Sartorial observations

This article was published in Trinity News on 6 April, 2010, the twenty-first 'Old Trinity' column.

(The College Chapel full of surplice-clad students and dons, one of series of drawings of life in Trinity College by Bryan de Grineau published in the Illustrated London News in November 1949.)

Sartorial observations

THE 2010 Statutes, recently adopted, participate in the modern march towards blandness. In the new document, academic garb is presented as little more than fancy dress for Commencements day, an unfortunate hangover from the unenlightened past. Gone is the ancient instruction that all will wear a cap and gown while performing academic duties; now these are worn only “on ceremonial and other appropriate formal occasions”.

But the miserable egalitarianists of the new millennium are just the heirs of the destructive ideologies of the 1960s, the decade at the end of which this university began the demolition of its own traditions. Any remnant of old Trinity which survives today does so as occasional nods to tradition in the Phil, the Boat Club and a few other institutions, often in the face of the sneers of those who think they know better.

One cannot accuse the 1966 Statutes of being a revolutionary document. The structure is largely the same as that of the 1926 Statutes, with minor changes. But a quick glance at this year’s version brings one immediately to a different conclusion. Showing inexcusable ignorance of the English language, the new document attempts to change the college’s name by omitting the necessary comma. And gone is the immemorial reference to the doffing of caps to the Provost and Fellows. A longer comparison would no doubt uncover many other ruptures with our past, despite the document’s demonstrably false claim that the college is “proud of its history and traditions”.

BUT THE 1966 Statutes did dismantle one of the college’s sartorial traditions. Still included is the instruction that one must have a cap and gown and wear them – but dropped is the obligation to wear a surplice at services in the Chapel. The older rule states that “white surplices, instead of gowns, shall be worn by those attending at services in the College Chapel on Sundays and feast days, with the hoods proper to their respective degrees.”

A surplice is a white tunic worn over the clothes. In Trinity, surplices were in the Anglican style, with open sleeves and reaching nearly to the ground.

The surplice requirement was introduced in the 17th century as an anti-Puritan measure. In 1613, the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote that the king had been informed that Trinity’s Provost and Fellows would not wear surplices, and he commanded them to dress correctly, or be removed from their positions. Twenty years later, this tendency had not yet been stamped out, and two men were briefly deprived of their Fellowships for refusing to wear surplices.

In October 1929, The Irish Times’s Trinity College Notes joked about the source of these garments. “Nobody,” he wrote, “has ever been known to buy one, and departing graduates find it impossible to dispose of them, even as gifts. Everyone possesses a surplice; yet no one can remember how he acquired it.”

Chapelgoers have the great 1960s to thank for their liberation from this cotton form of oppression! Nothing, of course, prevents one from wearing a surplice to the Sunday Eucharist – but who wants to take anachronism that far?

ANOTHER OLD form of garb met its demise in that infamous decade. A regular reader will remember the opening lines of some 19th-century Trinity verses previously quoted on this page: “’Tis the place, and all around it, as of old the porters loll/Velvet-capp’d and gaiter’d, guarding the Examination Hall.”

This porters’ uniform survived well into the last century. The 1958 college promotional video Building for Books observes that “the porters in their 18th-century uniforms are fixed points in an ever-changing scene”.

A piece in Trinity News marked the beginning of the uniform’s end. “The junior porters,” said the February 1969 article, “are complaining about their uniform. They want something more ‘up-to-date’. Their present uniform dates from Elizabethan times when the porters also had to deal with the horses.”

“Particularly disliked,” continued the unnamed student, “is the black velvet riding hat, but ‘the lack of pockets and the heat in summer are also very annoying.’”

The Trinity News reporter may have been over-ambitious with “Elizabethan” – the video’s 18th-century is probably more accurate. The Board was unable to cooperate with the demand for a change in the summer weather, but it wasn’t long before the traditional clothes were gone for good.

These days the so-called “security guards” are gloriously arrayed like military police expecting a riot – hardly less ridiculous than the respectable older uniform.