CAMBRIDGE University, rated second to Harvard among the world’s universities, celebrates its 800th anniversary this year. It has many historic and ongoing connections with Ireland and the Irish. Some 300 Irish residents are students, and 2,000 alumni live on the island, one of whom is our Minister for Finance, while another is lord chief justice of Northern Ireland.
To celebrate Cambridge 800, an Evensong was held at Christchurch Cathedral at which the music of three Cambridge Irish composers, Charles Villiers Stanford, Charles Wood and Brian Boydell was played. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Neill, an alumnus of Jesus College, preached. Prof Adrian Dixon, Master of Peterhouse, the oldest Cambridge college, read one lesson; Brian Lenihan read the other.
It was an appropriate venue as Cambridge was the cradle of the reformation in England. The subsequent attempted imposition of the reformed religion in Ireland was largely the work of Cambridge alumni The first five provosts of Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592, were Cambridge men. One of these William Bedell, later Bishop of Kilmore and beloved of all faiths, translated the Bible into Gaelic.
It was not until after the Union in 1800 that Irishmen attended Cambridge in significant numbers. William Smith O’Brien, the aristocratic leader of the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion, was an undergraduate in the 1820s. There was also room at Cambridge at that time for Robert Murphy, a poor scholar from Mallow and a genius in mathematics, the quintessential Cambridge subject.
Charles Stewart Parnell was, to use the proper phrase, “up” at Cambridge in the 1860s. His Anglophobia has been traced to being snubbed there by haughty Etonians. He was “sent down” for picking a fight with a local dung merchant. There is a plaque outside his room at Magdalene College. There is also a Parnell fellowship at the college, which enables Irish academics to spend a year there.
Erskine Childers, executed as a republican in our Civil War, was an alumnus of Trinity College Cambridge; he had come a long way from his undergraduate days when he spoke against home rule in the Cambridge Union. His son Erskine Childers, who became president of Ireland, followed him to Trinity.
After the reformation, Cambridge was exclusively Anglican. Roman Catholics were not eligible for degrees until the 1860s. Even now, although the climate of opinion may be agnostic, most colleges, with their chapels and choirs, remain Anglican foundations. However, the recently founded St Edmund’s College, which grew out of a residence for Catholic priests, mostly of Irish descent, attending the university, has a Catholic chapel.
Women got a cold shoulder until recent times. Excluded from the all-male colleges, they founded their own colleges, Newnham and Girton, in the late 19th century. Although female undergraduates could take examinations, they were not, until 1948, entitled to a degree. For some years Trinity allowed them to come to Dublin to be conferred on the strength of their Cambridge results. They were known as the steamboat ladies. Trinity Hall in Dartry was built with their fees.
Until the male colleges were thrown open to women in the 1970s less than 10 per cent of the students at Cambridge were women. Now, two women’s colleges are the only single sex colleges left.
Although Newton spent his life in Cambridge and Darwin was an undergraduate there in the 1820s, its eminence as a scientific university dates from the late 19th century. It was at its Cavendish laboratory that in 1931 Irish physicist Ernest Walton joined with John Cockcroft in splitting the atom, so earning the Nobel Prize.
Shane Leslie, author of The Cantab, and Denis Johnston were the only writers of the Anglo-Irish literary renaissance educated at Cambridge.
But, thanks to Clareman Tom Henn, founder of the Yeats summer school, Anglo-Irish literature was on the curriculum. Delighting in the easy social intercourse between teacher and pupil that was traditional at Cambridge, Henn had tea at his home every Sunday, at which any Irish at the university were welcome.
Until recent years, sporting prowess stood to those seeking admission and university teams played at the highest level. Mick Doyle, of rugby fame, claimed that he got in by catching a ball thrown at him at his interview. Michael Gibson won his way into the Irish team by a brilliant performance in the 1963 varsity match against Oxford. Bob Tisdall, gold medallist in the 400 metres hurdles at the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932, was another Irish sporting hero nurtured in Cambridge.
Until the second half of the 20th century most Irish at Cambridge came from the privileged section of society that went to English public schools. These diminished subsequently and most of those from the Republic have been post-graduates from our universities. Some are assisted by the Robert Gardiner scholarships, open only to students and graduates of Irish universities.
Recently there have been more going straight from Irish schools, so availing of the individual undergraduate tuition that is the outstanding feature of a Cambridge education. Among those who have done this are Melanie McDonagh, the journalist, (one of the first women presidents of the Cambridge Union) and Ruth Gilligan, who had written her first novel before she left St Andrew’s College – her latest novel, Can You See Me? is set in Cambridge.
Irish who go to Cambridge have no reason to feel outsiders. The University librarian, Ann Jarvis, is a Trinity graduate from Rathgar. The Regius Professor of Divinity David Ford is a High School boy. Brendan Simms, John Bew and Eamon Duffy lecture in history – Prof Mansergh, father of Martin Mansergh TD, introduced Irish history to the curriculum 50 years ago. Stephen O'Rahilly, one of the few Irishmen to be a Fellow of the Royal Society, is a medical professor. Old and Middle Irish is on the syllabus and there are now lectures on modern Irish, recalling that it was the Cambridge communist George Thomson who guided Blasket Islander Muiris Ó Súilleabháinwriting Fiche Blian ag Fás.