Historical Sketch of the College Historical Society (1770-2020)

Historical Sketch
              of the College Historical Society
                        (1770-2020)

The Forerunners
The College Historical Society sprang from two associations of a similar character which were founded in
the middle of the eighteenth century: Burke’s Club and the Historical Club. The Club founded by
Edmund Burke and a few of his fellow students is the earliest debating society composed of students of
the University of which any definite record remains. The minute book of this club, a treasured possession
of the College Historical Society, relates that the first meeting took place on Tuesday, April 21st, 1747, in a
house in George’s Lane, now South Great George’s Street, the members present being Edmund Burke,
Matthew Mohun, William Dennis, Andrew Buck, Richard Shackelton and Richard Ardesoif. Mohun, for
his ill conduct and neglect was later “formally expelled the Society for ever.”
The preamble to the Club’s laws stated its intention to provide “fair opportunities of correcting our taste,
regulating and enriching our judgement, brightening our wit, and enlarging our knowledge, and of being
serviceable to others in the same things.
The business of the Club was to be “speeching, reading, writing and arguing, in Morality, History,
Criticism, Politics and all the useful branches of philosophy”; the first law related to the conduct of
members and ordained that ‘decency and good manners, virtue and religion, must guide their whole
behaviour, and no word, gesture or action, contrary thereto, pass uncensured.’ Burke, who sat ssix times
as President and twice as Censor, was the moving spirit and was never once absent from the meetings.
The last record in the minute book is of the meeting held on Friday, Jul 10th, 1747.
The Historical Club was instituted on October 24, 1753. It was founded to cultivate historical knowledge,
but soon began to hold monthly debates. It met, as had Burke’s Club outside College, through composed
entirely of students. He last quarter of the eighteenth century was the golden age of Irish eloquence, and
among the great orator of this period the names of Burke, and of Grattan, Flood, Yelverton, Hussey-
Burgh and other member so the Historical Club held an honoured place.

The Early years of the College Historical Society: March 1770-80
The College Historical Society sprang from “the embers of another Institution”- this Historical Club. The
new Society met for the first time on Wednesday, March 31st, 1770, when thirteen students ‘who first
united into a body and obtained the use of the Common Room from the Provost and Senior Fellows’

were present. The Society had codified laws, and its meetings, which began at si o’clock, included a
history examination, a debate and the submission of essay and poems. The office of Auditors is original
to the College Historical Society, and the title has been adopted by many other societies in College and
elsewhere.
The Society soon established itself, furnishing comfortable rooms, awarding medals and collecting
‘subscriptions for the relief of the poor at this period of distress and misery.’ John Hely Hutchinson, the
controversial Provost elected in 1774, who opened the University to Roman Catholics, was a good friend
to the Society. As the Patriot Party of the Volunteers gather strength, the Society took an increasing
interest in Irish politics. At its first Irish debate, held in January 1779, it rejected the proposal of a Union
between Great Britain and Ireland, and in the following months supported the Volunteers and
unanimously approved of the ‘secessions of America.’

To the Rebellion of 1798
On November 19th, 1783, Theobald Wolfe Tone was elected a member of the Society and pursued an
outstanding career in it. As the political atmosphere in Ireland grew more exciting, this was reflected in
the Society, which Tone once took to task for being ‘a theatre of War and Tumult.’
Tone was a contemporary in the Society of Thomas Addis Emmet, who helped to establish the Societ;s
reciprocal membership (still in existence) with the Speculative Society of Edinburgh. In 1798, however,
the Society went too far in its independene. It refused to exclude from its meetings a sometime member
who had been banned by the Board from the College and the Board retaliated by expelling the Society
from College. The Society contrived to meet outside College, in William Street, but by the end of 1794
some members had decided to accept the Bord’s stringent conditions for readmission, which included as
one of the fundamental regulations the stricture that ‘No question of modern politics shall be debated,’
but the spirit of this law was frequently infringed.
The reconstituted Society flourished. In 1795 the enthusiasm of the Trinity students for the patriots led to
their losing the privilege of watching the proceedings of the Irish House of Commons from a gallery of
their own, because after a speech by Grattan against the recall of the popular viceroy Lord Fitzwilliam,
the students, recalled Lord Edward Walsh, ‘rose as one man shouting and cheering with the boisterous
tumult of a public meeting… We were pushed out in a heap without the slightest ceremony, and were
never again gain suffered to enter as privileged persons.’ In 1797 two members who subsequently
distinguished themselves joined the Society, Thomas Moore and Robert Emmet, and the two became
firm friends.
In 1798, Lord Clare, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Vice-Chancellor of the University, held a
General Visitation, during which it was discovered that there were four committees of the United
Irishmen and some Orange Societies within College. Nineteen students (eight of them members of the
College Historical Society) were expelled, including Robert Emmet. So when the ’98 Rebellion began on
May 23, the Society took a stance opoosed to that of its ex-Auditor, Wolfe Tone. At a meeting of only ten
members they resolved to enter ‘with the warmest feeling into the common cause of their country, and …
to join heart and hand in defence of their liberties and laws.’ The Society then adjourned until the rising
ended.

To the Second Expulsion, 1815
An echo of Emmet’s insurrection appears in the Journals for November 16th, 1803, when a medal, open
to all members of the University, was offered for the best elegy on the death of Lord Kilwarden, who had
been killed during the insurrection.
The years which followed were turbulent ones for the Society, and relations with the Board deteriorated.
There were many disorderly meetings. During the 1809-10 Session a debate on universal toleration led to
the Auditor being summoned before the Provost, and being questioned ‘as to certain inflammatory
expressions said to have been used.’

In 1812 the Provost, Dr Thomas Elrington, objected to some of the subjects chosen for debate, including
universal suffrage and capital punishment. He even objected to the motion ‘Was Brutus justifiable in
putting Julius Caesar to death?’ on the grounds that ‘to admit a defence to be made for assassination must
be injurious to morality.’
The Board imposed more restrictive regulations in 1813, and many experienced members were excluded
from the Society. Meetings became even less orderly, and the following year the Provost intervened in a
Society dispute to strike two participants off the list of members. The Society protested against ever-
increasing Board severity, and eventually in 1815 came to the conclusion that the Board was determined
to extinguish it. In a dramatic final debate on February 15th, 1815, a committee of seven was set up, ‘for
the purpose of resigning for the present into the custody of the Provost and the Board the rooms
hitherto appropriated to the use of the Historical Society, the late regulations of the Board being in the
opinion of the Society inconsistent with the successful prosecution of the objects for which it was
instituted…’ and then the Society adjourned sine die.
Provost Elrington’s notebook for December 10th, 1815, reads: ‘An application having been made by some
of the students for the re-institution of the Historical Society, it was refused’. One of Elrington’s pupils.
Lord Cloncurry. Later wrote of him as: “A learned man, but stupid and blockish, and thoroughly imbued
with the narrowest views of his class and profession. It was he who accomplished the suppression of the
Historical Society, then obnoxious to all who dreaded progression, as a nursery of genius and patriotism,
and as opening a common field whereon the rising generation of Irishmen were learning mutual respect
of each other…’

The Extern Society 1815-43
After 1815 the Society held its meetings outside College, and continued as a vigorous debating society.
Among its members during this period were Isaac Butt, an outstanding orator, who in 1932 attempted
unsuccessfully to have the Society readmitted to College, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, novelist and poet,
Thomas Davis and John Black Dillon.
Early in 1841 Davis and Dillon were among several members of the Society who joined O’onnell’s Repeal
Association, and later helped largely to form the Young Ireland party. Dillon’s address to the Society as
an ex-President in November 1841 was entitled ‘Patriotism’. The Nation newspaper was founded in 1842
by Davis, Dillon and Gavan Duffy. In 1843 Davis was elected a Honorary Member of the Society. 1843
also saw the foundation within College of an Intern College Historical Society, at the request of many
students. Several member of the Extern Society, led by William Connor Magee, later Archbishop of York,
brought about ht euniting of the two Societies, and in May 1843 they held their first joint meeting in
College, with the Provost in the chair. MacDonnell (in the ‘Life of Archbishop Magee’) writes of it: ‘The
meeting was crowded… It was a long series of oratorical triumphs. From that day the success of the
Society was complete.’

To the Society’s Cetenary, 1870
The remainder of the nineteenth century was a good time for the Society. It was a period of stability
enlivened by the occasional riotous meeting or clash with the Board. In 1846 reciprocal honorary
membership with the Oxford and Cambridge Union Societies was confirmed. In 1852 the Board helped
the Society out of financial difficulties with a grant of £20. One of the outstanding debates of this time
took place on June 10th, 1857, on the motion ‘That the Reform Bill of Lord Grey was not framed in
accordance with the wants of the country.’
Isaac Butt spoke in the affirmative, and was opposed by David Plunket (afterwards Lord Rathmore) and
Edward Gibson (afterwards Lord Ashbourne), and the motion was carried. Among the new members this
Session were W.E.H. Lecky and J.P. Mahaffy, to be joned the following Session by Anthony Traill
(afterwards Provost) and Gerald Fitzgibbon.

The buoyant mood of the Society at this time can be gauged by the ton eof Plunket’s Auditorial Address
for the 1859-60 Session:
 “There is, indeed, but one responsibility I know of that you incur on entering our guild, it is to be patriotic Irishmen. This
Society is now in its ninetieth ear. Called into being at first at the moment when the spirit of an awakening freedom and a
new-born nationality began to breathe upon this land, it has watched that feedoms progress-tenderly nursed that nationality.
  For ninety yar it has sent forth the best and greatest Irishmen… If you are cold to patriotism, I have no wish that you
                                                  should become on of us…”
In 1864, when the movement began for the erection of statues to the memory of Edmund Burke an
Oliver Goldsmith, which resulted in Foley’s two masterpieces which still stand to either side of the
entrance gate to College, the Society collected subscriptions from its members and donated £30. The
centenary Session of 1869-70 was celebrated with a banquet in Dining Hall, at which Isaac Butt in his
speech referred to the Society’s existence outside the walls between 1815 and 1843.

To the Burke Centenary, 1897
The Society’s second century had a stormy first decade. The Auditor for 1873-74, Cecil Robert Roche,
chose ‘Federalism’ as the subject for his Opening Address, and the Board’s refusal to allow the meeting
led to his resignation. Oscar Wilde and Edward Carson joined the Society during this Session. The
inaugural Meeting of the following year, 1874-75, was perhaps the most tumultuous in the Society’s
history. The trouble arose out of the students’ hostility to one of the speakers, Mr Miller, Q.C., a
parliamentary candidate for the University. Contemporary accounts give graphics glimpses of the evening:
 “The undergraduate element was conspicuous, collarless, stick-bearing, uproarious, and spilling for a fight… There was a
 wild scene of tumult, uproar and riot, which raged for two long hours… Whistles and bugles added to the din, while on all
     sides were heard the sharp cracks of the explosive fireworks known as Ashanter bombs. The undergraduates yelled,
screamed, roared, rayed. The seats were broken in the body of the hall…. The meeting was adjourned’ Further disturbances
         during the next Session’s Inaugural led to stricter security regulations, and the meetings became more orderly.
In 1883 Douglas Hyde began to speak in the Society’s debates. The Society debated most of the burning
issues of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and also began to press for fuller recognition of its
own unique status in College.
The centenary of Burke’s death was commemorated in 1897 with a banquet in the Dining Hall, at which
Lecky delivered a memorial speech, in which he said: ‘We claim him as the founder of our Historical
Society, and it was certainly here that he first practised the art of debating, of which he became so great a
master.’

To 1920
The first decade of the twenties century was a lively and important one for the Society, although several
outstanding men associated with it died during this period: John Kells Ingram, Lecky, Lucius Gwynn,
Provost Salmon and Lord Justice Fitzgibbon, to be followed in the next decade by Lord Ashbourne,
Mahaffy, Lord Rathmore and Chief Baron Palles.
In 1902, the Graduates’ Memorial Building, intended to provide ‘Union’ facilities for students, was
opened. The Society had for many years been making representations to be granted rooms in the new
building. When it was opened, a petition signed by thirty-eight distinguished former members, including
archbishops, judges and members of parliament, was presented to the board, requesting that the special
position be safeguarded in the new building. The Society was later, and is still, entrusted with the running
of the building jointly with the University Philosophical Society.
At this time the Board began to relax its control of discussion in the Society, and among the issues of the
day to be debated were ‘That the Gaelic League is deserving of the support of every Irishman’ (carried in
1905 and 1906). Members included Oliver St. John Gogarty and T. S. C. Dagg, who wrote the
authoritative history of the Society until 1920.

In his Inaugural Address as Auditor, Dagg urged the authorities to consult with the students and said that
‘despite the fact that these (students) may not be in a position to regard College life through the lengthy
telescope of half a century, their opinion on the subject might be of some value.’
In 1909 the Society contributed £5 to the cost of erecting the Wolfe Tone Memorial. H next decade was
overshadowed by the 1914-18 War, in which over 700 of the Society’s members and past members
fought, 136 being killed. During the war years, the Society had therefore very few active members and
after the 1915-116 Session, as Mr Justice T.C. Kingsmill-Moore himself, who served in the Royal Flying
Corps, was largely responsible as Records Secretary (1915-18) and Auditor (1918-20) for preserving
continuity.
During the Easter Rising of 1916, the College was not attacked, but was garrisoned first by the staff and
members of the Officers’ Training Corps, and later by regular troops. The following term
Kingsmill0Moore wrote in TCD Magazine, ‘Whatever the party in power, we believe that they will regard
our College as one of Ireland’s greatest possessions.’
In June 1920 the Society celebrated its one-hundredth-and-fiftieth anniversary with a debate against its
corresponding Societies, the Edinburgh Speculative and the Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Unions,
and a banquet the following night.

The 1920s and 1930s
The Hon Mr Justice Budd wrote:
‘ The early twenties were a flourishing time for the CHS. Although the membership was much smaller
than now, the Society had a wealth of first class speakers and the standard of debate was high…
Revolutionary ideas were freely advocated and were not any the less effective in the absence of
demonstration to support them. ‘
Among the members prominent at this time were F. H. Boland (later President of the United Nations
General Assembly and of the Society, and Chancellor of the University), W.D.L. Greer and Mark Wilson
(later Chief Justice of the West African Court of Appeal).
The late ‘twenties and early ‘thirties were one of the most lively and controversial eras in the Society’s
history, culminating in the 1930-31 Auditorship of Eoin O’Mahony. W.B. Stanford, C.B. McKenna,
Terence d Vere White, Garret Gill, Gerard Sweetman and Owen Sheehy Skeffington all played actives
parts. The latter was the chief champion of O’Mahony when he faced impeachments lasting several
months, arising out of his substituting the toast of ‘Ireland’ of the traditional ‘The Kind’ at the dinner
following his Inaugural Meeting. Douglas Hyde was elected President of the Society in 1931.
The later ‘thirties saw R B McDowell, James Auchmuty and Conor Cruise O’Brien pass through the
Society, which as at this period, according to Dr O’Brien, ‘an institution of almost preternatural decorum-
at least during public business… However distasteful their opinions, or-much worse-however horing their
style, speakers were heard patiently, with at least apparent respect.’

To The Society’s Bicentenary
The Society continued decorously during the war years, and the post-war influx of mature ex-servicemen
added to its decorum and stability. There tended to be as much on the ‘club’ aspect of the Society as on
its debating. An interesting feature of the last ’forties and the ‘fifties was the participation of a large
number of African students, and the election of an African Audior. When in 1957 the College societies’
levy was introduced, out of which societies were supported on condition that their membership
subscription was no greater than five shillings, an era of expansion of the Society began, and membership
climb steadily.
The ‘Sixties was a decade of success in all fields. In competitive debates the Society had a record
unequalled in the British Isles, the attendance at debates and private business increased, and closed-circuit

television was needed to relay Inaugurals; more services were provided for members; and there was a
constant stream of distinguished guests to address the Society.
The final Session before the Bicentenary was one of the liveliest in the Society’s history, and during it
many years of agitation culminated in the admission of women students to full membership of the
Society. On January 22, 1969, Miss Rosaleen Mills rose before a packed house and television cameras to
propose the motion ‘That this house reveres the memory of Mrs Pankhurst’, and thus became the first
woman to address the Society.
The Society’s bicentenary saw a series of prestigious meetings, including the Bicentenary Address by
Senator Edward Kennedy, and an exhibition entitled ‘Art and Oratory’ in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The 1970s to 2000s
As Trinity grew and an ever wider range of concern (not least of them academic) press upon students’
energies, the Society remained the largest in College. The Society had an unequalled record in the Irish
Times debating competition, continuing to hold that title to this day. The Society was represented in
intervarsity debates both in Ireland and the United Kingdom and in the annual World Debating
Championship. This competition was hosted in Trinity in 1992 as part of the Society’s contribution to the
Quatercentenary.