DAVIS, Robert Furley (1866-1937)

Robert - often known more affectionately as Roby - Davis was born in Nottingham on 22 January 1866, the son of Charlotte (née Furley) and Robert Davis, a lace warehouseman. Despite this apparently humble social background, he performed well academically at Nottingham High School and matriculated as a Scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge, at Michaelmas 1885, earning a First Class degree in the Classical Tripos three years later.

He arrived in Belfast in September 1902 from Leamington College - where one of his pupils may well have been the noted biographer and literary critic, Lytton Strachey - to become Senior Classical Master at Campbell College. Only a few years earlier he might have been dissuaded from this career move by his exact contemporary, Henry Joseph Spenser. The two men were born in the same year, both attending Nottingham High School and St John’s College contemporaneously. Spenser had been one of the original staff at Campbell College when it opened on 3 September 1894, but he became a victim of a bitter and public dispute between the Headmaster and Staff, which became a cause célèbre in the Dublin courts, the consequences of which almost caused the school to close its doors within two years. Spenser departed - effectively dismissed - in the summer of 1896, but became a successful Headmaster at schools in England and, by coincidence, died in the same year as Davis (One of Davis’ early pupils at Belmont from 1903 - Elliott Johnston  - had coincidentally previously been educated at Nottingham High School).

Classics teacher

Robert Davis’s interest in the Classics post at Campbell may have owed something to the fact that his predecessor, Robert Knox McElderry, had emulated his First Class degree in Classics at the same Cambridge College in 1896 and may during his studies have read recent publications bearing McElderry’s name. McElderry, who became Professor of Greek at Galway (1902-1924) and at QUB (1924-1934), could have proved a hard act to follow, but the Englishman’s reputation as a Classics teacher was to prove formidable and enduring.

In 1894 he edited a volume of Tacitus’s Germania (including an introduction and notes), and in the following year jointly produced a translation of The Hymns of Prudentius. In 1906 one of the latter was adopted as one of two versions in the English Hymnal (no.613) of the Christmas procession Of the Father’s Love Begotten, which has also featured in subsequent hymnals such as Rejoice in the Lord (hymn no.191). [John William Yates, a Campbell colleague who composed incidental music for school plays, was also to have one of his tunes featured in the Irish Church Hymnal]. During the early days of his Campbell career - for his own amusement and that of his pupils - the Cambridge scholar would also translate into Greek and Latin extracts from Tennyson, Longfellow and even W S Gilbert.

In 1944 one anonymous former pupil claimed that Davis was “debonair, humorous, rich in personality and entertainments, who would go to any pains to do the slightest service for a boy in need”; and his most celebrated pupil, E R Dodds, reflected on the recognition of his older students of “how much genuine kindness lay behind his deliberately dry manner”. Harry Cronne, who arrived at Campbell College from Portaferry in 1917 and later became a Professor of Medieval History, believed that the Classics scholar “exercised a much-needed civilising influence in the school” and compared his teaching to “soft rain after a prolonged drought”.

Davis was well-respected despite his short stature; Dodds recalled that he was “a tiny man who wielded the quiet authority of a true scholar”, echoed in the sentiment that Davis possessed “a small, trim personage, with beautiful hands and beautiful manners”. There were occasions when his equanimity and ready good humour served him well. Clarke MacDermott, later to become Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, recalled that when he was a pupil at Campbell College it was not uncommon during harsh winters for locals to skate on the frozen lake at Netherleigh. He revealed that Davis “skated gracefully and partnered his wife, a tall and athletic lady [Greta Keenleyside, whom he had married in Nottingham], and his performance certainly lost no marks with his juvenile audience; but I doubt if in the end it added much to his rating, as one afternoon they both went through a thin spot together, she up to her knees, he nearer his midriff, and patently in greater need of succour than his spouse”. Davis’s athletic instinct is echoed in membership of Strandtown Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, and of Holywood Golf Club.

He was popularly known amongst the pupils at Belmont as ‘Pussy’ Davis, a nickname which derived from the feline aspect he projected via his moustache with stiffly-waxed points, sleek hair, oval pince-nez and purring voice. A pupil from the first decade of the 20th century recalled the school’s horse-drawn lawnmower “whose gentle whirring sound drifted up from the cricket fields in summer and mingled with the dry, crisp tones of Pussy Davis taking us through some Sophoclean text”. The Classics teacher was to be incapacitated for the whole of the Christmas term of 1919 as a result of contracting influenza, and it may have been as a consequence of this infection that he lost the use of an eye.

As in most other educational establishments of the age, there was regular recourse to the cane - and, indeed, some other more esoteric methods of discipline. One colleague at Campbell College - who acquired, for unknown reasons, the nickname of ‘Bubbles’ – “required offenders to put on a lady's high-heeled, lace-up boots and parade up and down his study”! Roby Davis exercised greater subtlety. Clarke MacDermott considered that he “was not only a fine scholar but an excellent teacher [of Latin and Greek] ... He took pains with the dull as well as the bright, and his incisive manner and capacity as a disciplinarian, who seldom needed to raise his voice, gave every chance to those in his classes; but he enjoyed teaching the keen boys and was very successful with them”. Eric Dodds - who derived a certain pride from having been expelled from Campbell in 1912 for, as he expressed it, “gross, studied and sustained insolence to the Headmaster” - was to become Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University (1936-1960), and he acknowledged his academic and intellectual debt to Davis, who offered “a perfect lesson in the technique and the good manners of controversy - how to use the rapier against the bludgeon and how to kill a bad argument mercifully”. Like his colleague Lewis Alden, he exhorted a wide range of reading, and encouraged pupils (in Dodds’s words) “to read ancient [Classical] authors rapidly and in bulk for the matter as well as the language”.

Extra-curricular

Roby Davis played an active role in the extra-curricular life of Campbell College. He was a competent violinist, and gave solo performances at the school’s Hallowe'en concerts between 1902 and 1907. He also contributed - as did his wife - to the production of all school plays. He proved a sociable colleague, and one of his pupils and later colleague, Kenneth Armour [youngest of three sons of Rev J B Armour, Presbyterian Home Rule minister of Ballymoney] - who also followed Davis as a graduate in Classics at Cambridge - cherished the memory of him as “a man whose being was almost wholly composed of sympathy and cheerfulness ... standing in the Common Room, his back to the fire, an ancient pipe in his hand, full of animated talk on any variety of subjects”. Armour continued: “He was one of those rare people whose frank criticism is more to be valued than most men’s praise, intolerant only of the casual and the bigot”.

As Eric Dodds noted in his personal tribute to Davis, the schoolmaster was conservative in his political views. At the time of the seminal National Insurance Act of 1911 he composed a poem (entitled The School Insurance Bill) in which he appears to mock its aspirations as undermining personal responsibility. In September 1912 he supported the imperialist ethos of the College by standing in line with 100 others - in the College itself - to sign the Solemn League & Covenant against the introduction of Home Rule in Ireland. As an Englishman, he could have argued that it was not his political struggle, but - in addition to the Omagh-born Headmaster - six other members of Staff appended their signature, only one of whom was of Irish birth!

The inter-War policy of the Governors of Campbell College required members of Staff to retire at the age of sixty. Davis’s talents were sufficiently respected, however, for them to allow him an extension of four years, and he eventually retired in the summer of 1931. In contrast to the majority of his colleagues, the fact that he was married obliged him to live outside the school. His first address was 4 Kincora Avenue which, until approximately 1907, was originally listed as Belmont Park. The house was initially named Penrith Villa, but Davis changed its name to Rodven. The nomenclature clearly had some personal resonance as, when he moved around February 1920 to 31 Wandsworth Road, which was originally known as Springvale, he also rechristened it as Rodven.

On 26 October 1908 he made a simple will - leaving everything he owned to his wife - on a single page of foolscap paper, which was witnessed by two Campbell College colleagues, Raywood Beaven and George Thompson. When he died without issue at Rodven on 14 February 1937 his gross assets totalled £246 2s 7d - probably a reflection of the fact that, between the Wars, schoolteaching was a very poorly-rewarded profession. His wife’s name is given as Elizabeth Ann, and it is unclear whether ‘Greta’ was an affectionate name bestowed upon her, or whether at some stage Davis had remarried. His wife lived on in Wandsworth Road until approximately 1943. Although there was no full obituary, his passing was listed in the death notices of The Times.

Keith Haines

Hon OC

From his book - A brief history of Knock, Belmont and Strandtown, published by Ballyhay Books of Donaghadee.