This week marks 58 years since the visit of Queen Elizabeth II. To coincide, an Old Mancunian shares memories both of the visit, and also of the teaching of Latin and life in general at MGS during the 1960s.
A, ab, absque, coram, de
Palam, cum, prae, ex and e…
All those who studied Latin at MGS in the 1960s, and no doubt for many decades before and perhaps since, will have been familiar with Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer. This handy compendium of Latin grammar, declensions, conjugations and sundry rules was handed out to all of us, most commonly with the second and third words of the title on the cover altered by previous possessors of the book to “Shortbread Eating.”
The author clearly believed that schoolboys learned better if the rules could be turned into doggerel verse, so that the book was dotted with examples of this with a further block of them at the end. It’s questionable how far these verses actually helped, but back in the 60s the Head of Classics, R. M. Simkins, the inimitable Simmy, certainly thought they did and encouraged us to learn them. Even now, sixty years later, I can still recite quite a few so at least they stuck.
The one including the first two lines above deals with prepositions governing the ablative case, and the fourth word, “coram,“ meaning “in the presence of,” is notable for its rarity in Latin. In seven years of studying the language at MGS, and two more subsequently at Cambridge, I only encountered it a handful of times.
So what is the connection with the late Queen? In 1965 I was in Div II of Classical VIth, our form master being Simmy himself. I was also a prefect, so on the day of the royal visit there were various duties including shepherding the boys from one of the junior forms to the side of the drive from Old Hall Lane so that we could applaud Her Majesty as she walked along it. However that is not my main recollection.
In the run up to the great event we were told that the Queen would be having lunch in the Refectory and that some, but not all, of us would be allowed to eat at the same meal. I am not sure how the lucky few were chosen, but a few days before the visit Simmy took obvious pleasure in reading out the list of those who would be eating “coram Regina.”
Needless to say, he pronounced this immaculately – ray-ghee-nar – with the long “a” at the end indicating the ablative case. Correct Latin pronunciation was taken seriously at MGS. It was particularly important for those of us who had to translate into Latin verse, rendering sundry bits of Milton, Tennyson and the like into what might, on a good day, have passed for ersatz Virgilian hexameters or Ovidian elegiac couplets. Getting the quantities and scansion right was essential and remembering which vowels were long or short was a key part of that. So Simmy would never have mispronounced a Latin word, and clearly relished combining one of the most obscure prepositions with one of the most widely recognised first declension nouns.
As it happens, I was one of those chosen for the special meal. It was notable chiefly for having three courses, soup being the first one as I recall. Yet whilst little else of that august occasion remains in the memory I cannot forget that, for the first though not the last time, I was privileged to eat coram Regina.
David Ritchie OM 1959 – 66
I must be an older OM than I thought, as I left the school three years before the royal visit 158 years ago !