MEMOIR:William Watts's decade as provost at Trinity College Dublin marked a period of great change for the university, writes Gemma Hussey.
WILLIAM WATTS is a modest man, who has written a modest memoir. Nevertheless it is historic, since he is the first provost ever to write about his years in that august office. The book by no means concentrates just on the years living in 1 Grafton Street. It is much wider, and tells the story of an interesting life.
He was born in 1930 on the East Wall in Dublin - where the small boy listened to foghorns on the Liffey from his bed - before being transported to live in Athy. His father didn't have secondary education and the Watts family lived on the meagre wages of an engineering worker with the Office of Public Works.
He mentions with some pain his early experiences of bigotry against Protestants: "it was easy to feel that we were not seen as really belonging in the country". But since he has already told us that his grandparents were Presbyterians from Scotland and Northern Ireland, and that his father was a convinced unionist ("we used to stand for the British National Anthem on the radio") perhaps he might with hindsight understand the mixed messages being sent out.
Young William was very clever and his brains saw him achieve scholarships to secondary school (St Andrew's) and university education in his beloved Trinity. He took two first-class honours degrees in quick succession - modern languages (French and German) and natural sciences. He has also acquired an international reputation in quaternary studies (and always held a passion for investigating lake beds for evidence of climate change).
A short false start at University College Hull didn't keep him away from Trinity for long, and he quickly began his upward trajectory.
His major achievement before he became provost was the establishment of the Central Appplications Office (CAO) of which he was the first chairman. By the time he was elected provost Trinity had 6,000 students. In 1991, when he retired, it had 15,000. Five years of that period coincided with my tenure as minister for education.
I encountered a courteous but dogged defender of his college at a time of critically scarce national resources, when we were trying to square the circle of a bulge in student numbers and a squeeze on money. However, I was able to write off a fine which a predecessor of mine had imposed on the college for settling without permission a dispute with cleaners and maintenance staff.
William Watts and his doughty wife Gerry had joined other senior staff in cleaning, manning the switch board, opening gates and bagging rubbish. It was the last straw for them when "some revolutionaries decided to sabotage the sewage system by pouring cement into the lavatories". Other crises of his time as provost included the big fire in the dining hall, and frequent dramatic happenings surrounding the Trinity Ball. Some of the chapters in this memoir digress to describe the arcane governing system of the college, and cover subjects in depth like the history of the Department of Botany and Research: Pollen and Climate. As a result, we are deprived of a straight account of the events of his ten-year provostship. One notable distraction however is entirely justified - Watts' description of his travails in the complex and tortuous solutions for the survival of the Protestant hospitals where Trinity's medical students were trained. He gave dedicated service to that job.
The modern history of Trinity College parallels the coming of age of Irish society as a whole. The disgraceful fatwa of John Charles McQuaid which persisted until 1970 was a stain on the history of this country and should have been opposed by McQuaid's fellow bishops and by governments. It stifled both Irish academic life and mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants.
William Watts was senior lecturer (in charge of admissions) at the time of the abolition and notes that the combination of the lifting of the ban and the introduction of free second-level education led to a welcome torrent of Catholics flooding into the college. Curiously, it was only when he became provost that Trinity stopped the practice of recording religious affiliation. It is a measure of the progress made by Ireland and by Trinity College that when Bill Watts' term as provost was over in 1991, he was succeeded by the first Catholic ever to hold the office.
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Gemma Hussey is a former minister for education and author of At the Cutting Edge - Cabinet Diaries 1982-87 (Gill and McMillan) and Ireland Today - Anatomy of a Changing State (Viking Penguin).
Provost - Trinity College Dublin: A Memoir By William Watts Lilliput/Hinds, 240pp. €30