Unhappy the city where the students disobey

This article was published in Trinity News on 22 September, 2009, the eleventh 'Old Trinity' column.

(A Junior Fellow and a nobleman’s son in their academic dress, the gold tassels visible on the cap and gown of the filius nobilis. From a plate in Taylor’s 1845 History of the University of Dublin.)

Unhappy the city where the students disobey

TROUBLESOME students exist in every generation, young louts who spend their days drinking, fighting, stealing and generally enjoying themselves. These boisterous characters quickly learn to laugh at the empty threats of those in authority, and so their crimes multiply until time runs out and they leave Trinity with mediocre degrees.

One might assume that modern contempt for rules creates such types, and that the college’s past was populated by upstanding, statute-abiding undergraduates. But we live in peaceful times compared with the rowdy 18th century, when ostensibly respectable students – nobles, sons of nobles, and gentlemen – were infamous in Dublin for the havoc they caused.

These good-time youngsters were known as “Bucks”, many of whom could be identified by the gold- or silver-tasselled gowns in which they strutted about. Fighting, duelling, drinking and general troublemaking were the hobbies of the Buck, who could be found in Dublin’s ale houses and more expensive eateries.

Rabble rousing at the theatre was a regular pastime. In 1746 a young Galway gentleman named Kelly climbed onto the stage at Smock Alley and insulted the actress, before flinging oranges at the actors, injuring one. The theatre manager got his hands on Kelly and delivered a flogging, only for the student to take his angry friends along a few days later. They caused a riot and wrecked the theatre. The unruly gang, armed with swords, hunted for Sheridan, the theatre manager, who had a lucky escape.

The Trinity-educated Jonah Barrington – not the squash player, who came much later – recounts in his 1827 Personal Sketches how students, himself included, would fling coins from their coaches, smashing windows as they were taken around the town. While on their vandalism sprees the noblemen among them would turn their gowns inside out to hide the bright tassels and avoid identification.

Those who incurred the students’ displeasure would often be taken to the college pump for a sousing. In 1775 a printer who had published some less-than-flattering articles about Trinity students received a visit to his home. He was grabbed, dragged to a waiting coach with pistols to his head, and taken to the pump. There he was nearly trampled to death by the students, but escaped when some of the Fellows interfered.

Sousing was no novelty by then. Over 30 years earlier a Scholar was arrested for unpaid debts and taken to prison. His faithful friends hunted down the arresting bailiff and punished the unfortunate man at the college pump. They then rioted in the town and tried to storm the prison. The mob was fired on, and two men killed. Five unlucky students were sent down, and five more given a good talking to – one of these being Oliver Goldsmith.

The students were able to escape discipline relatively easily in Dublin due to the college authorities’ lack of jurisdiction outside the walls. In Oxford or Cambridge a rowdy youth would need to be always on the lookout for dons; not so in Dublin.

“The character of a Buck can be very easily acquired,” records Advice to the University of Dublin: “You must at one time dress in the pink of fashion, and at another time appear quite slovenly and dirty ... Let your gait be erect or swaggering, and put on a look of manly ferocity, as if you were to knock down everyone you meet.” Offensive language is a plus: “Make yourself acquainted with all the stylish oaths, and the manner of expressing them”.

The 1791 work advised the would-be Buck to gain “some knowledge of bruising”, suggesting he practises his fighting skills with “a coalporter or the bully of a brothel” or receive instruction from “a skilful shoeboy”.

One of the Bucks’ set, though not a Trinity man, gained fame for completing the difficult dare of travelling to Jerusalem and returning within a set time. Often known thereafter as Jerusalem Whaley, he is better known to Dublin’s modern late-night socialites by another name: Buck Whaley.

The college’s attempts to control the students sometimes backfired. In 1734 one student was censured after insulting the Junior Dean. His friends stoned the Dean and wrecked his rooms. The fun continued with a riot, during which one person (not a student, in this case) tried to set fire to the college gates.

That same year one of the fellows, the unpopular Edward Ford, was shot dead at his window in the Rubrics – number 25 – by students firing from New Square. Five undergraduates were sent down for their part in the shooting, but later acquitted by a court. Popular feeling was against their prosecution, especially, says one letter of the time, among womenfolk, “who were astonished at the barbarity of undertaking so cruel a persecution against the sons of gentlemen, suspected only of a frolic!”

Distaste for rules and authority is a constant feature of youth. You will grow out of it. Meanwhile, the next time the JD is complaining about your contemptible behaviour you can truthfully retort that, as Trinity students go, you’re really not that bad at all.


THE SOURCE for much of the above is Constantia Maxwell’s entertaining history of the college. Reviewing Professor Maxwell’s book in TCD: A College Miscellany in 1946, Professor McDowell wrote: “A quiet reading man in 18th-century Trinity must frequently have found the atmosphere trying.” An understatement, surely!


THE FIRST of these columns last Michaelmas term covered some of the peculiar vocabulary used within these walls, both now and in the past. The omission of “Buck” has now been remedied, and I have discovered another interesting word, ripe for resurrection.

Slang and its Analogues Past and Present (1891) gives the word “colfabias” or “colfabis” as “A Latinised Irish phrase signifying the closet of decency, applied as a slang term to a place of resort in Trinity College, Dublin.” The more recent Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang corroborates, giving colfabias as “a water closet at Trinity College, Dublin”, dating the word to around 1820.

Here in Trinity, therefore, a bog is not a bog, but a colfabias.