- (GXFDWLQJIRU,UHODQG"7KH8UEDQ3URWHVWDQW(OLWHDQGWKH(DUO\
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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.
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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.
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203ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork
Grammar School
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
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204 ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of
Cork Grammar School
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.
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205ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork
Grammar School
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.
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206 ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of
Cork Grammar School
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
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207ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork
Grammar 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
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208 ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of
Cork Grammar School
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
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209ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork
Grammar School
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.
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210 ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of
Cork Grammar School
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.
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211ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork
Grammar School
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
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212 ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years 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].
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Cork Grammar School, viewed from the south, ca. 1950
Cork Grammar School (former premises), viewed from the north,
2011
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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.
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223ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork
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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.
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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.
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225ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of Cork
Grammar School
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).
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226 ire-Ireland 46: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 11 The Early Years of
Cork Grammar School
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.