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CHAPTER 1

‘WHERE THERE’S GRASS,

THERE’S NO BRAINS’

When I was at Mountjoy School in Dublin, I once did a most dreadful thing.

In applying for Trinity College, it was required to include with the application a confidential reference as to one’s character and abilities. This was sealed in an envelope by the referee and sent in to the college by the candidate, together with the application form. My reference, as was normal, was supplied by the headmaster of Mountjoy, William Tate. Before sending it in, I opened it and read what he had written. This was not only disreputable of me but also a very big mistake. Mr Tate wrote, among other comments,‘He has a colourless personality and he is unlikely to contribute anything to the university.’ The assessment came as something of a blow (and I have never forgotten it) and, since that time, I have never, ever read any document or letter that was specifically not intended for my eyes.

Mountjoy School (now Mount Temple Comprehensive) was, by the time I got there as a boarder in 1961, no longer in its heyday. Originally in Mountjoy Square, the school had moved to the Malahide Road in about 1950, when it acquired a large red-brick Gothicky mansion (designed by the Belfast architects Lanyon, Lynn & Lanyon in 1863) with acres of grounds that stretched down almost to the Clontarf seafront. A functional wing had been tacked on to the original building to accommodate the school. Mr Tate, who had been a fine headmaster in his time, was by 1961 old and near retirement, and he had long since given up on imposing any order or ethos on the school and the hundred-and-fifty or so boys who went there, among them a large contingent of day boys. Games were not compulsory (as they had been in my previous school, Kilkenny College), and there were practically no extra-curricular programmes, no music or other cultural activities, no choir, no dramatics, possibly no library: I don’t think that there was even a Scout troop. There was a lax approach to exeats – so that permission to go into Dublin for an afternoon was easily obtained – and little or no emphasis on aspiration or achievement. Only one of the masters made a positive impression on me. This was T.J. McElligott¹ who taught French. Unfortunately, I did not make a positive impression on him. In spite of that, when I was appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin he wrote to me (31 December 1979):

It was in 1963 or 1964 that one of my pupils sent me a card from Florence whither he had gone to see the treasures of that city. And, even though I did not see the pupil in the intervening years, I had followed his progress. This is simply to say how very glad I am that you have been selected for what will be a wonderfully satisfying position in which you can fulfill your own ambition in the service of the country.

The only master I did seem to impress, but for the wrong reasons, was the teacher of Irish. This was a weird (to me) Gaeilgeoir called ‘Puck’ Franklin, who was given to telling smutty jokes in class at which he sniggered riotously himself, but which we found simply embarrassing. When I would fail to answer correctly some question he would have put to me as Gaeilge, he would in his nasal voice, and with a sneer, say to the class in English: ‘Eh! Where there’s grass, there’s no brains.’ He would then repeat it in Irish as (evidently) it is a known Irish expression.

As to my ‘colourless personality’, I think – in retrospect and on reflection – I would have to take issue with Mr Tate. Among my possessions, I have recently come across a small silver medal inscribed M.S.D. Deb. Soc. 1963: no name. It meant nothing to me until I ran into a boy who had also been at the school; he said he remembered me taking to the stage in the vast (and crowded) Metropolitan Hall in Abbey Street representing Mountjoy at a huge inter-schools debate, and how he had been staggered that I had had such confidence. Then I recalled that I did debate at Mountjoy. This memory led me to remember giving a talk at Mountjoy (illustrated with musical excerpts on a record player) about Gilbert and Sullivan: I think I was trying to set up a music-appreciation group. I took up the study of the piano again (although very few boys learned music at Mountjoy) and, as I have the Studies & Pieces (dated 1962) for the Grade V Royal Irish Academy of Music examination, I must have reached that level and been able to play, among other pieces, the Presto from Haydn’s Sonata in D. It has, for some reason, stuck in my memory that, one day when I was practising (the piano was in a small room next to the Tates’ private quarters), Mrs Tate came in and, smiling, said to me, ‘Ah! ... Brahms.’

In the summer holidays between my two years at Mountjoy, I organised myself to spend three months with a family in France (this was quite unusual at the time) and, on my return to school, I set up, with my friend Malcolm Benson (who had also spent time in France), a cercle français. We were the only two members, but we did contribute humorous ‘Notes’ (in French) to the school magazine. Occasionally, dances were held in the school. Invitations were printed and we would send these out to any girls we knew (or would like to know) in other schools. The Alexandra College and Hillcourt girls were often too snobby to accept, but Bertrand & Rutland dames (as we called them) were known to be very game, and they would come in droves. One school dance coincided with the making in Ireland of the film Of Human Bondage with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak. I sent Kim Novak – ‘c/o Ardmore Studios’ – an invitation to the Mountjoy dance (with a covering note saying it was from me). She replied with a charming handwritten letter to say how much she would have liked to come to the dance with me but, unfortunately, could not do so on account of her filming schedule.

There was a boy called Nick Robinson in my class and he and I were friends. He was very brainy – much brainier than me – as well as being artistic (he was always drawing clever little sketches of people). He seemed more sophisticated than the rest of us (he had been to restaurants with his father) and he had an irreverent sense of humour that I found appealing. Rather as an affectation, he took the Guardian (and had it delivered) every day in order to do the crossword: this was all the more provocative as his father was at the time (I am fairly sure) on the board, if not the actual chairman, of The Irish Times. Nick once came up with the idea of writing a hoax letter to the Guardian – which they published. In it he wrote that he had recently spotted a rare bird – ‘a black-backed ammeter’ – in Ireland and ‘he wondered if it could have been blown there, together with atomic fall-out, on winds from the South Atlantic, its usual nesting place’. We were studying physics at the time. An ammeter is an instrument for measuring electric current in amperes: although generally black, it is not a bird.

A few days later, there was published a letter in response. The correspondent, from somewhere in England – and obviously a meteorologist of sorts – pointed out that the prevailing winds at the time could not have blown either atomic fall-out or an ammeter to Ireland.

This was too hilarious for us to let it drop, and so I took up my pen. I wrote to the paper to say that ‘although I had never seen a black-backed ammeter in Ireland, I had once between the wars’ (in other words, before I was born) ‘observed in the Yeats Country of Sligo a broad white-backed ammeter’. This letter was also published.

I think I might have been secretary of the Debating Society and Nick may have been chairman. I have come across a memorandum from him (written on the writing-paper of the Hotel Taft, New York) proposing topics for debates. ‘Has the emancipation of women justified itself in practice?’ and ‘Is modern feminine fashion a thing of beauty?’ As Mountjoy was an all-boys school, these were certainly novel proposals. But Nick may have thought of them for a debate with the girls from Alexandra College whom I once invited to a debate at Mountjoy: their secretary was Margaret Furlong and meeting her in this way at this time led to a lifelong friendship.

On leaving Mountjoy, Nick and I both became solicitors’ apprentices in the same Dublin firm, Matheson, Ormsby and Prentice. As it turned out, I never progressed very far along the road to becoming a solicitor but Nick, while reading for an honours degree in Legal Science at Trinity College Dublin, stayed the course.

Endnotes

1.Apart from being a teacher, he wrote about education in Ireland in The Irish Times and elsewhere. Author of Secondary Education in Ireland, 1870–1921 (1981).