Our forgotten student gown
THE DISAPPEARANCE of academic dress has been one of the many casualties of modern arrogance. A cap and gown was the uniform of all students and academic staff members from the foundation of this university until the lamentable 1960s. While the bachelors’ and masters’ gowns have not been completely abandoned thanks to their use at Commencements, the undergraduates’ gown, unique to this college, is now an extremely rare sight.
When a tradition has been erased, we are forced to turn to books. Shaw’s Academical Dress of British and Irish Universities preserves a description of the Trinity College undergraduates’ gown, which students here once donned daily. It is a sleeveless garment with a flap collar, each armhole having a broad flap decorated with three rows of tassels. The side of the gown, beneath the arm holes, is also decorated with tassels.
This gown is prescribed for almost all undergraduates in Trinity. Scholars, upon their election, become entitled to the more ample bachelors’ gown.
In the 18th century it was the privilege of Trinity College students to be admitted to the Irish House of Commons on College Green. “The student’s passport was his gown” says Ireland Ninety Years Ago, in which the author gives a personal account:
“When I first entered College, I was very fond of using this privilege. It was a proud thing for a gib to present himself to a crowd round the door, [and] hear many a cry, ‘Make way for the gentleman of the College!’”
That century, the same gentlemen were advised to have contempt for their gowns by the disrespectful but entertaining pamphlet Advice to the University of Dublin:
“When first arrayed in your academic dress, I suppose you were very proud of yourself, and frequently sported your new gown, even beyond those limits prescribed by the statutes; but one month’s experience, I hope, has convinced you that this is an unfashionable and ridiculous practice.”
And, to help the new student appear to be an old hand, Advice recommends abusing the garment: “You can let it sweep the ground after you like a lady’s train; cut most of the tassels off; and twisting it frequently like a rope, pelt it against every corner you meet. By this means you will probably pass for a sophister and avoid that reproachful term gib, so constantly applied to young freshmen.”
Undergraduates, clearly, were never particularly fond of their gowns. The narrator of the pleasant novel O’Grady of Trinity: A Story of Irish University Life, published in 1896, recorded the sentiment: “The Dublin undergraduate gown could not by any stretch of the imagination, however elastic, be considered a graceful or even dignified garment ... I yearned, therefore, for the comely gown and velvet cap of the Scholar.”
Whether by accident or design, the student’s gown was often a pitiful item. A College Historical Society subcommittee attempted to prevent “academic nudity” in the early 1930s. Bachelors and Scholars, said the committee’s report, “should wear a full, seemly gown,” while Pensioners and Sizars “should wear the customary, lesser gown, commonly called the jib’s gown.”
(Most students are ‘Pensioners’: that is, undergraduates other than Scholars and Sizars. ‘Sizars’ are poorer students – these days Sizars receive free Commons.)
The Hist report continued: “Furthermore, the gown must be a gown. A collection of black rags held together by pins, or a concentration of dark-coloured ribbons assembled by cords, is not a gown.”
A piece in TCD: A College Miscellany in 1949 noted the gown’s often unattractive appearance: “Ostensibly a sable drapery, it is more often green, fusty and ripped, having no kin even in pattern with its neighbour in lecture.” The student scribe was pessimistic: “If the gown is rendered extinct by the fulfilment of its present apathetic decline, it will be a good thing.”
The decline in standards of academic dress did continue, with official approbation. In 1958, ignoring St Paul’s instruction on head coverings in his first letter to Corinth, lady students were given permission to attend College Chapel without wearing mortar boards. Trinity News reported that gowns remained obligatory.
Eventually the undergraduates’ gown fell out of use, despite rules to the contrary. Even today the statutes prescribe a gown for each student and academic staff member, who “shall wear it while performing his academic duties”. The rules of both the Phil and the Hist also require academic dress for meetings; a requirement now never observed.
Other ancient universities retain and enforce academic dress requirements for students dining at hall, attending matriculation or taking finals. It is our loss that we have abandoned such a venerable tradition – even if it was not always loved by every student.
However, those students keen to restore the collegiate spirit can order Trinity undergraduates’ gowns for a reasonable price from Shepherd and Woodward in Oxford. Commons, examinations and GMB debates are particularly appropriate occasions for the eager restorationist to wear his Trinity gown, and do so proudly.
CONGRATULATIONS to the Boat Club men who were awarded Pinks recently for their victory at last year’s Irish senior eights championship: a well-deserved recognition of a once-in-a-generation win.
The college weekly TCD in 1936 reported that students with University Colours would attend college functions “swathed in this antiseptic-seeming material”. I have not encountered a record of the design of this Pinks blazer, despite its former popularity. Does any reader have a description or photograph of it?
