Virtus Vera Nobilitas

This is the story of just one Cambridge college and the effect the First World War had on it. One college, reflecting the effect of the other thirty. Between 1914 and 1918 over 600 undergraduates from Trinity College were killed, almost an entire intake for a year, the very best of their generation. Their names also appear on the walls of Trinity Chapel as well as many other memorials all over the country in remembrance of them. This book will put flesh on the bones of their names. It will remind people that they lived, although in some cases not very long.

Trinity College Cambridge is without argument the most prestigious of all the colleges within the most prestigious university. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, members of the college have won thirty-four Nobel Prizes, four Field Medals, one Turing Award and one Abel Prize. Two future kings and six future Prime Ministers were also educated there. The very elite of their age in the sciences, mathematics, English, philosophy, were educated there.

As a troop of the 9th Lancers left Cambridge along Trinity Street, in 1914, mostly made up of undergraduates, a storm broke over their heads. Lightning flashed across the sky and the thunder roared. People said later it was the heaviest rain they had seen in their lifetime. The chaplain noted in his diary, ‘It was then that I realised that the most important thing within a college, even one as old as Trinity, was not its ancient buildings and spires, but the people who studied there, the undergraduates and graduates’. He wondered then as the troop turned left and out of sight, how many would return and even then, as the storm crashed overhead had dark forebodings. This is just a story of one college, told through biographies of each of the 600 students killed, accompanied by copious illustrations.