unlike Anne’s slides, they were the right way round. She had huge enthusiasm, which she expressed with a dry humour, thereby removing all sense of awe that one might have about a work of art. She led one into the subject.

‘What is the principal difference between the two versions of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks?’ she would ask in a seminar. Passing around a book of Leonardo illustrations, she would then wait, exasperated, until someone eventually noticed that in the Louvre painting the angel is pointing.

She made one long to travel, to see the actual works about which she was so eloquent. Having whetted our appetites by her exposition of Giotto’s frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco at Assisi, she warned us that ‘on no account must we go there on a Sunday as the town is simply overrun by charabancs of Italian sailors’. She knew well that everyone – men and women – would, as a result of her warning, make a point of going to Assisi only on a Sunday. I was too timid to get to know her, except in the formal way that a seminar demanded, and it was only after I had sat my finals that I felt she noticed me. Before the results came out, she hailed me in Front Square one day. ‘Marvellous,’ she said, ‘you need have no worries. You answered wonderfully well.’

I do not think I had ‘a colourless personality’ when I went up to Trinity. But I certainly developed one when I was there. The college in those days could be a very intimidating place, socially rather than academically, and social life certainly took precedence over academic engagement. There were some 3,000 students and, of these, about 30 per cent were English, a significant proportion were from Northern Ireland, and the rest were Southern Irish Protestants like myself. Catholics required a dispensation from the Archbishop of Dublin, which was not easily obtained, to attend this College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity as it was deemed to be a Protestant university. Of the English 30 per cent, it was said (and the evidence seemed – to me at least – to support it) that they were mainly minor-public-school people who were too dim to be accepted by Oxford or Cambridge and too snobby to have gone anywhere else, other than Trinity. Lest this assessment seems harsh, it is confirmed by one of their number, Peter Hinchcliffe, who came up to Trinity in 1957 and became, ultimately, British High Commissioner in Zambia. He has written:

I had much in common with many others of my Junior Freshman class, including my English public-school background, with its uniform of tweed sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers, loud voice, braying vowels and regulation thick skin. Many of us seemed brashly insensitive to our novel existence in a foreign land. And, like so many of this generation of students from across the water, I had failed to find an Oxbridge college that felt it would benefit from my attendance.²

This English contingent dominated the university. They established themselves as an elite: they had, after all, been trained to do so – no matter where they found themselves on the globe – at their English public schools. Most Irish undergraduates found them intimidating, and their snobbery – as a general rule, they did not know, and did not want to know, the Irish students – was so alien to the Irish temperament that we did not know how to deal with it. One of their number, contemporary with me, Mirabel Walker, has written (in Trinity Tales) ‘one of the odd things about being in Ireland at Trinity was that I made very few Irish friends there’. These English seemed to run The Hist (the College Historical Society) and The Phil (the Philosophical Society), Players, the Boat Club, Trinity News, the magazine TCD Miscellany, and much else, while we Irish retreated into our colourless shells. But, as revealed by Jeremy Lewis (in his amusing memoir Playing for Time), the public-school types also had their inner insecurities, but they disguised their uncertainties better than we Irish managed to do. On going to Ireland for the first time, he ‘wasn’t altogether sure whether Dublin was in the North or the Republic’: he wasn’t alone among the English undergraduates in that. For some time, he knew ‘none of my Irish fellow-students, nor was I to do so until some terms later’ (when he met the poet Derek Mahon, (who comes from Northern Ireland). Writing wittily, he divides the undergraduate population into ‘English public-school boys, green-blazered Ulstermen, and the Catholic Irish – a third of the total – Orangemen, undesirable aliens from over the water and several Nigerians’: Evidently he did not even know that Irish Protestants like myself existed (unless he thought of us as Orangemen, which we, decidedly, were not) and that it was we who made up about ‘a third of the total’.

I joined the Hist and made my maiden speech, but the experience so terrified me that I never spoke there again: I, who only a year or so previously had addressed – without a hint of nervousness – an audience of hundreds in the Metropolitan Hall. I am writing about my own perceptions but, with exceptions, I think many other Irish students felt the same. Several that I knew, finding themselves, like myself, studying the wrong subject, dropped out. Their decision to do so was, I feel sure, as much influenced by the atmosphere in Trinity as it was by their academic failure. For whatever reason, I decided within myself that I would stay the course. I wanted a degree and I was not going to be beaten. I told myself (and I still think of this): if I survive the social intimidation of Trinity, nothing or no one will ever intimidate me socially again.

Having had digs with a wonderfully eccentric Miss Fleming (Helen) on Leinster Road, Rathmines, in my first years (where I shared with, among others, Malcolm Benson and Charles Smyth), I took rooms in my sophister years: first in New Square, where I shared with an unusual friend, Reggie Fairfax-Crone. Reggie was English and older than most undergraduates, having already studied elsewhere before coming up to Trinity, and was, improbably, studying engineering. He was very clever, widely read, and with a penchant for arcane information about all sorts of different subjects; and for some reason, he found me an appreciative audience.

‘“Wherefore have ye left your sheep”’ he reprimanded me, ‘did not mean “Where have you left your sheep” but “For what reason have you left them.”’

‘And does the same apply to “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said.

Although we have remained lifelong friends (when he married Carmel I was asked to be godfather to one of his daughters), sharing rooms with him was rather a trial, and the following year I found a single set in the Graduates Memorial Building. Reggie had a seductively appealing younger sister, Penny, who would sometimes visit from England, and she and I embarked upon a sometimes-reckless romance. Exceedingly attractive in looks and personality (so much so that my mother deemed her ‘dangerous’), she was very clever, culturally stimulating, socially enervating, and tremendous fun. Maddeningly unreliable at times, she came to exert considerable influence on me, giving me a confidence that I had lacked, drawing me out of myself, and in time introducing me to a wider world, and – by her example – pointing my life in all the right directions. Charm, a dubious commodity in my mother’s opinion, was as her second name and she had it in bucketfuls. She spoke with an English accent that sounded a little too posh for Trim, pronouncing the word ‘Aga’ as ‘aahGaah’ when we called it ‘the Agga’. Penny and I are friends to this day and I am also godfather to one of her sons.

Endnotes

1.(1927–2016). Lecturer (at this time) and later professor of the History of Art in Trinity and previously keeper of Art at the Ulster Museum. Author (with the Knight of Glin) of The Painters of Ireland 1660–1920 and many other publications. Obituary by Robert O’Byrne, Apollo, October 2016.

2.Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Sixties (2009). See also Anne Leonard, Portrait of an Era: Trinity College, Dublin in the 1960s; and Jeremy Lewis, Playing for Time (1987).