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FEATURE | Trinity Tales


TRINITY TALES

TRINITY COLLEGE IN THE SIXTIES


So was publishing Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Sixties such a good idea? Has the collection of stories any real value – or are they simply the jottings of an ageing group of graduates from far too long ago? Is it of any conceivable interest to younger generations of Trinity students?

The idea to collect these memoirs was proposed to the three of us by Michael de Larrabeiti B.A. (1996) some four years ago. It was for love, not money because we decided to dedicate all royalties to the Trinity Long Room fund. We set about inviting contributions from everyone we knew who had been at TCD in the '60s. A year later, the list of possible contributors had reached double fi gures. We now had the beginnings of a book. It was to grow organically slowly taking shape. Larrabeiti died of cancer in 2008 after a long illness, and sadly didn't get to read or help to edit the completed fi nal draft.

The brief extracts below provide a fl avour of the vibrant and colourful memories of what some have claimed was ‘a golden generation’.

(Image of the book cover)


TUTORS

In my second year at Trinity I was called into my tutor’s rooms. R.B.D. French was a short man who always looked as if he had just been polished. His shoes were the deepest black. And although an outsider might have thought him plain, he wasn’t. He was in some ways exotic – not familiar, a bird of strange plumage. I often wondered if he minded being my tutor.

“I have been told,” he told me, “that you have been remiss in attending lectures. I have been told –”... he waited, standing in a patch of sunlight, the ultra-English voice (as I, the part-foreigner, thought) searching for the right pitch, “I have been told that I must reprimand you.” I waited. “Consider yourself”, said R.B.D., “... reprimanded. Would you care for a glass of sherry?”

Mary Carr B.A. (1969): The Absence of Whales


IDENTITIES

In October 1958, I wasn’t thinking about identity politics but worrying about how to talk to people. And as regards ‘identity’, Trinity was probably then the most fl uid place in Ireland.

For too long at Trinity, I was shy and fearful, even though the exotic place was in my native city – if a city in which some natives were less native than others, a city in which every Trinity student might be tagged ‘West Brit’. Perhaps my lack of a genuine minority background made Trinity stranger than it might otherwise have been. Yet the students whom I found exotic – from posh English schools, from further abroad, even from the North – were themselves discovering or inventing Trinity (and McQuaid’s Dublin) as liberatingly foreign. They were forging a milieu that glamourised various permutations of sex, alcohol, creativity, and mortal sin. If they left the country after graduating, never or rarely to return, their nostalgia can have a whiff of Brideshead. Decades of change to Trinity, to Ireland, will not revise anyone’s Arcadian narrative.

Edna Broderick B.A. (1962): Beyond the Dalkey Bus


(Photo captioned: A Day at the Races, summer 1964)


Extracts from Trinity Tales courtesy of Lilliput Press.

Trinity Tales is edited by Sebastian Balfour B.A. (1996), Laurie Howes B.A., M.A (1964) and Anthony Weale B.A. (1995). It is available to buy online from Trinity College Library Shop www.tcd.ie/Library/Shop/


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