Dr John Wallace looks at a new book on the distinguished and flamboyant don, Prof R.B. McDowell, and his charmed existence within the halls and squares of Trinity College Dublin.
Born in 1913, Robert Brendan McDowell entered Trinity College Dublin as an undergraduate in 1932. Trinity was then an academic enclave, with few people passing through its gates. Initially, he was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the buildings in the college and also by its customs.
This was an institution encrusted with tradition, where liveried porters in hunting caps attended to an undergraduate population of about 1,500, of whom just 350 were women. Founded by Elizabeth I in 1592, at night the squares and ancient buildings of the college were steeped in romantic darkness and after ‘night-roll’ at nine o’clock, you could not leave the campus.
h4. Edwardian Belfast
On moving from his comfortable home in Edwardian Belfast, in Trinity the young ‘R.B.’ encountered living conditions that could best be described as ‘Spartan’. And the situation stayed that way, at least until the bath-house was built in one of the squares known as Botany Bay.
A senior don was overheard to remark that he could not understand why washing facilities were needed in the college. After all, the academic term was just eight weeks long and then the students were free to avail of the necessary amenities in their parents’ homes. Looking on the bright side, the college did have electricity and many of the student rooms had gas rings on which to cook. In R.B.’s room, however, the primus stove still reigned supreme. He was often quite cold in the college buildings where the Dining Hall was regarded as one of the coldest rooms in Europe. However, he found that after a time, he was no longer conscious of the weather when crossing the wind-swept squares.
The young R.B. always knew that he wanted to go to one of the older universities, so he chose Trinity as it was nearer than Oxford but not as close as Queen’s, which would have been too near to his parents’ Belfast home.
Initially, he had intended ‘to take orders’ but instead decided to study history. He believes that he was one of the last young men to whom the Victorian career of the ‘scholarly parson’ had been suggested.
In a world of clubs, dining halls and libraries, R.B. progressed through TCD as a history undergraduate, lecturer, PhD student and finally, a distinguished don. The primary focus of his academic work was 18th-century Ireland, its buildings, politics and people.
R.B. was Junior Dean in Trinity from 1956 until 1969. As ‘the visible embodiment of college authority’, the position compelled him to become ‘a man of action on a small scale’. It was a welcome change to his habitual reading and writing.
His job as Junior Dean was to enforce college regulations on a largely willing student population. However, it was not all plain sailing and, as he was told by a Fellow of the college, an important part of the job was sometimes not to see things.
In dealing with misbehaviour by a student, he had a number of options. The penalties could be a warning, ‘gating’ or confinement to college, or just a fine. However, he soon discovered that some individuals were actually proud of being punished.
h4. Variety of activities
His permission as Junior Dean had to be sought for a whole variety of activities on the college premises. He needed to be consulted in order to have a party in rooms. One student wanted permission to play his bagpipes in college.
On another occasion, the Junior Dean allowed a student in Botany Bay to keep snakes in his room, provided they were confined to their elaborate containers. He also gave permission so that a ‘deferential’ monkey could stay overnight in the college before proceeding to the zoo the next day.
As Dean, R.B. often had to deal with the Victorian and Edwardian pastimes of practical joking. However, by the late sixties ‘the times they were a changing’ and a more serious challenge to college authority was about to surface on the grounds of the venerable College of the Holy Trinity.
h4. The Internationalists
The undergraduate body did not have much time for institutional politics until the Internationalists, a small, but energetic group of Maoists, arrived in the college. They believed that Mao, in his Little Red Book, had provided a Utopian blueprint for Ireland’s future. The Internationalists came together in Trinity in 1967 and numbered roughly about forty energetic souls. When the Junior Dean was asked by them what he would do when Trinity College had been extinguished, he replied, like an exiled Russian Guards officer, that he would ‘drive a taxi in Paris’.
In the late sixties, the Internationalists launched a campaign against a visit to Dublin by the King and Queen of the Belgians. They protested against the Belgian government’s African policy in the Congo. The protest culminated in a riot in front square.
The following day, after a scuffle involving R.B. on the Dining Hall steps, two of the leading Internationalists were ‘sent down’. For a short time, the Internationalists were a source of drama and colour for the whole college population, including this columnist, but they soon faded away to be replaced by other forces.
The student union (SU) took over from where the Internationalists had left off. Some of the new students were ‘anti-deferential’ to the Junior Dean in whom college authority was embodied. In the late 1970s, the SU clashed with the College Board over the use of the student common room.
h4. A council of war
After a noisy meeting with the students in the boardroom, the college authorities were forced to abandon the room and retire to the nearby Provost’s house. In the elegant salon of the 18th century mansion, McDowell declared to the remaining board members, ‘We can now see ourselves as a council of war.’
R.B. had plenty of time for travel and he was in Paris in 1968 where he witnessed the police attempt to take back the college of art, the Ecole des Beaux Art, from the protesting students. The students had shut down the medical school on the adjacent Boulevard St Germain.
The Pasteur Theatre in the medical building had been renamed the ‘Che Guevara Theatre’. If the police stormed the building, with the Junior Dean still in it, he had decided that he would simply tell them that he was ‘a visitor from Ireland’.
Later, when he was faced with a charging police cordon on the Boulevard St Germain, R.B. naturally took refuge in the expensive Deux Magots café nearby. And his short flirtation with revolution was over.
R.B. McDowell remembers people running onto the streets to see an airplane in 1920. He went on to work for forty years in Trinity where he lived life from one week to the next.
h4. Inherent conservatism
He witnessed TCD in ‘splendid isolation’. With his inherent conservatism, at the end, he felt that somehow he had ‘failed to see life as a whole’. The former professor of history thoughtfully adds that autobiography ‘induces humility’.
* McDowell on McDowell, A Memoir [2008] is published by Lilliput Press.
* Dr John Wallace is a medical doctor with an interest in biography.
About Gary Culliton
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