Battle in Botany Bay

This article was published in Trinity News on 9 March, 2010, the nineteenth 'Old Trinity' column.

Battle in Botany Bay

STUDENT VIOLENCE, fires in Botany Bay and the ousting of a terrified Junior Dean are not what one expects of dignified 19th-century Trinity. But one restless week in November of 1892 showed what the undergraduate mob was capable of when a favoured Junior Dean was replaced with a sterner, less forgiving man.

Thomas Thompson Gray had been JD for 15 years when the college’s tercentenary celebrations were held in 1892. The students were fond of him, and they knew well how to evade his punishments. But this lax discipline was not to Provost Salmon’s liking, who decided to replace the easygoing Gray with someone who – he hoped – would bring the students into line.

Salmon’s unfortunate appointee was George Wilkins. Wilkins had been a classics master at High School, an academy then known for its strict discipline, and he was expected to impose a similar regime at Trinity. He was appointed on Sunday, November 20 – but wouldn’t last the week.

The undergraduates were furious that their favourite man had been replaced, and particularly upset that a don known for his harshness was about to reign over their lives. The new Dean got off to a quick start, on his first night taking a young pup to task for drunkenness.

The recalcitrant Botany Bay dwellers weren’t going to stand for it. That night they lit bonfires to show their displeasure – and again the next night, and into the week. Porters and dons couldn’t quell the unrest in the dark quad, and the exasperated Dean began to realise that he couldn’t cope.

Botany Bay’s residents were only living up to their reputation. The Story of Dublin, published in 1907, says that the Bay “received its name from the prison-like style of its architecture and the supposed character of the undergraduates, who resort there as to an Alsatia out of the reach of the law”.

It’s the events of that riotous November week which these lines of verse recall. Written in Latin, probably by Lord Justice FitzGibbon, who had family members up at Trinity that year, the verses are a parody of parts of Virgil’s Aeneid. The initial lines are almost exactly those of the first lines of the great Roman epic, with much of the rest corresponding to the Aeneid’s Book II, with appropriate adjustments. A student fracas in Botany Bay is here described in the same high terms as Virgil’s account of the fall of Troy!

Night after night of fire and mayhem was more than Wilkins could endure. He despaired. At its meeting on Saturday, November 26, the Board refused to accept his resignation. But Wilkins wasn’t returning to the fray. He called on the Provost, who accepted the pathetic JD’s pleas. Wilkins was relieved of his duties.

Provost Salmon appointed AC O’Sullivan Junior Dean that same day. O’Sullivan – or ‘Tully’ – agreed to act temporarily, and he was a choice the undergraduates were willing to accept. He was a good sort, famous both as an oarsman and a footballer. He had even been behind the Boat Club’s decision to enter the Thames Cup at Henley for the first time the previous year.

Tully restored order and, with the help of some of the other Junior Fellows, booted some of the rowdier students from their rooms. (And, perhaps inevitably, also put out a few innocent students.)

Wilkins gone and peace regained, Tully stepped down two weeks later. MWJ ‘Matty’ Fry was chosen for the post, one he held for five years. Fry had undoubtedly learned to tread carefully after Wilkins’s disastrous week. And Junior Deans of future years knew to be tactful in exercising their office – for of fear instigating another rabid undergraduate uprising.

THE COMPOSITION was unknown until it turned up in FitzGibbon family papers and was printed in Trinity: An Annual Record in 1958, with an explanation, all under the title ‘Battle in Botany Bay’.

Eblana is Dublin; the Muses were a set of latrines; skips are servants; and jibs are first-year students. Curious is the reference to Traill as the “artful driver of the flying ball”. Anthony Traill, later provost, was a keen golfer, and the first president of the DU Golfing Society. Trinity informs us that the student responsible for tackling Tully at the conclusion was DU Football Club man Brian O’Brien, who played rugby for Ireland many times in the 1890s.

I am very grateful to Kevin McGee, a graduate student in the Department of Classics, for providing this excellent translation, and for explaining the correspondence with Virgil. Those interested in reading the original Latin text can do so at trinitynews.ie/oldtrinity.

Arms and the man I sing, who lately came
From High School to the groves of Academe
And hoped to lead his life in honour here.
But Fate, the Fate of Colleges, forbade
That such a man hold sway in such a place.

So many are the colleges of youth.
One shines in this, another shines in that;
A third outstrips them both in learned zeal.
But one was founded by Eblana’s Queen,
To one she granted statutes and a name,
And held it deep within her gloried heart.

And Salmon was its Provost. He decreed
That Gray renounce the keys, and in his place
The College elders named another Dean –
A Dean whose dearest care ye now shall learn.

For he, unschooled to emulate Gray’s arts,
Began at once to crack too fierce a whip.
His first night out, he hauled before the law
A student he had collared, wracked with wine.
This was the source of riot most extreme:
Young men in togas raged, and now there rose
The wail of trumpets mixed with fighting cries.
Through the broad streets they rave; each pathway seethes.
The youths press on. They snatch up all the bins,
Set them alight, and revel in the blaze.
They hurl dry wood and tree trunks on the pyre,
They add the Muses’ doors, and now the Bay
From end to end gleams with reflected flame.

But here, in front of all, there galloped in,
Flanked with a mighty throng of skips and porters,
This novice Dean. Through rod and flame he charged,
Where raging arms and rising clamour called.
At length, young allies lined up by his side.
Small Fry, then Tully comes, then Tony Traill
(That artful driver of the flying ball);
Whom when he saw resolved to take the field,
The Dean began to chide in strident words:

“Buck up, you men! What sloth so long detains ye?
The jibs are bearing all in flames away,
And you in lofty council lingered on
Till now?” At once, before these low-born words
Received reply, the battle was engaged.
Elusive students strove in mocking flight.
As Tully chased one down, his foot gave way.
He landed on his head. But as he rose,
The man himself could not suppress a smile.