Tucked away in the University College Cork (UCC) archives is a note from James Bradley, doctor, of Macroom, Co Cork, dated May 17th, 1911. Addressed to UCC’s registrar, the short letter complained that the annual college calendar had listed his name among graduates but failed to indicate that he had entered the naval medical service in 1887 by competitive examination.
Bradley, who wrote that he “got first place, & only retired from the service three years ago”, wished for the university to correct its oversight. It is a minor grievance about a missing line, but a revealing one: a Catholic doctor in a rural west Cork town, on the eve of the revolutionary decade, asking an Irish institution to acknowledge his service to the empire, with no trace of apology.
We might reasonably assume that the administrators, doctors or engineers who chose to go off to work in the British empire were overwhelmingly drawn from the well-heeled graduates of Trinity College Dublin. Trinity, of course, was an institution of immense wealth that had long restricted access for non-Anglicans, and its graduates did indeed go off to India and the colonial services in numbers.
However, this is only a partial picture. From the middle of the 19th century, hundreds of Irish men trained as doctors, engineers, administrators and diplomats at the Queen’s colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway. These institutions were established expressly to serve a growing middle-class that included the island’s Catholic majority. Bradley was one of them.
The colleges, founded in 1845 and built amidst the Famine, are usually remembered for the opposition they attracted. Established by Robert Peel’s Conservative government on the principle of no religious tests for professors and non-sectarian education for students, the so-called godless colleges were condemned almost immediately by much of the Irish Catholic hierarchy, who wanted a Catholic university. The Synod of Thurles in 1850 condemned mixed education of Catholics and non-Catholics, as Catholic authorities feared for the spiritual health of their flock.
The quest for a Catholic university was the story that most appealed to historians interested in the professionalisation of the Irish middle-class. In that narrative, the Queen’s colleges were simply an impediment to overcome, and the real action was the development of a Catholic university (what is now University College Dublin) which ran in parallel with the emergence of a largely Catholic nation-state in the early 20th century. Yet, hiding in plain sight is an alternative history of the Queen’s colleges where education was about remaking Irish society, which also helps us see, with greater clarity, Ireland’s place within the British empire.
The provision the government had in mind when creating the Queen’s colleges was wider than simply educating Catholics. Third-level education for all sections of Irish society was one motive. So, too, was the belief that education could replace sectarian animosity with more productive rivalry, transforming young men into citizens and allowing them to take their place alongside their British counterparts in the work of governing an empire.
When introducing the scheme in 1845, the home secretary, James Graham, reminded MPs of the rivalry between the various colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and of the way that competition for prizes and scholarships forged connections between young men and exercised, as he put it, a beneficial influence in later life. He hoped the same might be achieved in Ireland, where students of different creeds would compete without reference to party or denomination “laying the foundation of future concord and social improvement”. Modelled on the recently opened University of London, with its non-sectarian ethos and federated examining structure, government saw open higher education as a way to remake Irish civil society and create institutions that belonged to the state rather than to any church.
The wager that higher education would allow Irishmen to contribute as imperial citizens was aided by a change at Westminster. In the first years of the colleges, enrolments were small — after all, the country had not recovered from the social and economic turmoil of the Famine. However, between 1853 and 1855 the British government abandoned patronage as the mechanism for selecting civil servants and replaced it with open competitive examination. Under what became known as the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, careers in the Indian Civil Service, the Indian army and navy medical services and the Indian public works department were now to be determined by an exam rather than through familial connection. Charles Trevelyan, one of the architects of reform, recognised the overlap between government hopes for Ireland’s future and the emerging meritocratic designs of examination, believing that a career in the Indian civil service was the “prize” to “stimulate liberal education in Ireland”.
The college presidents seized on the opportunity. Robert Kane, UCC’s first president, had actually anticipated the changes and written to the East India Company’s (EIC’s) leadership and secured one scholarship to the company’s training college, Haileybury, in 1851. The EIC allowed the Cork college to create an exam to select a candidate from their student body, and Jeremiah Moriarty, a Catholic student who hailed from near Grange, Co Limerick, won. Newspapers across Ireland and Britain hailed Moriarty’s selection. His success continued at Haileybury, where he won a “first class prize” in his final year and earned a desirable appointment in the Bombay presidency as a magistrate and revenue collector. For Kane’s part, he boasted of Cork’s importance, arguing in the newspapers to a reading public that competitive exams had “practically originated in this college”, further underlining the commitment of administrators to imperial appointments.
College curriculums changed to suit the subjects favoured in the exams. Once open competition arrived, Cork established a semi-private tutorial for students with a reasonable prospect of success, Belfast created prizes to encourage candidates and all three Queen’s colleges attempted, at some point in the 1850s, to teach Sanskrit and Arabic so their students might chase the same marks as candidates from Dublin, Oxford and Cambridge. The annual reports each president was obliged to lay before parliament turned into catalogues of examination success, and were used to argue for buildings, libraries and money.
As the exams were standardised, administrators often used the relative success of the Queen’s colleges to demonstrate their educational excellence and students’ aptitude versus more storied institutions. The president of Queen’s College Belfast, Pooley Shuldham Henry, boasted in 1863 of the 16 Belfast men who had secured positions in the past eight years. He said it was a “remarkable success” to be competing with “the oldest and most renowned” universities in the empire. Even at Galway, the most precarious of the three colleges, the president, Edward Berwick, could boast of five appointments to the Indian civil service in three years, along with an appointment to the Indian public works and another to the administration of Ceylon, which was part of the Indian Raj but is now Sri Lanka.
Of the 668 men who graduated from Cork up to 1898, no fewer than 149 went into some imperial career. Doctors were the main choice, but there were also engineers, administrators and judges. That is 22 per cent of a single college’s graduates, from a city not usually thought of as a nursery of empire though one that had a longstanding connection via its harbour with the British army and imperial trade networks.
Medicine was the well-trodden path: in 1884, the president of Cork boasted to a royal commission of inquiry of the hundreds of graduates who had passed the army, navy or Indian medical boards, which he offered as a testament to the quality of medical education in Cork. Bradley, sitting his naval exams three years later, was walking a route many hundreds of Cork men had walked before him.
Robert Hart, from Co Armagh, joined the British consular service in China, where he lived for 54 years
Who were these Irish men? They included some very well-known alumni, like Belfast graduate Robert Hart, head of the Chinese customs service who, by the end of his career had installed an entire network of Belfast alumni in posts; Antony MacDonnell, educated at Galway who oversaw famine relief in Bengal and later chaired the Indian famine commission of 1901 before returning to Ireland as under-secretary where he helped pass land reform that enabled peasant land purchase; and John Pope Hennessy, who obtained a first at Cork before his eventual election to parliament and subsequent colonial appointments as governor in Sierra Leone, the Bahamas, Hong Kong and Mauritius.
Colonial governor and politician John Pope-Hennessy (1831-1891), who obtained a first at University College Cork. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
What this all suggests is that the Queen’s colleges were never simply an attempt to educate Catholics, or to serve a rising middle class, though they were both of those things. Empire was present at their foundation and remained central to how they justified themselves. When the colleges came under sustained attack in parliament, from the Catholic hierarchy and from Irish members who thought them a waste of public money, their defenders answered with examination results and the careers those results had opened. Success abroad was the proof that non-sectarian education worked at home and could offer Irish men a place alongside British counterparts.
For every Hart or MacDonnell there were dozens of men about whom we know almost nothing. I am writing a larger history of these institutions, and it is those obscurer careers I most want to recover. The parliamentary papers give names, examination places and appointments. They say very little about what those appointments meant to the men who won them or to the families in Macroom, Ballina and Ballymena who watched them go and then waited on the post. Much of that material has never been near an archive at all. Letters home, photographs, diaries, certificates and the objects brought back and left on a mantelpiece tend to survive in attics and in the backs of wardrobes, unread since the death of the person who could explain them. Bradley wanted his own small achievement recorded, and it is only because someone kept his letter that we can honour the request. I suspect there are many more such requests waiting to be answered.
Jay Roszman is a lecturer in 19th century Irish history at University College Cork