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201ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork Grammar School

Ian dAlton Educating for Ireland?

The Urban Protestant

Elite and the Early Years

of Cork Grammar School,

188019141

My thoughts at this time were greatly occupied in fixing upon some English school for my boys, the advantages of which I see more clearly every day, wrote Captain Otho Travers, the East India Com-panys recruiting agent in Cork, in 1834. At pains to confide to his di-ary that I wish not to speak against my country, he felt that English schools taught better manners and had more clat.2

Nearly half a century later, two founders of Cork Grammar SchoolMervyn Archdall, the Church of Ireland archdeacon of Cork, and Thomas M. Usborne, a prominent merchant articulated a very different vision for Irish Protestant secondary education. According to Usborne, the school was simply set on foot for the purpose of supplying a great want in Corknamely, a good public school, and with the object of inducing persons who had been send-ing their children to England, to educate them at home. The arch-deacon suggested that

it is a great pity that Irish parents who labour at home and expect their sons will live in the country, for wear [sic] or woe, will not see

1. This article is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 17th International Conference of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, held at the Institute of Irish Studies of the University of Liverpool on 1 July 2011. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Ciaran ONeill of Trinity College Dublin, joint convenor of the conference, who knows much more about Irish education than I ever shall. His perceptive and erudite comments vastly improved my original draft. Thanks also to Robbie Roulston and Felix Larkin for several helpful comments and suggestions.

2. Diary of Otho Travers, entries for Dec. 1833, Jan. and May 1834 (National Library of Ireland [hereafter cited as NLI] Microfilm P.3064). For interesting com-ments on Irish boys educated in England, see Freemans Journal, 31 Aug., 1 Sept. 1885.

202 ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork Grammar School

how desirable it is to keep up the connection during the time of their education with the people amongst whom they are to live subse-quently. . . . They did not want to make Englishmen of their boys. There was much to admire in the Irish character and they wanted to maintain it.3

While Archdalls comments indicated a somewhat more Hibernocen-tric perspective, Usbornes could be interpreted as a desire for a soi-disant English public school in Cork (it was more than ironic that he sent his only son to Harrow and Cambridge).4 Their remarks beg at least a couple of big questions. In an Irish context, what was superi-or or secondary schooling actually for? And what part, if any, did such superior education play in shaping the world of the minority Protes-tant elite in southern Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth?5 This essay offers some observations on these questions, using Cork Grammar School as exemplar. First, the scene is set by outlining briefly the economic and educational dynamics of Cork Protestants over the latter part of the nineteenth century; second, the impetus for the establishment of schools such as Cork Grammar is examined in a national context; and thirdby reference to these national factorswe analyze how two charismatic headmasters worked the system to the better advantage of the Prot-estant community in Cork. What emerges above all is the significance of the cult of the headmaster in the nineteenth century, particularly the role of the leader in a relatively mundane school, and how differ-ent a direction such a school can take with a change of personality.

3. Cork Constitution [hereafter cited as CC], 21 July 1882. 4. In J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 192258), http://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search.pl?sur=&suro=c&fir=&firo=c&cit=&cito=c&c=all&tex=USBN859T&sye=&eye=&col=all&maxcount=50 [accessed on 17 Aug. 2011]; The Times, 9 June 1915 (obituary of Thomas Us-borne, MP for Chelmsford, 18921900).

5. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 16001972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988), 434; D.G. Boyce, One Last Burial: Culture, Counter-Revolution, and Revolution in Ire-land, 18861916, in D.G. Boyce (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland, 18791923 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988), 135. For a discussion of the position of southern Irish Protestantism as a historiographical construct, see I. dAlton, A Perspective upon Historical Process: The Case of Southern Irish Protestantism, in F.B. Smith (ed.), Ireland, England, and Australia: Essays in Honour of Oliver MacDonagh (Canberra and Cork: Australian National University and Cork University Press, 1990), 7091.


Cork citys economic life remained dominated by Protestants for much of the nineteenth century. The landscape, however, was chang-ing, as demonstrated in Table 1.6 John OBrien suggested that as early as 1841, with their capture of Cork Corporation, the Catholic middle classes had arrived. But that did not necessarily mean that the for-merly dominant Protestants had left.7 At the time of Cork Grammar Schools foundation in 1881, with Protestants accounting for only 15 percent of the population, they still held around 40 percent of the jobs in the professions.8 Even by the early twentieth century they remained overrepresented in the citys civil administration, in such posts as public notaries and district registrars of marriages, for in-

6. CC, 24 Oct. 1833; Census of Ireland, 1881, Part 1, Vol. 2, Province of Munster, No. 2, County and City of Cork [3148-II], H.C. 1882, lxxvii, 119, Table XIXa, 296302.

7. J. OBrien, The Catholic Middle Classes in Pre-Famine Cork (The ODonnell Lecture, 1979), (Dublin: National University of Ireland, n.d.), 1920. See also A. Bielenberg, Corks Industrial Revolution, 17801880: Development or Decline? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1991), passim.

8. Census of Ireland, 1881, Part 1, Vol. 2, Province of Munster, No. 2, County and City of Cork [3148-II], H.C. 1882, lxxvii, 119, Table XIXa, 296302; I. dAlton, Southern Irish Unionism: A Study of Cork City and County Unionists, 18851914, M.A. Thesis, National University of Ireland (University College, Cork), 1972, 2731. For an overview of the religio-economic balance in Cork in this period, see J. OBrien, Population, Politics, and Society in Cork, 17801900, in P. OFlanagan and C. Butttimer (eds.), Cork History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1993), 699720.

Table 1Percentage of Protestants in Selected Occupations in Cork City, 1833 and 1881

occupation 1833 1881

Lawyers 81 38Doctors 57 36Bankers, merchants 59 33Engineers, surveyorsInsuranceTeachersStudents, literaryHouse constructionMechanics, labourers

n/an/an/an/an/an/a

54

40

35

14

6

1


stance.9 In socioeconomic terms, of course, Protestantism was by no means monolithic, as Martin Maguire has demonstrated in the case of Dublin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cork was broadly similar, though it must be said that long before Dublins Protestant working classes had melted away by the late 1930s,10 the hundreds of Protestant inhabitants in greatest distress, graphi-cally described by the rector of St. Anne Shandon in 1845, were al-ready close to vanishing point.11 By 1881 the professional, the skilled, and the commercial accounted for more than two-thirds of male oc-cupations among city Protestants.

The middle-class, dominant elite within an elite, however, had within it a further group. This super-elite consisted of those able to receive a superior education. As in the Catholic community, it was small and privileged. In 1871, between 2,000 and 2,500 Cork city Protestant households produced a total enrollment of about 220 boys and 150 girls in its private Protestant superior schools. Girls seem to have been particularly well-catered for, with two highly regarded establishmentsRochelle, established in 1829 as an academy for the teaching of governesses, and the High School,12 founded in 1876 by

9. For the national picture at a high level, ranging from the peerage to various commissioners, resident magistrates, etc., see the seminal work by K. Flanagan, The Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible: Competitive Examinations for the Irish and Indian Civil Services in Relation to the Educational and Occupational Structure of Ireland, 18531921, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sussex, 1978, 607, Table 6:4 [hereaf-ter cited as Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible].

10. M. Maguire, The Dublin Protestant Working Class, 18701932: Economy, Society, Politics, M.A. Thesis, National University of Ireland (University College Dublin), 1990; idem, The Organisation and Activism of Dublins Protestant Work-ing Class, 18831935, Irish Historical Studies 29:113 (May 1994), 6587; idem, The Church of Ireland and the Problem of the Protestant Working-Class of Dublin, 1870s1930s, in A. Ford, J. McGuire, and K. Milne (eds.), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), 202.

11. Rev. W. Neligan to Sir Robert Peel, 28 Jan. 1845 (Peel Papers, British Library Add. MS 40558).

12. The High School, under headmistress Harriet Martin, was an idiosyncratic institution in the period from 1884 to 1907. See M. Taylor, Sir Bertram Windle: A Memoir (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932), 16869 (diary entries for 17, 21, 28 Feb. 1905). See F. ODwyer, The Architecture of Deane and Woodward (Cork: Cork Uni-versity Press, 1997), 370, for a brief reference to Harriet Martins headmistressship of Cork High School after 1884, her friendship with John Ruskin, and her institution of a Ruskinite guild of rose queens in the school. See also M. Leland, The Lie of the Land: Journeys through Literary Cork (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 235.


the same William Goulding13 who was to be one of the co-founders of Cork Grammar School five years later.14 If this set of figures seems a low proportion from city Protestant households, one reason may have been the effect of educational emigration. Frederick Falkiner and Maurice Hime, writing in the mid-1880s, suggested that up to 1,300 Protestant Irish boys were attending English schools.15 It ap-pears that this educational diaspora was principally composed of the relaxed rich and the aspiring or perspiring middle classes.16 We have relatively little information on the latter group. Of the former, prominent instances are the West Cork journalist Lionel Fleming, whose grandfather attended Kilkenny College; but his son, Lionels father, was schooled in Britain.17 Henry Cole Bowens sons went to Midleton College in the 1780s; their sons in turn were educated in England. For the aristocracy and gentry at least, this seems to have been the dominant pattern.18 To proceed somewhat more scientifi-cally, an examination of Batemans The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland indicates that a majority of listed Cork landlords (most of whom had undergone their formal education before 1850) attended English schools and universities.19 This super-super edu-cated elite was influential at the highest reaches of Irish society: at the

13. Goulding, though Conservative MP for Cork City, 187680, was a relative liberal in other ways; he championed the opening of clerkships in the Great Southern and Western Railway Company in 1903. See F. Campbell, The Irish Establishment, 18791914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 241.

14. See D. Rudd, Rochelle: The History of a School in Cork, 18291979 (n.p., n.d.), 7. The population figures are derived from the 1871 census, as summarized in Fran-cis Guys County and City of Cork Directory for the Years 18751876 (Cork: Guy, 1876), 50910 [hereafter cited as Guys Directory, 1875]. There was an average of about four persons per household in a total Protestant population of 10,942 (including Angli-cans, Methodists, and Presbyterians).

15. M.C. Hime, Home Education, or Irish Versus English Grammar Schools for Irish Boys (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1887), 23. For a more detailed discussion of educational absenteeism, see Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 7172. Dr. Ciaran ONeills ongoing research confirms that this was the case for Catholics also, even those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

16. Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 75.17. L. Fleming, Head or Harp (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1965), 18.18. See Campbell, Irish Establishment, 2527, for the national picture.19. J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Har-

rison, 1883), passim.


end of the century about 20 percent of senior civil servants had been educated at one or another English public school.20

For those who could not afford, or did not care for, an English sec-ondary education, a plethora of small schools existed in the county, as outlined in Table 2.21 These schools, mainly classical in character, offered a relatively high-cost education principally aimed at univer-sity entrance and, in some cases, preparation for the army, navy, and home civil service. They offered other attractionsfor parents any-

20. Campbell, Irish Establishment, 6768.21. For the Cork city endowed schools listed above, see T. Cadogan (ed.), Lewis

Cork: A Topographical Dictionary of the Parishes, Towns, and Villages of Cork City and County, reprint ed. (Cork: Collins Press, 1998), 240; Aldwells County and City of Cork Post-Office General Directory, 18445 (Cork: Jackson, 1845), 9899. For Fermoy College, see also M. Barry, A Brief History of Fermoy, http://www.blackwater.ie /fermoy/history.htm [accessed on 25 April 2011]. For Queenstown College (founded in 1883), see advertisement in CC, 22 Jan. 1883. For Midleton College, see Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 12425. For pre-1878 Anglican schools gener-ally in Ireland, see K. Flanagan, The Shaping of Irish Anglican Secondary Schools, 18541878, History of Education 13:1 (1984), 2743.

Table 2Principal Protestant Superior Schools in Cork, 1881

cork county endowed Bishop Crowes Endowed School, Cloyne

Bandon Grammar School (founded 1641)Midleton College (founded 1696)

proprietary Fermoy CollegeQueenstown CollegeSt. Edmunds College, DunmanwaySt. Faughnans College, Rosscarbery

cork city endowed St. Stephens Blue-Coat Hospital

Green-Coat HospitalMoses Deanes Charity Schools

proprietary Mr. Hamblin and Dr. Porters SchoolDr. Brownes SchoolMr. Greenstreets SchoolMr. Knapps Civil, Military, Naval, and Collegiate

Boarding and Day School


way! St. Edmunds College, Dunmanway, boasted of its remote loca-tion: Being completely in the country, [it] is removed from the vices and temptations incident to towns and villages.22 St. Faughnans College, Rosscarbery, under the patronage of Lord Carbery, attempt-ed to straddle both worlds, being, as it claimed, conducted strictly on English principles.23 In the city the endowed schools were for less well-to-do Protestants.24 The private schools for the better-off tend-ed to be small, under-resourced, and not particularly good, though Mr. Hamblin and Dr. Porters School had some two hundred pupils in the mid-1880s.25

The genesis of Cork Grammar was grounded in a response to the opportunities and challenges facing Irish Protestants in the mid-nineteenth century. At the local level, as in Dublin, the Protestant nexus allowed job-seekers of that persuasion to rely on Protestant-controlled firms for employment, but the numbers of such firms were small, and opportunities for advancement scarce.26 With restricted demand came a parallel problem of oversupply. In general, it has been postulated that around the mid-century an overproduction of professionals forced Protestants to seek opportunities abroad.27 They thus needed to be equipped to compete on foreign as well as home territory.28 Allied to this push factor was a pull one: Irish uni-

22. CC, 20 July 1881 (advertisement).23. Of these, Midleton College, Fermoy College (English Public School Sys-

tem), St. Faughnans College, and Bandon Grammar School were still operational in 1907. See Guys City and County Cork Almanac and Directory, 1907 (Cork: Guy, 1907), 7576 [hereafter cited as Guys Directory, 1907]. Today only Midleton College and Bandon Grammar School survive under their original designations.

24. Cadogan, Lewis Cork, 18688.25. Hime, Home Education, 55n.26. See Guys Directory, 1907, 88 (for notaries public, district registrars) and 95

102 (for list of companies). Their religious orientation can generally be gauged by the names of the directors or managers. Maura Murphy has concluded that though certain large city business concerns like the brewers, distillers, and provision stores remained in the same families for generations, the smaller concerns remained in in-dividual families for much shorter periods. . . . See M. Murphy, The Economic and Social Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cork, in D. Harkness and M. ODowd (eds.), The Town in Ireland (Historical Studies XIII), (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1981), 132.

27. Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 62225. He makes the point that the majority of Protestant clergy and doctors went abroad (ibid., 624).

28. For a discussion of the competitive effects of the tenfold increase in the num-bers of the Irish civil service between 1861 and 1911, see J. Hutchinson, The Dynamics


versities, especially the Queens Colleges, were seen from the mid-century as more adept than Oxbridge at equipping their students to compete for bureaucratic state jobs in particular, leading educated Irish ProtestantsAnglicans especiallyto punch above their weight against those from other parts of the kingdom, in the competitive examinations for the home and imperial service, with India becom-ing a special preserve.29 Modernized and competent feeder schools played an important role in this Protestant revolution of rising (or at least level) expectations, even if by the 1880s the Irish Protes-tant Indian summer was already on the wane,30 and the pressure of increased Catholic participation, outlined in Table 3 for the mid-century, had become greater.

In 1871, Protestants and Catholics each accounted for 50 percent of superior-school pupils. By 1911, however, the proportions were 27 percent and 73 percent respectively.31 This sharp secular reversal

of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 25862; J. White, Minority Report (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 159. For the Catholic element, see C. Shepard, Irish Jour-nalists in the Intellectual Diaspora: Edward Alexander Morphy and Henry David OShea in the Far East, New Hibernia Review 14:3 (Autumn 2010), 7590.

29. For a discussion of the impact of this factor on the generality of Irish en-trants, Catholic and Protestant, see T.J. McElligott, Secondary Education in Ireland, 18701921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981), 1315.

30. Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 63134.31. According to Fergus Campbell, the 1878 Intermediate Education Act re-

sulted in nothing less than a revolution in Catholic participation in secondary edu-cation (Irish Establishment, 76). See also Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic In-eligible, 61, Table 1:1, 62, 596; J. Coolahan, Irish Education, Its History and Structure (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1981), 65.

Table 3Protestant and Catholic Superior Schools and Pupils in Ireland, 1834 and 1861

number of superior schools

mumber of pupils

% change, 183461schools pupils

protestant

1834

1861

96

60

4,2402,075

37.5 51

catholic

1834

1861

23

86

1,4844,962

+ 274 +234


in the relative dominance and absolute numbers of Protestant sec-ondary schools and the concomitant increase in suitably qualified Catholic candidates did not necessarily translate into a proportionate jobs dividend. Fergus Campbell has argued that the greening of the late nineteenth-century Irish administration, as assessed by Law-rence McBride, did not yet prevail to the extent hitherto thought. Campbells point is that Irish Protestants maintained a grip on the highest (and thus the most influential and powerful) echelons of the Irish administration for considerably longer than earlier stated. If that is the case, then Irish Protestants were acting rationally in accord with an expectation that so long as an ethnic preference could be validated by a superior education, it would continue to afford them superior jobs in the state and bureaucratic apparatus.32

The particular impetus for the foundation of Cork Grammar was the enactment of the 1878 Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act. This law was the second attempt to provide a centrally standardized examination system for Ireland. The first, established by the Queens Colleges in 1860, had been the Middle Class Examinations, mod-elled on the lines of the English Local Examinations. The system lasted a mere seven years; it was unsuccessful and unpopular proba-bly because no grants or prizes were available.33 The 1878 law set up public examinations for secondary schools for any boy (and later girl) who had received education in an Irish school during the preced-ing year. Conjured up by Disraelis Conservative government, this scheme was in essence a backdoor method of subsidizing Catholic schools while ostensibly adhering to the merit principle.34 In com-parison to previous attempts to fund superior education, money was made availablein this case, the income derived from 1 million of

32. F. Campbell, Who Ruled Ireland? The Irish Administration, 18791914, Historical Journal 50 (2007), 62344. Campbells Irish Establishment, 5354, is a ri-poste to Lawrence McBrides thesis in his The Greening of Dublin Castle: The Transfor-mation of Bureaucratic and Judicial Personnel in Ireland, 18921922 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), ix.

33. J. Burns, Shop Window to the World (Dublin: Board of Governors of the Ma-sonic Boys School, 1967), 24. This is a history of the Masonic Boys School, Dublin. What the title implies about the Masonic approach to the education of the Irish Prot-estant lower middle class is revealing.

34. D.H. Akenson, Pre-University Education, 18701921, in W.E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. VI: Ireland under the Union, Part 2, 18701921 (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 524.


the funds of the recently disestablished Irish Anglican church. And payment by results was the novel feature of the 1878 scheme. In Don-ald Akensons words, it represented the Victorian commercial code applied to education.35 To benefit from its provisions, a school had to be aggressive and efficient. Prizes and more substantial exhibitions were awarded to individuals,36 but the vast bulk of the rewards went directly to the schools, to be used in whatever manner they thought fit. For unendowed schools the pious hope was that the funds would be used to improve buildings and equipment or to pay for additional staff. But this was seldom the practice. Almost invariably, the monies were shared out among existing staff members, especially those at the top. In 1883, for instance, the Masonic Boys School in Dublin earned 24, two-thirds of which went straight into the headmasters pocket. By 1903 that school had received nearly 500, of which half was granted to the headmaster.37 New schools like Cork Grammarslightly uppity and opportunisticneeded the income, having nei-ther endowments nor the weight of antiquity on which to draw.38

Whatever the distorting effects arising from this financial bonanza and from the manner of its distribution, at one stroke an objective examination standard was applied to virtually all Irish secondary schools. Employers now had a measure to compare the ability and competence of prospective employees; and parents could do the same with schools. Within a couple of years league tables were common and were frequently used by the schools themselves as a marketing toolengendering, in the educational historian John Coolahans opinion, an unhealthy rivalry between them.39 But, of course, com-petition was what the new system was designed to promote. This, then, was the novel structural environmentalong with the rela-tive success of the recently established High School for Girlsthat

35. Ibid., 525.36. These latter charges ranged from 20 for junior grades to 50 in the senior

significant sums in an age when annual boarding fees were seldom over 30, and day fees were about 15.

37. Burns, Shop Window, 28. 38. I am indebted to Dr. Ciaran ONeill for this point. A comparison can be

made with the slightly earlier Nathaniel Woodard schools in England. See J.R. Honey, Tom Browns Universe: The Development of the Public School in the 19th Century (London: Millington, 1977), 47104.

39. Coolahan, Irish Education, 64.


prompted the creation of a new Protestant boys school in Cork in 1882. A substan-tial sum of about 2,600 was raised by local subscription, and The Cork Grammar School Company Limited was formed.40

For Irish Protestants symbols were increasingly significant in the later Victorian pe-riod. The schools seal, a representation of which appears above, re-wards scrutiny in that context. Through symbols the elite but relatively small and isolated Protestant communities in southern Ireland could establish a more solid collective identity and a greater esprit de corps, which were all the more necessary in the face of the cascading effects of land agitation, Parnellism, Catholic religious militancy, and above all the Gaelic cultural revival. Looked upon, in the words of a Protestant novelist in 1916, as illegitimate children of an irregular union between Hibernia and John Bull,41 southern Protestants in particular had to cope with the paradox of an Ireland whose narrative inexplicably de-manded their adherence to the nation and their exclusion from it at one and the same time. In one reading the arms of the school consti-tuted an attempt to place the Protestant community within an Irish identity with which its members could be comfortable by combining the arms of the city of Cork with those of the Church of Ireland, thus cementing the principal Protestant national institution into one of its geographic local expressions. The strong influence of the Church of Ireland was evident from the first. The bishop of Cork, Cloyne, and

40. Information in a letter from the Secretary, Society for Promoting Protestant Schools in Ireland, to the Principal, Ashton School (Cork Grammars lineal descen-dent), 28 May 1975 (Ashton School Archives, Cork [hereafter cited as ASA]).

41. S. Day, The Amazing Philanthropists (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1916), 16.

Seal of Cork Grammar School


Ross was president of the founding Board of Management, and of its seven members, three were clerics.42 The motto was a biblical quote with loyalist overtones: Fear God, honour the king.43 An interest-ing omission, however, was that overt symbol of royalty and loyaltythe crown.44 The Latinate inscription of the seal implied a classically based education and a connection with Usbornes public-school ethos, though what that actually meant in an Irish context is unclear.45

Continuity with an older educational establishment was main-tained by absorbing it into the rather ramshackle Sidney Place prem-ises of Mr. Knapps Civil, Military, Naval, and Collegiate Boarding and Day School, one of those academies that had found it difficult to survive under the new Intermediate system. Situated in the most Protestant part of the city (one which regularly returned union-ists to the city council until local-government reform in 1899),46 it was also contiguous to the High School for Girls. Cork Grammar was founded as a day school, but from late 1882 onward the head-master was permitted to take in a few boarders.47 Fees ranged be-tween 10 and 15 guineas per annum, equivalent today (2011) to about 1,3001,600 modest enough when compared to equivalent En-glish charges, but relatively expensive for an Irish school.48 As an in-

42. These were the bishop, the archdeacon, and the dean of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross, as well as lay Protestants Richard Pigott Beamish, William Goulding, Robert Hall, and Thomas Usborne, all four of whom were prominent in Corks mercantile life (CC, 10 Jan. 1881, advertisement). See also CC, 24 Dec. 1883.

43. 1 Peter 2, v.17.44. The crown was heavily used in other southern Irish loyalist institutions of the

period, notably the Primrose League (whose motto was Quis separabit), and also in medals struck after the great unionist demonstrations of 1885 and 1892 in Dublin.

45. A useful general discussion of the nature of grammar schooling is G. Suther-lands Education, in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.) Social Agencies and Institutions: The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 17501950, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1990), 3:11969. It was generally held that the only Irish school that could properly aspire to considering itself an English public school was St. Columbas College, Dublin.

46. See dAlton, Southern Irish Unionism, Chap. 3, 10556.47. CC, 29 Dec. 1881. Boarders were not significant until Ralph Harveys head-

mastership; their numbers (connected, in the headmasters words, very much with the present condition of the country) fluctuated until the late 1880s, hitting a low in 1886 (CC, 23 Dec. 1886).

48. Flanagan considered such fees expensive (Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 121). The current valuation has been taken from http://www.measuring worth.com/ukcompare/result.php [accessed on 10 May 2011].


ducement to parents to keep their children at the school, the board undertook not to charge more than 12 guineas a year for boys who stayed for the whole of their education. The syllabus was what the age demanded. Pupils would be instructed in the Holy Scriptures and the formularies of the Church of Ireland. Latin, Greek, and mathematics for Irish and English university entrance doubtless satisfied Usbornes public-school pretensions. But considered broadly, the curriculum was vocational. Modern languages, English literature, composition and grammar, ancient and modern geography, and history would be studied. But as attractions to its principal customer base among the city commercial classes, writing and bookkeeping, arithmetic, alge-bra, and trigonometry would fulfill the requirements of mercantile pursuits49 as well as those of the army and civil service. In a wise deci-sionin light of luring pupils from the other non-Catholic segments of the population, especially Jews50the founders chose to emphasize the right, enshrined in the 1878 act, to allow any pupil to be withheld from classes offering religious instruction.51

The first headmaster was an Englishman, Edmund Arblaster. A former scholar and prizeman of Clare College, Cambridge, his peda-gogic credentials seemed equally prestigious. He had been assistant master at Magdalene College School, Oxford, and latterly second master at the Grammar School, Great Yarmouth. Seemingly oblivi-ous to the fact that an Englishman having to seek employment as a teacher in Ireland may have reflected adversely on his quality, the Cork Constitution, the mouthpiece of local Protestants,52 concluded that this appointment cannot fail to be regarded as an earnest of the

49. The phrase mercantile pursuits was used in the schools entry in Guys Directory, 1907, 75. It reflected Corks position as, par excellence, a mercantile rather than an industrial city at the end of the nineteenth century.

50. Quite early on, the school attracted Jewish pupils; for one example in 1893, see C. Grda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 127. Jewry was active (and contentious, possibly because most were immigrants) in the period 18801910. A Jewish national school was founded in 1891, and it had eighty-seven children on the roll by 1898. See L. Hy-man, The Jews of Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Year 1910 (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1972), 21824.

51. CC, 28 Dec. 1881 (advertisement); 29 Dec. 1881 (news item). See also McEl-ligott, Secondary Education in Ireland, 2829.

52. According to Guys Directory, 1875, its tone was decidedly aristocratic, and its principles distinctly Protestant and constitutional (507).


intention of the board to secure that the school shall rank high as an educational establishment. It opened its doors on 25 January 1882 with about forty pupils. At a ceremony the new headmaster promised an emphasis on punctuality and good attendance as well as on the more muscular pursuits of cricket and football.53

It proved insufficient, however, to just sit back and let the pupils drift in, which is what the management seems to have done. Ominous weaknesses, pedagogical and financial, quickly became apparent. As early as July 1882, Arblaster complained that students suffered from a lack of systemized class work and from serious indiscipline. This second problem seems to have been as much owing to Arblasters own character as to rowdy pupils or indulgent parents. In the words of his obituarist, he had not either the knack of keeping discipline or the turn for business administration essential for a really success-ful scholastic career.54 One problem was that while the schools first prospectus promised that the examinations under the Intermediate Education Act will be carefully provided for,55 this goal seems not to have been Arblasters priority. At the schools first prize-day cere-mony in mid-1882 he declared that he favored a school that not only follows the time-honoured system of giving a thorough education in the liberal arts . . . but also comprehends . . . modern languages and natural science. In late 1883, with some bruising experiences of the Intermediate examinations under his belt, he was even more firmly convinced that what has been called the competition craze of the nineteenth century is leading to very evil results in the way of gener-ating an idea that the passing of an examination is the be-all and end-all of education.56 His successor, the Rev. John Berry,57 concurred:

53. CC, 26 Jan. 1882.54. Edmund Arblaster (18521937) matriculated at Cambridge University in

1872 (Clare College, 187275). See The Clare Association Annual, 1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 45. For an indication of his scholarly bent, see E. Arblaster, Note on a passage of Plato, Soph., Journal of Philology 6:11 (1876), 160.

55. CC, 29 Dec. 1881.56. CC, 24 Dec. 1883; CC, 21 July 1882.57. The Rev. John Berry was born in April 1856 at Tullamore in Kings County

(Offaly) and was educated at Chard Grammar School and Trinity College Dublin (B.A., 1877; M.A., 1880; B.D., 1888). He served as headmaster, Portarlington School and Cork Grammar School; as principal, Fermoy College, 188795; and as rector of Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada, beginning in 1895. See J.J. Howard and F.A. Crisp, Visitation of Ireland, reprint ed. (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1973), 22.


I am strongly opposed, he declared, to making the Intermediate results the chief aim of masters and pupils. . . .58 That first foray into the Intermediate system in 1883 seemed to confirm the schools in-ability to take proper advantage of the new system. Admittedly, the sixteen pupils entered achieved a pass rate of 69 percent, which ap-peared to compare favorably with the average of 57 percent for all Irish schools. But a more apposite comparison, limited to Protes-tant schools, did not flatter. Some chagrin was doubtless occasioned by the striking performance of Cork Grammars near-neighbor, the High School for Girls, which achieved a 100-percent pass rate for its fourteen entrants, with thirteen honors.

Under Arblaster (who left the school abruptly in mid-term in Feb-ruary 1885) and Berry (who lasted for only another two years), the school was reduced to a parlous state. It was not entirely their fault; the disturbed nature of the country in the mid-1880s did not help.59 By the end of its first year Cork Grammar had 49 pupils; enroll-ment reached 54 in 1883 but then proceeded to drop every year until 1887, when a low of 33 was reached. Quite simply, the school had not worked the system well enough. Resultson which a successful use of the 1878 law was predicatedcould not be achieved without num-bers. Numbers could not be kept up without results. In all probability the school would not have survived financially without a donation of 1,000 in 1888 from brewer Arthur Crawford, which was used to pay off an accumulated debt.60 More drastic action was needed to ensure that the school would have a future.

Salvation, as it turned out, appeared in the unlikely form of the Rev. Ralph Harvey. A tough, bluff, rough Yorkshireman who had come to the school as an assistant master in 1885, Harvey was ap-pointed headmaster on Berrys resignation in 1887. Stephen Far-rington, later Cork city borough engineer and one of Harveys star pupils, described him as tall and broad, with a rust-red beard that

58. CC, 23 Dec. 1886. 59. Cork Grammar was not the only school affected. Others, such as Alexan-

dra School for girls in Dublin, also found the going tough. See A. OConnor and S. Parkes, Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach: A History of Alexandra College and School, Dublin, 18661966 (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1966), 3839. On the Catholic side the Jesuits had to close their best school (Tullabeg) in 1886 and merge it with Clongowes, then a much inferior establishment.

60. CC, 18 Dec. 1895.


would have done justice to a South Sea pirate. Farrington opined that the beard should have been accompanied by a sunburnt, cutlass-carved visage. Instead, Harvey sported a pink-and-white Dresden china complexion, giving him an alien and rather terrifying appear-ance to small boys and occasionally to bigger bishops. According to Farrington, Harvey instituted a reign of terror that was immoral, having no relation to conduct, and unpredictable, having no re-lation to cause and effect. This may have been no bad thing, Far-rington thought: after all, thriving communities are known to have lived on volcanoes. . . .61

Whatever his demeanor, Harvey recast the school as a successful adjunct to, and support for, the Cork Protestant community, while paradoxically refusing in many respects to pander to the pretensions of the Protestant middle classes. Mindful of the ephemeral nature of the proprietary-school system, he cemented Anglican financial con-trol by bringing Grammar within the City of Cork Church School Board in March 1890, under the provisions of the 1885 Educational Endowments (Ireland) Act.62 His educational influence was evident in four principal areas: the achievement of examination successes; a bias toward matriculation in the Royal University of Ireland (RUI); an emphasis on applied science and on practical entry into the civil service and commercial careers; and an improvement in the quality of the schools premises.

A classicist and historian of minor note,63 Harvey was a staunchly unfashionable proponent of Pearses ruthless murder machine.64 During his tenure the Intermediate examinations became the touch-stonethe very ne plus ultraof Grammar; so much so that, out of

61. S. Farrington, The Grammar School under Harvey, The Grammarian 1:4 (1953), 10.

62. 48 & 49 Vict., c. 78. The Cork Grammar scheme was number 47 under the 1885 act; a copy survives in the Ashton School Archives.

63. He was editor of numerous works: Richard Misyns translation of Rolles Incendium Amoris (1896); Ovid, Metamorphoses XIII and XIV (1898); Cicero, Pro Lege Manilia (1900); Pro Archia (1906); and Catiline (1907). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1885 (CC, 4 April 1885). See also M. ORell, Class Book of French Composition (Paris: Hachette, 1897), 195, where Harveys Cicero is mentioned as a recommended text; and F. Hunt and J. Wuillemin, The Oxford & Cambridge French Grammar (London: Hachette, 1898), 16263, for another encomium.

64. P.H. Pearse, An Ideal in Irish Education, Irish Review (June 1914); P.H. Pearse, The Murder Machine (Dublin: Whelan, 1916), passim.


about fifty Irish Protestant schools, it was adjudged to be the third most successful in 1898.65 Nothing could have been further from the ambitions of Harveys predecessor, who had declared in 1886 that the preparation for this examination [the Intermediate] was so ar-ranged as not to interfere with the regular work of the school. For Harvey, by contrast, the Intermediate was the regular work of the schoolto the extent that external examiners were dispensed with in 1893, and internal school examinations after 1898.66

This concentration on the Intermediate system was discomfiting to many members of the schools governing body. Bishop Edward Meade of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross, taking his life in his hands, dif-fidently suggested in front of Harvey in 1907 that the real object of education for the pupils was that their characters might be formed, and that they might learn to be earnest, faithful, true, and diligent.67 The headmaster was having none of this. He always steadfastly main-tained that the Intermediate system was sound in principle, if some-what capricious in practice.68 He had little sympathy with those who criticized the restrictions of the system on good teachers, the sub-stantial pressure on pupils to win prizes and exhibitions, the con-comitant neglect of weaker students, and the unhealthy competition within and between schools.69 He denied that the system led to cram-ming, though it is hardly surprising that the Intermediate inspector-ate uncovered clear evidence of this.70 Harvey had no doubt that the Intermediate system was vital to the schools continued existence.

65. Ten candidates had been entered in 1889; the corresponding number had risen to forty-three by 1906. See Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 66062, for a list of Protestant schools, 18551900, from which Trinity College ma-triculands graduated. Cork Grammar is probably the school described there as Sid-ney Place Collegiate School.

66. CC, 22 Dec. 1894; 23 Dec. 1898; 22 Dec. 1899.67. Prize-day report (CC, 21 Dec. 1907).68. Prize-day report (CC, 21 Dec. 1906).69. P. Hogan, The Fortress of the Good and the Liberation of Tradition: A Re-

view of Irish Education in the Late Twentieth Century, Studies 75:4 (Autumn 1986), 270.

70. Reports of Temporary Inspectors of the Intermediate Education Board for Ireland (Cork Grammar School), 2 parts (Dublin: privately printed, 1902), 1:163 (copies in ASA). Harveys apologia for the system, and his denial of cramming, may be found in a 1906 prize-day report (CC, 21 Dec. 1906). As early as 1898 the commissioners had recognized the general problem (Akenson, Pre-University Education, 52527). In 1908, finally, a system of payment by inspection was introduced.


As he stated bluntly in 1894, If he did not produce examination results quickly, there would be no schoolnothing left but the four walls . . . ; except for the Intermediate system of payment of results [sic], the Cork Grammar School would not survive six months. . . .71

The bias toward the Royal University was further evidence of the relative Hibernicization of the school under Harvey, who based his leanings entirely on utilitarian considerations. He appreciated thatin Kieran Flanagans wordsthe Queens Colleges were highly pro-fessional in orientation and provided a vocational training that cor-responded with the necessities and aspirations of their students.72 Protestants accounted for between one-half and one-quarter of those at Queens College, Cork, between the 1880s and 1908, when the RUI was dissolved.73 Twice as many pupils matriculated into the College as entered Trinity College Dublin, and in 1896 it was said that more students from Cork Grammar passed into the RUI than from any other Protestant school in the south of Ireland. The apparent favor-ing of the RUI seems again to have made some conservative church elements uneasy. This cut little ice with Harvey. Ireland was not the richest country in the world, he brusquely asserted in 1894, and the fees of Trinity College compared unfavourably with the R.U.I.74

Harveys equipping of the local Protestant community with the educational tools to compete was encapsulated in a vocationally driv-en curriculum. Building on the schools initial prospectus, it provided

71. Quoted in CC, 24 Dec. 1894.72. Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 621. As an example, in

1909 University College Corkthe former Queens College, Corkbegan offering a special course for journalists who propose to proceed to the B.A. degree . . . , [with] opportunities to attend lectures on the professional aspects of journalism. This course, the first of its kind in Britain or Ireland, was introduced on the initia-tive of the president of the college, Bertram Windle. See F.M. Larkin, A Tale of Two Elites: Politics and Journalism in Ireland, 18701918 (paper read at the 17th International Conference of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, 1 July 2011), 6.

73. This situation helps to explain why in 1905 the bishop of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross was, according to President Windle, so solicitous about [the] college. See diary entry by Bertram Windle, 6 March 1905, quoted in Taylor, Windle, 170. The figure for the earlier period is derived from John A. Murphy, The College: A History of Queens/University College Cork, 18451995 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 116, and from Guys Directory, 1875, 44. For the later period, see CC, 22 Dec. 1903. See also the com-ments of Canon D.H. Powell at the 1897 prize-day ceremony (CC, 23 Dec. 1897).

74. CC, 22 Dec. 1894. See also Campbell, Irish Establishment, 281.


for a wide range of careers and further education. Science for Harvey was a passion, to the extent that he had a small private laboratory.75 Pupils were prepared for the entrance examinations of a plethora of universities, English and Irish, as well as for those of the home and imperial civil services, the armed forces, the Royal Colleges of Sur-geons and of Science, the banks, and accountancy. Pitman courses in typing and bookkeeping were also taught, as were city and guild vocational and technical subjects.

Finally, there was the vital matter of school premises: these were never to Harveys satisfaction. Despite his alleged toughness, he saw no particular merit in subjecting his boys to Dickensian physi-cal conditions. From the start, the school was handicapped by its cramped, hilly, and ancient inner-city site. Games had to be taken some miles away, in the southwestern suburbs. It took Harvey nine years to obtain a modest extension to the premises, and a further six before substantial alterations were completed.76 By 1908 increased numbersfrom 33 when he became headmaster to 135 or so77were again putting considerable pressure on resources. At that stage Har-vey felt that only a new school building would fit the bill. But the bill, amounting to some 10,000, was beyond the largesse of even the relatively rich Protestant elite.78 Management balked, and the failure of a fund-raising scheme bitterly disappointed Harvey. He resigned

75. R. Mansfield, Two Headmasters, The Grammarian 1:2 (1951), 13. With financial help from the Technical Committee of Cork Corporation in 1902, Cork Grammar was better equipped in science facilities than such respected schools as The Kings Hospital in Dublin. See L. Whiteside, A History of The Kings Hospital (Dublin: The Kings Hospital, 1975), 145; CC, 19 Dec. 1900 (editorial); CC, 20 Dec. 1900 (news item); A.G. Leonard, I remember . . . , The Grammarian 1:3 (1952), 16.

76. CC, 24 Dec. 1889; 21 Dec. 1893; 18 Dec. 1895; 23 Dec. 1898; 23 Dec. 1899; 19 Dec. 1901; 22 Dec. 1902. For a description of the school buildings in Sidney Place, see Reports of [Temporary] Inspectors of the Intermediate Education Board for Ire-land (Cork Grammar School), 190102, 1903, and 190910 (ASA). These reports are probably those mentioned as issued to heads of schools in the Report of the Intermedi-ate Education Board for Ireland for the Year 1910 [Cd. 5768], H.C. 1911, xxi, 47, p. x. See also Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 31.

77. The number of 135 appeared in an advertisement for the headmastership in 1908. See Journal of Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), 30:340. The advertisement sits among several for English schools.

78. An 1908 list of potential subscribers is preserved in the Ashton School Ar-chives. See also the city high sheriff s speech at the 1911 prize-day ceremony (CC, 22 Dec. 1911).


shortly afterward.79 The school had to wait for nearly another fifty years finally to leave the city stews.80

Harveys act was a difficult one to follow, and in light of some of the managers concerns about him, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the new headmaster was of a different style. The Rev. Edward SealeTed to his familiarswas an Irishman from County Wick-low. An ex-Scholar of Trinity College, he came to Cork Grammar from a post as fifth-form master at Highgate School, London. A for-mer pupil described him thus: Seale was of a finer fibre, with hand-some features, slightly distorted by pain. . . . Pain in some strange way had refined his features. It had also left him somewhat short in temper.81 Under Seale, Cork Grammar moved away from the Irish-oriented vocational education espoused by Harvey, though the lat-ters legacy outlasted his term; in the year after his resignation several pupils distinguished themselves in the Intermediate science examina-tions. The new head was not stupid: he remained acutely aware of the necessity to prepare his boys for commercial careers. As he stressed, For one of our boys who goes to the university, ten go to business.82

Nevertheless, Seale, who had expressed grave misgiving about coming to the school at all,83 reoriented it toward a more English public-school ethic and style, without contending for a moment that the premises and architectural beauty of the Grammar School are worthy of the third city in Ireland, as he put it in 1911.84 In doing this, he perforce redirected it not only educationally but also cultur-

79. Harvey took up the rectorship of Charleville in north Cork, where he died in 1925. He held various curacies in Cork city parishes in tandem with his school ap-pointment.

80. The school, under the headmastership of the Rev. G.H.J. Burrows (194770) and then controlled by the Incorporated Society for Promoting Protestant Schools in Ireland, acquired Ashton, a large house with spacious grounds on the Blackrock Road, about a mile from the city center. New additions were built, and the school finally moved to the new premises in 1956. For financial and architectural details concerning this period, see the Cork Grammar School Papers (ASA).

81. Mansfield, Two Headmasters, 13; G. Inglis, Cork after 41 Years, The Grammarian 1:8 (1957), 21.

82. Three pupils obtained exhibitions in the middle grade, and the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction awarded an increased grant for conspicu-ous merit (CC, 21 Dec. 1908).

83. Prize-day report (CC, 21 Dec. 1908).84. CC, 22 Dec. 1911.

Cork Grammar School, viewed from the south, ca. 1950

Cork Grammar School (former premises), viewed from the north, 2011


ally. This shift was to have ramifications for adaptability and integra-tion later on. His impact was visible in four areas particularly. The first concerned the curriculum. Seale, like Harvey, had been taught as a classicist. But while Harvey had reserved his enthusiasm for consenting adults, Seale was more evangelical. The study of classics represented in his view an unrivalled training for the mind. The In-termediate inspectors had noted approvingly in 1909 that the school is already taking up the study of Greek . . . ; the headmaster intends to remove the extra fee now put upon instruction in it. And classics, especially Greek, flourished over the next few years, with several dis-tinctions and prizes won.85

A second area of impact was an offshoot of the first. Seales Hel-lenophilia encouraged an increased emphasis on fitness and sport. New sports fields, closer to the school, were made available in 1909. Hockey was the traditional school game, but Seale introduced a suc-cessful swimming club, and also rugby, though with less success. 86 His attempt to change the supporters shout from an Irish Grammar! to an English School! was a conspicuous failure.87 Grammar boys did not tolerate pretension. George Inglis, who came from a West Cork Protestant lower-middle-class background, recalled being asked on his first day to sing a few bars of God Save the King for a choir au-dition. I stood mute, he recalled. Come on, said Mr. Garrett [the music master], dont you know the tune? That got a laugh, but in fact that particular tune was never popular in West Cork. . . .88

The third feature of Seales lasting influence concerned order in the school and the manner of its establishment. In disciplinary mat-ters Seales bias toward a sort of crypto-public-school ethos was evi-dent. Unlike Harvey, who had drained his staff of all authority, Seale decentralized much of his, though he alone was allowed to administer the cane. His punishment methodsflogging, followed by imposi-tions and the withdrawal of privilegeswere enforced with mild re-

85. Reports of Inspectors (Cork Grammar School), 190910, 45 (ASA); CC, 23 Dec. 1909, 19 Dec. 1912. For the previous two newspaper references, see Press Cut-tings Book [hereafter cited as PCB], 11 (ASA).

86. The old sportsgrounds were at Glasheen Road; the new ones were at Sun-days Well. For sporting successes (and failures), see CC, 21 Dec. 1908, 23 Dec. 1909; Mansfield, Two Headmasters, 14.

87. Mansfield, Two Headmasters, 14.88. Inglis, Cork after 41 Years, 1415.


gret, on the basis that young Protestant gentlemen had temporarily lost their sense of honor and nobility. Harvey, on the other hand, had treated the children as unreformable young savages.89

Seales fourth innovation had little directly to do with a utilitarian vision of education per se, but it was another significant marker of the group psychology of the relatively small and isolated southern Prot-estant minority in the years before the First World War. Patrick Buck-lands era of confident opposition,90 if it ever in fact existed, had all but vanished by 1908. Long used to the British empire as a place of employment opportunity, southern Irish Protestants in the years following the Boer War of 18991902 (the war was indeed a catalyst) experienced the empire as the collective cultural and emotional peg on which they could, and did, increasingly hang themselves.91 There is little surprise in this development. The literary theorist Edward Saids later argument is appositethat nations are narrations and that the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from form-ing and emerging, is very important.92 By 1910 the dominant narra-tive in southern Ireland, drowning out most others, was built around various strains of Catholic-based national stories and histories.

Seales response to this sort of cultural dislocation was to look for other narratives, principally in an imperial context, and one such was the formation of an Officers Training Corps in the school in the spring of 1910.93 Essentially for the reserve and territorial divisions of the army, these OTCs were the product of increasing militarism after 1900. The commanding officer of the Cork garrison, Major-

89. Mansfield, Two Headmasters, 14; Reports of Inspectors (Cork Grammar School), 190910, 4 (ASA).

90. P. Buckland, Irish Unionism, One: The Anglo-Irish and the New Ireland, 18851922 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972), 1.

91. For a fascinating analysis of the imperiophilia to which Irish boysCatho-lic and Protestantwere exposed in this period, see C. ONeill, The Irish Schoolboy Novel, ire-Ireland 44:12 (Spring/Summer 2009), 14768.

92. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), xiii.93. PCB, 24 (ASA). For additional information about the OTC, see The Gram-

marian 1:2 (1912); ibid., 6:24 (1920). The OTC in Cork Grammar School was the victim of a celebrated raid by the Irish Volunteers on its armory in 1917. The initial misgivings of the War Office and Dublin Castle were thus not unfounded. See Riobrd Langford Papers, U/156/3 (Cork City and County Archives, Blackpool, Cork). Lang-ford, a Volunteer officer, personally oversaw the raid, in which forty-seven rifles were taken from the OTC building.


General Charles Metcalfe, persuaded the War Office and the Dublin Castle authorities that it would be safe to allow a Protestant school in southern Ireland to possess uniforms and guns, with the result that 30 plus a supply of rifles were granted to the school.94 By Decem-ber 1910 a shed had been provided on the school premises to house the ordnance and uniforms. The grant of 30 was supplemented by money from the Cork unionist leader Lord Barrymore and some par-ents. Apart from regular weekly shooting and marching practice, the highlight of the year was an eight-day summer camp. In this respect, then, the OTC mirrored Robert Baden-Powells recently formed Boy Scout movement, though the OTC was somewhat more militaristic in tone.95 A parallel Scout troop was also established in Grammar. Seales only quarrel with it (he called it a mysterious but vigorous corps) was that its fascinating pursuits tended to make boys un-available for other school activities.96 The OTC had a golden summer in 1911. Along with a contingent from Campbell College, the only other Irish school to possess an OTC, a number of cadets from Cork Grammar attended the London coronation of George V and later a rally in Windsor Great Park. In his report on the occasion Seale well captured the significance of empire as a sort of Protestant national substitute: They [the cadets] must have felt, as . . . they filed past the King-Emperor that glowing July afternoon, something of pride and glory in being active members of a mighty empire, which one day they may be called upon to defend. . . .97

Harveys resignation from the school had been prompted by a sense of failure; Seales was occasioned by success. For its size the school performed spectacularly well in the Intermediate examina-tions in 1912 and 1913, and in June 1914, just before the outbreak of a war that would change everything, including Grammar and the

94. Irish Times, 14 July 1911.95. CC, 19 Dec. 1910; PCB, 8 (ASA). For instance, on 18 April 1912 the corps

marched from the school to Riverstown, where one section defended it while the other attacked. See The Grammarian 1:1 (1910), n.p.

96. Reports of Inspectors (Cork Grammar School), 190910, 8 (ASA); CC, 23 Dec. 1909; Howard Murphys letter in The Grammarian 1:10 (1959), 7.

97. CC, 22 Dec. 1911; PCB, 17 (ASA). The Rev. C.B. Armstrong, headmaster during the First World War, recollected that the existence of the OTC accelerated the rush into the forces in 1914. See C.B. Armstrong, Cork Grammar School, 19141919, The Grammarian 2:6 (1965), 12.


community in which it nested, Seale was poached by the more pres-tigious Kilkenny College.98 Thus ended the significant experiment in a greater Anglicizing of the school.

What conclusions may we draw from this exercise in microhistory? At his first prize-giving ceremony Harvey conventionally described his vision for Cork Grammar as a preparation for life in the world.99 That world, however, as we have seen from the different approaches taken to Irish Protestant secondary education by Harvey and Seale, remained contentious. In one sense it could be held that Harvey per-haps did more for the futures of his pupils, Seale more for the pre-tensions of their parents. In another sense the school embodied a paradox at its heart: to induce persons who had been sending their children to England to educate them at home was to equip them for living and working in the English-speaking empire as much as in Ireland.100 Working is the critical word here, reflecting a common-ality of approach by Irish Protestant and Catholic superior schools to the idea and purpose of education, seen as essentially utilitarian and technocratic (even Seale recognized the economic validity of this), as against the inculcation of gentlemanly manners and mores that seemed the principal purpose of their English counterparts.101 On the negative side, however, neither Catholic nor Protestant secondary schools particularly attacked the already apparent weakness of Irish educationnamely, an ecclesial and bureaucratic, clerical focus that came largely at the expense of industry; Joe Lees quip about Irish students knowing how to properly decline the Latin for table, without anyone being able to build one, springs to mind. Equally damaging in a different way, and overriding their common educational aims, was an increasing divergence between the denominations in interpreting the concept of Ireland as a cultural identity, evidenced in such critical spheres as the depiction of history,102 the language, and the compre-

98. Letter of appreciation from Bishop R.T. Hearn of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross to Rev. Edward Seale, 5 June 1914 (ASA). Seale eventually ended up as headmaster of Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.

99. CC, 23 Dec. 1887.100. D. Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 16301830 (Cork:

Cork University Press, 2005), 500.101. Flanagan, Rise and Fall of the Celtic Ineligible, 79103.102. As a classic example, see the nationalist, even republican, bias of the Chris-

tian Brothers in their Irish History Reader (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1905).


hension of loyalty, thus portending that uneasiness with the patria which characterized the southern Irish Protestant condition later and indeed throughout the twentieth century.

Cork Grammar perhaps offers an example of the ability of urban southern Irish Protestants to respond to and engage with rising Cath-olic achievement and concomitant expectation. But if it bears an in-terpretation of integration, this feature was highly conditionalthat is, it was designed to ensure that Protestants would retain their eco-nomic privileges, not share them. Schools like Cork Grammar may have provided a sort of social and cultural glue that helped south-ern Irish Protestants to stick together, but they could be quite se-lective and elitist even within themselves.103 Ultimately, schools such as Cork Grammar, firmly anchored to denominational authorities, demonstrated a longevity and an adaptability that their proprietary precursors could not possess. And while many icons of Protestant hegemony, from grand juries to Big Houses, have vanished, Harveys utilitarian and Seales more cultural entity still has a living and lively descendent. Cork Grammar School, amalgamated previously with the High School for Girls in 1920, and with Rochelle School in 1971, is now (2011) Ashton School, wholly state-funded, and one of those peculiarly oxymoronic Irish educational constructsa Protestant comprehensive.104

103. On average, in the years (196066) just before the introduction of free secondary education in Ireland, 65 percent of Cork Grammar pupils who took the Intermediate Certificate went on to take the Leaving Certificate. This was a perfor-mance only marginally above the national rate. The reasons why greater numbers of economically advantaged Protestants, relative to the generality of their Catholic peers, were not continuing to the Leaving Certificate would repay further investiga-tion. The figure for Cork Grammar is derived from following names in lists of Inter-mediate and Leaving Certificate classes in The Grammarian, 196167. The national figures for 196163 are available in Investment in Education: Report of the Survey Team Appointed by the Minister for Education in October 1962 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1965), 175, Chart 6.8.

104. See http://www.ashton.ie.

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