The ghost of Edward Ford

This article was published in Trinity News on 3 November, 2009, the fourteenth 'Old Trinity' column.

The ghost of Edward Ford

MANY GHOSTS must walk the squares of Trinity College invisible or unnoticed. Students who spent a happy youth here surely make a post-mortem visit, content to leave the living unmolested. But one unfortunate soul has been seen walking the quadrangles in death, a Fellow whose unpleasant personality led to a bloody death.

Edward Ford was an academic success. He won a Foundation Scholarship in 1724, took the BA and MA degrees, and was elected a Fellow in 1730. He lived in number 25, over one of the two passages through the Rubrics.

But his erudition was not matched by popularity, and he had a tendency to interfere with student matters. To show their dislike of Ford, a group of gownsmen came to break his windows after midnight on

March 6, 1734. But Ford was ready with a pistol, and shot at the group, injuring one.

The students left, acquired arms of their own, and returned to what was called the Playground – now New Square. A Scholar had urged Ford to remain in bed, but the obstinate Fellow refused to listen, and he went to the window in his night dress. The students fired, and Ford received shots to the head and body. After two hours of agony, he died.

Many are familiar with this story, which is recorded in several college histories, and I already mentioned it this term. But a smaller number are aware of Ford’s ghost, which haunts the area around the Rubrics.

Professor Maxwell recorded in 1946 that “his ghost, dressed in wig, gown and knee breeches, is said to walk by the side of the Rubrics at dusk.” Those who have seen him, she wrote, “declare that he emerges slowly from the door of his old chambers at number 25, walks more briskly in the direction of Botany Bay, and then fades into darkness.”

A student mentioned Ford’s ghost in TCD in 1931. “A spectral figure of a man in terror,” he wrote, “appears at number 25 and proceeds to near the Campanile, the site of the old chapel, where it vanishes.”

Ford’s tormentors, “a confused and shadowy mob”, also sometimes materialise, and among that crowd is seen “a few little golden dots – the tufts that were formerly worn on their caps by the sons of noblemen.”

The 1931 writer said that the ghost had not been seen for seven years: “A man who now rules thousands under the African sky told me when I entered college three years ago – he was then a Bachelor – that he had seen it when he was a Jib.”

I don’t envy the man who sleeps in Ford’s rooms on these dark winter nights.

THE LANGUAGE we use here seems to have suffered from a break in continuity at some time since the 1960s. One example is the use of the Americanism “campus”, which has supplanted the perfectly good “college”.

Another is the manner of referring to buildings in college. Since time immemorial each building was called (for example) “number 40” or simply “40”. The recent practice of using the unattractive “house 40” highlights our lack of historical awareness and institutional memory.

THIS YEAR’s Calendar has been published using an unsightly typeface yet again. Perhaps serifs offend the administrator responsible for setting the Calendar’s text. But his aesthetic sensibility is hardly superior to that of those who compiled the first 174 editions.

I also note that the student secretary of the DU Far Eastern Mission has “Sch” appropriately appended to his name – but the names of the members of the Scholars’ Committee, again, do not! I spot at least one other Scholar’s name similarly lacking its due honorific.

IN FEBRUARY I asked if any reader could recall the design of the Pinks blazer. Many thanks to the Fellow emeritus who sent me a photograph of this university colours blazer. It is pink, its buttons black, with the arms of the University of Dublin worked into the breast pocket. No other Trinity blazer, to my knowledge, sports the DU coat of arms instead of the more familiar college shield.

IN TRINITY News this time last year I wondered about the hood of the new master in theology degree. The 2010 Calendar reveals its colours. The 1988 BTh hood was black, lined with black, edged with purple. The MTh hood is purple, lined with purple, edged with black – a nice reversal of the BTh colours.