Memoir: Discipline among students at Trinity College is maintained by the junior dean (JD) and this office was filled for 13 years from 1956 by the historian, Brendan McDowell.
He was, at first sight, an unlikely man for the job. A celebrated conversationalist, he is a Belfast man with an eccentric dress code who speaks, reads and writes often at breakneck speed. A bachelor and the most sociable of men, he lives collegiate life to the full, and can speak knowledgeably and swiftly on an extraordinary range of subjects to the amazement of visitors to the college. As JD he was an unparalleled success.
It is now sometimes forgotten that McDowell was one of the stars, if not the star, of early Irish television, appearing on a Postbag programme, where his self-assurance in front of the camera belied the pre-programme panic of the make-up team. Dealing with the usual undergraduate peccadilloes proved no problem for him.
His judgments were fair and were readily accepted. With the arrival on the student scene of the Internationalists in the late 1960s demanding that the JD "explain himself", and describing the College Board as "lapdogs of imperialism", things tilted somewhat against the JD.
Remarkably, and quite inadvertently, McDowell had come up against the student revolt in Paris the previous summer and had no option but to follow the protesters into a large lecture hall where the French government and the university authorities were denounced in the roundest of terms. He reported later that, while having little sympathy with the political views of the rebels, he had found the occasion a quite thrilling experience!
Back in Trinity, the board panicked under pressure and summoned an all-day meeting to discuss alterations to the college's archaic disciplinary regime. The meeting adjourned for lunch, and returning board members were impressed to witness the largest-ever single postal delivery to the college, consisting of one and three quarter tons of the Thoughts of Chairman Mao.
But such revolutionary movements (as we are all so painfully aware) often contain the seeds of their own destruction. A suitably emaciated lady medical student took her protest outside the front gate to the space between the gate and the railings on College Green, sitting in freezing weather before a brazier of glowing coals with a notice board outlining her demands for reform. Unhappily for her, a couple of engineering students observing that the young lady was absent from her post at a certain strategic interval, smartly replaced her placard with another, which read: "Hunger Striker, Gone To Lunch!"
But it was the Law gang under the inspired leadership of Andrew Bonar Law and his loyal number two, Brian (Shifty) Clarke (both scholars of the House) who caused the most disruption to the forces of law and order in Trinity during McDowell's tenure of office. "Where will they strike tonight?" was the head porter's pathetic cry.
In Anne Leonard's fascinating book of reminiscences of McDowell, her contributors describe how the doors of the 1937 Reading Room were one morning bricked up (with bricks conveniently left behind by a construction gang) and how a 30-foot-long film camera trolley used in making the film Shake Hands with the Devil was parked with its front wheels across the ridge in the roof of the Examination Hall. In fact, a gang of a dozen students had been assembled on a quiet Sunday evening and the trolley had been pulled into the Provost's Garden (using keys cut by Andrew Bonar Law) and then up the back wall of the Examination Hall with 10 men pulling and two belaying the rope around a chimney.
Everything went according to plan until the trolley reached the roof ledge, dislodging a couple of slates which went sailing down to the Provost's Garden below. On went the lights in the Provost's house and out came Dr McConnell and his wife in night attire, followed by a couple of porters with lights - but nobody bothered to look up. The trolley remained in position hanging down the back wall of the building for all of Monday and then 10 minutes' effort with some scaffolding poles as crowbars and the trolley was lodged in its final resting place. It had to be taken to pieces to get it down.
Another famous occasion in the same hall concerned an honorary degree conferring ceremony in which the Public Orator introduced the candidates with lengthy Latin orations which, it was generally felt, could have been drastically cut down. Some high-powered electrical engineering on the previous night had introduced a cable into the Examination Hall, hooked up to a switch in a nearby lecture room. The organ in the Examination Hall had not played for more than a century but it struck up with a flick of the switch, playing Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue at full volume and completely drowning the Latin oration. This continued for a couple of minutes, then stopped - and everyone sat back.
The Public Orator resumed where he had been so rudely interrupted, but 90 seconds later the organ struck up again, reducing the ceremony to a complete farce. Porters were sent up, by the JD, to the organ loft to arrest the organist, and seize the record player which had been at the heart of the organ's revival. At last the JD had a captive! Two days later he received a letter from the Gramophone Society informing him that its record player had been purloined and might have been used unofficially in the Examination Hall. The following day, the JD handed the record player back to the secretary of the Gramophone Society who, of course, was none other than Andrew Bonar Law. McDowell emerged from these and many other stirring contests bloody but unbowed.
To mark his 90th birthday, Anne Leonard has compiled a marvellous volume of reminiscences by former Trinity men and women and Roy Foster has written a foreword to a series of essays by the great man himself, including studies of Carson, Swift and Burke. To this reviewer, though, nothing will equal his magisterial History of Trinity College, 1592 to 1952, written jointly with botanist David Webb.
Some years ago McDowell acquired accommodation in a traditionally Irish region of north London. On being congratulated for having, at last, moved in with the Paddies he responded: "Paddies, Paddies, not a Paddy to be seen, all Pakistanis and Indians, Tory voters to a man!" Happily, he now spends most of his time in Trinity holding forth on every topic in Commons or in the Kildare Street and University Club.
Trinity is fortunate to have such a distinguished figure, at the age of 90, still living life to the full and presenting the human face of the university to the outside world - and don't we need it!
• Trevor West is a Senior Fellow of Trinity College and author of Horace Plunkett, Co-operation and Politics and The Bold Collegians: The Development of Sport in Trinity College, Dublin