This is the last week of the Summer Vac here in Trinity, but the new students are on campus for Freshers’ Week – College is at its one of its fullest periods now, with the crossover of the last of the summer’s tourists taking tours of campus and the Book of Kells, and the new freshers being toured around campus by their peer mentors as part of the “Student2Student” programme.
The tours for visitors are run by our friends at Authenticity Tours and undertaken by students of the College. It’s probably true to say they don’t think quite as much of the Berkeley as we do, with more of an emphasis on the older parts of campus that tourists come to see. However, as our former colleague Trevor Peare explains, these tours aren’t new:
The Accessions and Admissions sections of the Library were located at the first window to the left of the Berkeley Loading bay in the 1970s. The windows gave a clear view across the cricket pitch to the Pav. and the Moyne Institute that housed (and still does) the College Department of Microbiology. The tours of Campus conducted by students during the summers would pause their groups just by the windows of the Berkeley before continuing on past the back of the Library onto Fellows’ Square. The script went along the following lines: “Over there, you can see the Moyne Institute for Microbiology – it was funded by Lord Moyne of the Guinness family. Do you know why it is called the ‘Moyne Instute’? The reason is because (adopting a stage Irish accent and appropriate action) ‘Moyne’s [mine’s] a Guinness!'”
All very amusing the first time you hear it, but not after five or six times a day, every day! We had to ask the tours to stand a little further away from our window on a regular basis.
The Moyne
*Not* something we’ve heard recently. Our regular readers will know of the Berkeley’s own Guinness connection in the form of the Iveagh Hall.
