BOOK OF THE DAY: Where Swift and Berkeley Learnt: A History of Kilkenny CollegeBy Lesley Whiteside with Andrew Whiteside Columba Press €25
ONE OF the earliest Protestant institutions in Ireland, with its roots to the Reformation era, Kilkenny College has a distinguished history, if also a fragmented one. In 1538, Piers Butler, eighth earl of Ormond, started the original grammar school in Kilkenny, and the following decades saw controversial historian Richard Stanihurst among its pupils. That school failed to prosper, however, and was re-instituted in 1667 by James Butler, first duke of Ormond. It began sturdily, braving the shifts and shocks of the conflict between King James and King William and prospering for decades before falling into a pattern of achievement and decline into the 20th century.
Kilkenny taught Jonathan Swift and George Berkeley, of course, but most of its pupils were the sons of the locally prominent. The history of Protestant Ireland has fared well in our time, but such good fortune has embraced its schools only recently. The best example to date is Lesley and Andrew Whiteside's history of Kilkenny College, Where Swift and Berkeley Learnt. It was hardly an easy task, especially for the earlier centuries.
The Whitesides are documentary historians and Andrew is the archivist of Kilkenny, but the documentation for the first centuries of the college is spotty at best. The school statutes of the era survive, manifesting what was expected of pupils more privileged than most people around them, but even in terms of curriculum we know little more than that Christian doctrine and classical learning were favoured over mathematics or science, and that school discipline was, by modern standards, ferocious.
Otherwise, even for famous pupils like Swift and Berkeley, the dearth of school records leaves us without evidence of what and how they were taught. Instead we have invaluable short profiles of pupils and teachers, particularly the headmasters. Kilkenny was hardly in the forefront of educational innovation, few of the wealthy left it bequests, intermittent parliamentary grants could not make up for the lack of a deep endowment, and often the headmaster would have to pay for maintenance and repairs from his own pocket. As the Whitesides demonstrate repeatedly, headmasters were the key: a skilful man could recruit pupils and staff effectively and retain them, while the indifferent brought the college low.
The alternations of prosperity and decline include two mergers.
In 1903, Kilkenny College absorbed the local Pococke School, founded in the 18th century to convert Catholic boys to the established church and train them for the linen industry. Pococke had become a regular boarding school by the mid-19th century, but fell victim to the realisation within a few decades that the area could not support two Protestant boys’ schools. Following independence in 1922, Protestant numbers fell more sharply and, by the 1970s, Kilkenny faced closure, a fate averted with its merging with the Celbridge Collegiate School, a day school for girls founded in the mid-18th century.
The last 35 years have seen far smoother sailing, as the hard edges of old-fashioned Irish confessional allegiance have softened among both Protestants and Catholics. Nowadays historically Protestant schools often, indeed usually, include an appreciable number of Catholic children, whose parents reckon educational standards are higher than in their denominational schools.
Robert Mahony recently retired as professor of English at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC