"PAT" CUEEEY 57 



doings of the pack : but sometimes when Currey took " the Httle 

 doo-s " for a walk, I went with him to the Merton Arms and accom- 

 panied him and them in staid procession along Queen's Road. I 

 believe that on one such occasion, when Dr. Percival Frost was 

 walking up the avenue into Clare with his specially privileged dog, 

 the pack shocked the College porter ^ by giving chase and bolting 

 through the College into the street. I liked to see on the screens a 

 notice signed by Carrey as Master of the Beagles side by side with 

 another signed by him in his capacity as Assistant Tutor; and I 

 remember how once, when I followed him into the lecture-room, I 

 found on the desk a notice of a meet which had dropped out of his 

 note-book. At that time nothing did more than Currey 's Mastership 

 of the Beagles to bring don and undergraduate into closer and 

 healthier relations. When, as sometimes happened, Currey was laid 

 up with gout, his place as Master of the Beagles was taken by his 

 faithful friend J. F. Muggeridge, familiarly known to some of us as 

 " the henchman." 



I fear that we sometimes shocked traditional proprieties. The 

 then Vice-Master of Trinity once said to me,^ " I believe that I 

 passed you in the street to-day ; I never recognise any one who 

 wears a billy-cock hat": and I fancy that Currey disliked the 

 traditional tall hat as much as I did, and came under the like 

 condemnation. Possibly some may have been disturbed when, in 

 Hall, instead of saying stiffly, " The pleasure of a glass of wine with 

 you," he called out to me across the table, " General, let's liquor 1 " 

 Charles Astor Bristed, in his Five Years at an English University, 

 an admirable picture of Cambridge in the early forties, reckons 

 " irony," that is to say, self-depreciation, as a marked characteristic of 

 Cambridge. Currey was eminently ironical in this sense of the term. 

 But unluckily Cambridge men do not always understand Cambridge 

 irony, and I remember an instance in which Currey 's irony was 

 gravely misapprehended. A College tutor once told me that he 



1 Later they shocked the Master in person by following a hunted liai'e into the 

 Clare Court (see p. 80). It is interesting to note that Clare has had the same 

 Master as now since before even the Foot Drag began. — F. C. K. 



2 If he was shocked at "bowlers," what in the world would he have said of some 

 of the hatless and dishevelled "scallywags " of these latter days ? — F. C. K. 



