Pairings: Adrian Poole

Adrian Poole

Fellow in English

Trinity’s monumentality can overpower. All those great men, all those beards. So it’s always encouraged me to find Alfred Lord Tennyson’s pipe nestling beneath his statue in the ante-chapel. The College website tells us that ‘children always delight in its discovery’. Me too.

Not that any of us would actually want to smoke it nowadays. Even when I was an undergraduate and we all smoked, it was pretty old-school to light up a pipe (though I recall my PhD supervisor, Raymond Williams, old Trinity man, doing just that).

No, what’s comforting is the sense of pleasure, not so much of smoking itself but of outwitting the rules. No smoking in the Chapel, to be sure. Especially if the Master of the  time disapproved of smoking in the first place.

So the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft had to half-hide the pipe, in cahoots with the donor Harry Yates Thompson. (The College website is good on this.) And here’s a welcome truth about the College, that the rules are not set in marble or stone. After all there’s a woman memorialised in the ante-chapel already, even if like the pipe she’s not obvious.