Clive Fitts
Recollections, 1919

There are 61 men in the 1919 photograph, and this number made for an intimacy that must inevitably be lacking when the numbers increase. There was much to do and nearly everybody played a part in College life and participated in College sport. We ran, swam, rowed, played football, cricket and tennis, and on the whole did not add lustre to ourselves or the College.

Most of my group were not concerned with success beyond the modest attainment of a pass either in the annual examinations or in the 'supps', which were freely available and very helpful.

It is alleged that Australians do not know how to use leisure, but this was not evident in Trinity.

Curiously enough, College life was more hazardous for the Honour students than for us, for though we could repeat a year, failure to obtain satisfactory honours might mean loss of a scholarship and of a place in College.

We had supper at 10 o'clock each night and, except on special occasions when we had home-made cream cakes and short-bread from the Misses Gray across the Sydney Road, everybody drank cocoa made with condensed milk and ate biscuits. If the fare did not vary the conversation certainly did.

After the initiation ceremony was behind us, we freshers were invited by senior students to supper. One who had never left home before, found himself in a new world among people intellectually more mature, even if they were not many years older; more worldly wise, tempered in battle and trench warfare and in the lighter side of life in Paris and the West End of London and the bazaars of the East. It was a heady, intoxicating world for a schoolboy freshman, and not less so when on an occasion someone would have a crate of beer from the buttery for a party. The crates were really the baskets for fire-wood kept in every study.

But our nightly discussions were not always on the seamy side of soldiering, and our friends at Monash University will be glad to know that atheism, agnosticism and rationalism had their champions in an Anglican foundation 40 years ago. How our minds were fired by the unanswerable logic with which F— demolished Christian belief; how nobly he fought for freedom of thought and for the abolition of compulsory Chapel attendance not, as he modestly said, fighting for himself, but for the College.

Here was a man to worship; one who had come unscathed through the war, who had savoured life to the full and who seemed to charm everyone but the Warden. Alas, he went down from College after three years and took his tarnished glory with him and we small fry still went to Chapel. Twenty years later I met him, still debonair, still without his degree, and with the same altruism offering me the chance of coming in on the ground level in a gold mine which I later found never went any deeper.

The Trinity College Social Club might well be said to have run the College in most respects, and the meetings were conducted with an efficiency and a regard for procedure which, having endured countless committee meetings since, still command my respect. The range of discussion was wide but never unduly prolonged or tedious. Was it the shape of things to come?

If we fledglings were beset by the distractions of argument, of sport, of the buttery, of gambling both at cards and races, and indeed of working while sharing a study with someone who wanted to improve his billiards, with few exceptions we were spared the entanglements of the Hostel, which only became Janet Clarke Hall in 1921.

The inmates of the Hostel were known as Hostiles, and I fear it was with hostility that they were treated and the occasions on which any of them came into College were rare. I have met many of them in later years and realise that perhaps we missed something from the Hostel that exists today between Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall.

We mingled freely, however, with the men of Ormond, Queen's and Newman, and it would be no exaggeration to say that, in the absence of an effective students union, the corporate life of the University resided in the colleges.

In weekends or vacations or in the last weeks of the academic year the College took on a different air, and one could be curiously alone. It was in the solitude of a Sunday afternoon that I found the Leeper Library in which subsequently I spent many happy hours.

As I look at the 61 faces in the photograph I count 28 medical students. Of these there are five whom one would regard as honours students and three of them chose to become general practitioners. None of the five was in the freshman year, and it is a fact that we had little idea how to work for examinations, which may be better than having too much.