The Royal Belfast Academical Institution is an independent grammar school in Belfast, Northern Ireland. With the support of Belfast's leading reformers and democrats, it opened its doors in 1814. Until 1849, when it was superseded by what today is Queen's University, the institution pioneered Belfast's first programme of collegiate education. Locally referred to as Inst, the modern school educates boys from ages 11 to 18. It is one of the eight Northern Irish schools represented on the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. The school occupies an 18-acre site in the centre of the city on which its first buildings were erected.
History.
Dissident foundation.
In 1806, writing in the Belfast "News Letter", William Bruce dismissed "visionary notions" of new "academical institution". The town, he reminded his readers, already had "an excellent plan of school education for which it is indebted to the Belfast Academy funded in 1786". What was to become "Inst" was not the first vision of William Drennan's to be opposed by Bruce, the principal of the Belfast Academy. In the 1790s, Drennan and his Society of United Irishmen had called for complete and immediate Catholic Emancipation and for a radical and democratic reform of the Irish Parliament.
For Drennan, the new institution was an expression his resolve, in the wake of the 1798 rebellion, to "be content to get the substance of reform more slowly" and with "proper preparation of manners or principles"." He was joined by leading Belfast merchants and professional men. These included the former United Irishmen Robert Simms and Robert Caldwell, who had been among the proprietors of the United Irish paper, "Northern Star;" the Tennent brothers, William who had been a state prisoner, and Robert, who as a ship's surgeon had been a sympathetic witness to the 1797 Table Bay naval mutiny; and the botanist John Templeton. They seconded Drennan as he persuaded a town meeting in 1807 "to facilitate and render less expensive the means of acquiring education; to give access to the works of literature to the middle and lower classes of society; to make provision for the instruction of both sexes... "
The scheme was ambitious, comprising a school department for boys and a collegiate department in which both young men and women could receive lectures and instruction in the natural sciences, classics, modern languages, English literature and medicine. In 1808, it was further proposed that facilities should be provided for professors of divinity responsible to their respective denominations, so that the institution could become a seminary for the training of ministers. As might have been anticipated, the Presbyterian Church, which had no such facility in Ireland (their candidates for ordination had to train in Glasgow), alone took up the offer. Lord Castlereagh perceived "a deep laid scheme again to bring the Presbyterian Synod within the ranks of democracy". Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) concurred. The entire project was "democratical"—pervaded by "the republican spirit of the Presbyterians".
William Bruce and his friends mocked the proposed system of governance, comparing it to revolutionary French constitutions that had excited debate in Belfast in the 1790s. It was a "machine", they suggested, "so full of checks that it will not move". The sovereign body of the institution was as an annual general meeting of subscribers. They elected both boards of managers and visitors, but with a complicated system of rotation "to preclude the possibility of the management falling into the hands of a few individuals". The proposal for the institution, nonetheless, received sufficient establishment support to secure a charter in 1810.
United Kingdom legislation
William Stuart, Anglican primate archbishop of Ireland, enrolled as a first class subscriber, and George Chichester, 2nd Marquess of Donegall, the town's landlord, leased the land to the institution and, on 3 July 1810, laid its foundation stone. The eminent English architect John Soane, who designed the new Bank of England in 1788, prepared drawings free of charge. A total of £25,000 was raised: £5,000 in India under the patronage of the Governor-General, Earl of Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the balance largely from Belfast merchants and businessmen able to nominate in return one boy to receive free education. The funds, however, sufficed to erect only one, comparatively plain brown-brick, section of Soane's intended stucco and Doric-column quadrangle. The institution was formally opened on 1 February 1814.
In his address at the opening of the grammar school on 1 February 1814, Drennan promised that "the mysterious veil that makes one knowledge for the learned and another for the vulgar... would be torn down". Admission would be "perfectly unbiased by religious distinctions" (Drennan counted among his subscribers Fr. William Crolly, who as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh in 1831 was to support the government's plans for non-denominational National Schools). Fees would be held "as low as possible". More startling for the times, discipline would rely on "example" rather than on "manual correction of corporal punishment". This may have owed something to the example of an earlier Belfast schoolmaster whose portrait was to hang in the new institution, David Manson. As recounted by Drennan, in his Donegall Street school in 1760s Manson had banished "drudgery and fear" by teaching children on "the principle of amusement".
"Wars of independence".
When in the following year, 1815, the collegiate department enrolled its first students, it became the first university college to be established in the British Isles since Trinity College Dublin was founded at the end of the sixteenth century. It soon ran into controversy.
At a St. Patrick's Day dinner in 1816, chaired by Robert Tennent, board members did not disguise their broader political sympathies. They led one another, and staff, in a series of radical toasts: to the French and South American Revolutions, to Catholic Emancipation and a "Radical Reform of the Representation of the People in Parliament", and, perhaps most controversially, to "the exiles of Erin" under "the wing of the republican eagle" in the United States. Despite the resignation of all the board members present, the government seized upon the incident to attach conditions the annual £1,500 it had granted, reluctantly, for the college's seminary. Inst historian, James Jamieson, is convinced that "what the government really wanted was to do away with the collegiate status of Inst and so prevent the establishment of a native seminary for the Presbyterian ministry where a culture opposed to passive acceptance of the ideas of privilege and class distinction might be imbibed".
Tory critics of the institution might also have been noted that in 1815 a list of books prepared for the literary department included works by the English radicals John Horne Tooke, William Godwin, Joseph Priestley and Thomas Belsham. But, perhaps convinced that in the face of the "Catholic democracy" conjured by the great "Emancipator" Daniel O'Connell the republican spirit of Ulster Presbyterianism was sufficiently cooled, by 1831 government had not only restored the grant; King William IV bestowed upon the Institution the title "Royal".
Yet further controversy followed. Conservative Presbyterian clergy, led by Henry Cooke, believed the teaching staff combined theological laxity—their refusal to subscribe to Westminster Confession of Faith with its reference to the Pope as the "Antichrist", and affirmation of the Holy Trinity—with political error. Staff did not hide their support for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (privileged in relation to Presbyterians but, in Cooke's view, a bulwark of the Protestant interest in Ireland).
Cooke did not succeed in removing either of the principal objects of his ire: those he accused of anti-trinitarian "Arian" or "Socinian" heresy, Henry Montgomery, head of the English department, and the junior William Bruce (who had departed from his father's orthodoxy), Professor of Latin and Greek. The Board refused an inquisition into their religious orthodoxy. But while Inst may have won what Jamieson called its "wars of independence", the dispute contributed to the establishment in 1853 of Assembly College, a seminary under the direct control of the Presbyterian Synod, and to the government passing over the institution in establishing a Queens College (the later Queens University). Inst had upheld its principles but at the cost of its collegiate status and the associated government grant.
On 1 November 1855, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Carlisle, unveiled a statue in front of the institution on College Square East of the popular Frederick Richard, Earl of Belfast, son of the Marquis of Donegall, patron of, among other causes in Belfast, the Working Class Association for the Promotion of General Improvement. After Henry Cooke died in 1868, significance was attached to his bronze likeness displacing that of the young liberal aristocrat, and that it should stand with its back to the institution Cooke distrusted.
Owing to the initiative of Dr. James MacDonnell ("the unchallenged doyen of Belfast medicine"). from 1835, the Collegiate Department had provided Ulster with its first medical school in Ulster. It had its own teaching hospital, the Royal Institution Hospital in Barrack Street, sometimes known as the College Hospital. In 1847 the school and college building themselves served as a fever hospital. In Belfast, typhus, a deadly companion of the hunger driving country people into the town, struck one in every five residents.
RBAI continued to provide college education until Queens College Belfast opened in October 1849. When it was found that the new college had made no provision for anatomical and dissecting rooms, RBAI continued to provide the necessary accommodation in its old medical department until 1862.
The Collegiate Department was to leave the town an important enlightenment legacy in the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society. Formed by staff and scholars in 1821, the society is the origin of both the Botanical Gardens and what is now the Ulster Museum.
First generations.
Among the early graduates of the Institution was William Tennent's nephew, Robert Tennent, who in the 1820s was a member of John Stuart Mill's London Debating Society. Together with his friend James Emerson (Belfast Academy), he joined Byron in the Greek War of Independence. On return to Belfast they stood against one another in the 1832 election, Tennent the Whig losing to Emerson, the Tory, a result that marked the ebb-tide of political liberalism in Belfast.
In mid century, General Certificates from the Collegiate Department were common to several Presbyterian ministers who, in the wake of the Great Famine, became passionately involved in the tenants rights movement. Cooke denounced them for undermining, not only property, but also the Union by sharing platforms with Catholics intent on restoring a parliament in Dublin. His worst fears were realised in David Bell who, forced to resign his ministry and despairing of constitutional methods, was sworn into Irish Republican Brotherhood by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa.
Several campaigning newspaper editors were also students of the Institution: James Simms, editor of the "Northern Whig"; James MacNeight, editor of the "Londonderry Standard" and of the Belfast-based "Banner of Ulster"; and Charles Gavan Duffy, of the Young Ireland paper, "The Nation". Duffy, a Roman Catholic from Monaghan, enrolled in the collegiate school of logic, rhetoric and "belles-lettres" in the early 1840s.
Duffy was also to contribute to the Belfast-based "Northern Herald", edited between 1834 and 1835 by the "Old Instonian" Thomas O'Hagan. O'Hagan would go on to become the first Catholic Lord Chancellor of Ireland (1868–1874 and 1880–1881).
The limits of non-denominationalism.
Drennan was adamant that the admission of scholars should be "perfectly unbiased by religious distinctions". Yet when O'Hagan was at RBAI in the 1820s, the Oxford "Dictionary of National Biography" records him as being the school's only Catholic pupil.
In the 1830s Henry Cooke and other leading Protestant evangelicals had been instrumental in defeating the prospects for integrated education. When the Dublin Castle administration sought to provide Ireland, "in advance of anything available at that time in England", a system of grant-aided non-denominational National Schools. Cooke, at once scented danger in the freedom that would have been granted priests to enter schools and instruct their "own" students in religion. The concept of educating Catholics and Protestants together, while it had been endorsed by Crolly as bishop and archbishop, was dealt a further blow when in the 1840s his colleagues in the Catholic hierarchy objected to the "Godless" Queen's Colleges, loudly seconded—despite the pleas of Duffy's fellow Young Irelander, Thomas Davis that "the reasons for separate education are reasons for separate life"—by Daniel O'Connell.
When in 1849 a Queen's College (now Queen's University) opened in Belfast, the Collegiate Department closed. RBAI continued as a school for boys, with both day and boarding pupils.