De Valera's Irelands (5 page)

9

The School Journal for 14 August 1898 has this entry: ‘Fr Superior return­ed considerably refreshed by his holiday in Clare.' That holiday, in the plans of Providence, proved a deciding factor in Eamon de Valera's ca­reer, as the Superior in question, Fr Laurence Healy, spent his holiday at Lisdoonvarna in the company of Fr James Liston, curate at Bruree. When the intermediate results were published on 30 August, young Edward de Valera, as he was then known, learned that he had secured a £20 exhi­bition – or scholarship – in junior grade. As he had to travel seven miles to the nearest secondary school, namely the Christian Broth­ers' school at Charleville, necessitating much expenditure of time and energy, he hoped to be accepted at a boarding school on the strength of this £20 scholar­ship. He had lived with his uncle Edward Coll in a labourer's cottage since his return from New York in 1885, where he had been born of an Irish mother and a Spanish father. His uncle could not be expected to con­tribute much to the £20. As no reply was received from the colleges in the south to whom he had applied, Fr Liston advised him to write to Fr Healy. He was immediately accepted on the strength of his exhibition alone.

As school had begun on 1 September he was already a week late. So without any further delay he purchased a new suit for 16/– and the other items mentioned in the prospectus, and set off for Dublin, aged 16. Horse trams still operated from Kingsbridge to the city centre. He then had to walk to Merrion Square to board the electric tram. He asked the conduc­tor to let him down at Blackrock College but the conductor was at a loss to know whether he wanted to go to St Joseph's Vincentian College Black­rock or to the French College as ‘Rock was still known locally; and in­deed it was still its official title for the intermediate board, as can be seen from the admission card supplied by them to Edward de Valera for his middle grade examination in 1899. That was the original official title of the college.

Fr Laurence Healy was in fact the first Irishman to be appointed Presi­dent of the college, succeeding Fr Jules Botrel, a native of Brittany, in 1896. That year too saw the first Irish bursar, Fr Neville, take over from Fr Mar­tin Ebenrecht from Alsace. Other links with the early origins of the col­lege were snapping just then. Fr Jerome Schwindenhammer – one of the three founder members in 1860 – was to die in France shortly after Dev arrived at the college. The first ceremony he witnessed at the college would have been the funeral mass for Fr Huvetys, the first superior of Rockwell (1864–1880) and superior of Blackrock (1880–89).

New links with the future were being formed. The first phone was installed in the college just before Dev arrived. The first ever kinematic or movie shown in the college took place that year too. The past students were about to form their first union and their senior or ‘Castle' team, as it was known, was about to apply for senior status, which was granted in 1899.

De Valera was quoted in his obituaries as saying he chose Blackrock as it was then the most competitive school. It was credited in fact with the highest number of exhibitions won by boarding colleges in the pub­lished results of that year. The college victory dinner was held mid-Sep­tember to celebrate these results and de Valera often recalled the opening words of the dean of studies' speech: ‘Who fears to speak of ‘98!' This quotation puts us in immediate touch with the competitive spirit and the ideals of that era, when each school had still to depend for its survival on the published successes of its students.

As de Valera began middle grade at Blackrock he felt himself very much of an outsider. Apart from his late arrival, most of his classmates had the advantage of being in the school for junior and even preparatory grades. He had to cope with the different text books and different methods and this he found disconcerting especially in Latin class where his teach­er, Fr Keawell, was notorious for insisting on his method being followed. This resulted in a disheartening number of billets to see the dean of stud­ies, so disheartening that Dev even contemplated running away from school. But the dean, Fr O'Hanlon, who was once described to me by Sr Manes of Sion Hill (recently deceased) as of the ‘woolly sort', just said:

‘De Valera are you doing your best?'

‘I am Father.'

‘Then go!'

Dev in fact very soon got to love the regular life of the college with its long uninterrupted hours for study, a luxury he had never known at his uncle's cottage. He soon found a kindred spirit in John d'Alton – later cardinal. His admiration for this student, whom he already sensed as mark­ed out for the Lord's vineyard, is expressed in a letter written then to his half brother Thomas Wheelwright in America – a letter happily preserved. Dev himself found his mind veering towards the priesthood as his vocation but Fr Healy advised him against joining the junior scho­lasticate of the congregation until he gave the matter fuller consideration.

The Christmas of 1898 Dev spent with the scholastics who did not go home on holidays in those days. He was invited by the prefects to join them in a team to play the scholastics in the first ever rugby match they were officially allowed to play. Until then rugby was forbidden to the scholastics as being contrary to French clerical decorum. They followed more or less the form of football planned for their predecessors in 1874–76 by Michael Cusack.

Dev's first rugby match literally left its mark on him. Determined to halt his opposite number and not knowing how to tackle properly he went down between his opponent's legs to stop him, and as the player had hoops on his footwear Dev received a nasty gash in the lug! He seems not to have taken a very active part in rugby thereafter and never figured on a school's team. He was a keen supporter, however, of the ‘Castle' or club team and liked to recall that he helped shoulder home all the way from Ailesbury the captain of the victorious Metropolitan side in 1899. Dev knew that for him studies were paramount as he had to pay his way by his success in the public examinations. Successful he was in the mid­dle grade examination in 1899. He won a £30 exhibition and though he won no medals for individual subjects, as did several of his classmates, he secured the highest total of marks and was thus adjudged the best all round student in the school. One of the honours that went with this dis­tinction was that he was chosen as reader of prayers – in church and study hall and at retreats for that year – a privilege that he appreciated highly. The manual of prayers that he used was treasured by him all his life and the prayers from it were among the last he heard being read for him by his devoted chaplain, Fr Willie O'Meara, at Linden. He was re­ceived into Our Lady's sodality on 8 December 1898, and among the sou­venirs of his school days that he passed on to the college is the medal with his name inscribed that he received on that occasion.

Revolutionary, politician and highly controversial character that de Valera was, his name does not immediately jump to mind as a possi­ble candidate for canonisation, though he has been recently described by one professor of history as ‘a saint in politics'. In all interviews I had with de Valera himself and with others who knew him in his school days, in­cluding Cardinal d'Alton, his character comes through as that of one re­markably upright, honest and of truly noble cast, but by no means a plaster cast, as he had a remarkable sense of humour, enjoyed schoolboy pranks and took part in the usual student escapades.

Once, when work was going ahead on the early chapters of his offi­cial biography, he asked me were there any of his contemporaries alive who had given a personal appraisal of him as a schoolboy. I mentioned that one such appraisal that immediately came to mind was the opinion expressed by Joseph O'Kane, one of his classmates. ‘He said you were the last boy he would have imagined in those days as being destined to be a successful politician.' ‘Did he give any reason?' Dev laughed heartily – that almost schoolboy laugh that had endeared him to his close friends right up until his last days. ‘I am afraid we cannot use that – as a lot of people might not believe it!' But it echoes the sentiments expressed by one of his teachers in the
Blackrock College Annual, 1932
:

In character, too, he showed himself at that time what he is today. He had a certain dignity of manner, a gentleness of disposition, a capability of adapt­ing himself to circumstances, or perhaps I should rather say, of utilising those circumstances that served his purpose. No one of his fellow-students ever heard him utter a harsh or unkind criticism of a fellow student. So with a full knowledge of his character, he began to glide gradually into the cate­gory of favourites, of those, that is, of whom men are inclined to trust be­cause they are upright, honourable, trustworthy and sincere ... !

It is well to remember that these words were written before de Valera had made his mark as Taoiseach and as President.

Fr Healy resigned as President due to ill health at the end of de Va­lera's first year at Blackrock. He was succeeded by an outsider, Fr John T. Murphy, who though a student of the college, had spent long years in Trinidad and in USA where he had been rector since 1888 of Pittsburg College – now Duquesne University. A man big in body and in mind, pos­sessed of boundless energy and a gifted orator, he set about galva­nising Blackrock and restructuring its outward appearance. Clareville House and the property were purchased in early 1900, but this deal was begun and carried through by Fr L. Healy. The boarders' recreation was extended to its present limits by purchasing part of what was then Wil­low Park. In his grand strategy to improve the frontage of the college along the main road, Fr Murphy took advantage of the arrival in Ireland the following year (April 1900) of Queen Victoria. Tradition has it that he got the students to line the road to cheer as the queen's carriage passed, and then for another carriage, the signal for which was to be given by Fr Murphy raising the huge ceremonial hat he had brought with him from Pittsburg College. The carriage in question was that in which the Earl of Pembroke travelled. Whether the earl was so proud of being so cheered in front of the other notables, or so ashamed of the dilapidated condi­tion of the houses along the front, he rose to Fr Murphy's bait and not merely settled the matter of leases to Fr Murphy's pleasure but made an official visit to the college. There is a tradition that only two students refused to salute the queen's carriage – and the name of de Valera is not among them!

De Valera had a great admiration for Fr Murphy and loved to listen to his oratorical
tours de force
, just as he remarked in later years he used like listening to Mr Dillon's speeches in Dáil Éireann.

Fr John T. Murphy's first year at Blackrock coincided with de Valera's year in senior grade. It was an eventful year. Apart from Queen Victoria's visit, that year was marked by the first ordination ever at Blackrock, that of Fr Joseph Shanahan, CSSp, later of Nigeria fame. The ceremony was performed by the first student of Blackrock to be consecrated bishop, Mgr Emile Allgeyer (1897). De Valera remarked on how impressed the students were by this solemn ceremony, as also by Fr Shanahan's first mass of­fered at the college the next day. Later that year Fr Murphy in­vited his friend, the then renowned Archbishop Ireland of St Paul, Minnesota, to visit the college and address the entire school. The press account of the visit put in bold letters that the archbishop stressed that he was:

... speaking to young men in whose hands were
the destinies of the Irish people
. Half a century hence those whom he addressed would be alive to see the fruits of their own efforts, and he trusted those efforts would be such as to place the Irish people in possession of all their legitimate rights and worthy of the possession of these rights …

Fr Murphy was himself very much in demand as a speaker for the big occasion or for the furtherance of charitable causes. One such cause he espoused wholeheartedly was the Pioneer Total Abstinence Movement founded towards the end of 1898. That a branch was formed early on in the college is obvious from the portrait of de Valera taken 1899 in con­nection with his success in the public examination, as he is wearing what must have been one of the first PTAA badges. Soon lemonade was to replace the traditional whiskey or claret punch for the students on fes­tive occasions. The invocation was not enthusiastically greeted by the ‘Castle' or university students whose favourite bunking out place was to Keegan's licensed premises then adjoining the property.

Another cause adopted enthusiastically by Fr John T. Murphy was that of the revival of the Irish language, especially its upgrading in schools. The Gaelic League was actively campaigning for this cause at that time. At a major speech given in the Rotunda, October 1900 by the President of the Gaelic League, Dr Douglas Hyde, Fr Murphy was chosen to second his motion and explain the situation as then affecting secondary schools. Soon after he was called on to address the Gaelic League in Blackrock Town Hall on the subject ‘Why we should study the Irish language'. Among those present as noted in the press was W. J. Pearse; Patrick Pearse was probably at the second such meeting. Little could Fr Murphy have fore­seen that the conclusions to be drawn from these beginnings would lead some of his listeners to the 1916 Rising. His comments on the Rising take on a special dimension when one recalls his involvement with the cause of Irish language and culture in 1900.

When de Valera arrived in Blackrock he had no knowledge of Irish. He envied those who had. He recalled to me as he passed through the recreation in 1958, the very spot where he saw his classmate, Thomas F. Rahilly, reading one of the earliest issues of
An Chaidheamh Soluis
in 1899. He recalled how amazed he was that a student of his own age could read that strange script and translate the contents for the other students. Years later, when de Valera was Taoiseach, he set up the Institute for Advanced Studies, and he appointed Thomas F. Rahilly as director of the Celtic Stu­dies Department.