From the GI Bill to the Trinity Sanctuary Fund A lifelong connection: how New Yorkers Ellis and Jane Bradford, BAs (1951) stayed in touch with their alma mater E llis Eugene Bradford was one of the ‘GI Bill of Rights’ generation – Americans who were supported to come to Trinity in the late 1940s after serving in the US Army. These GI Bill students were immortalised by one of their number, JP Donleavy, in his cult bestseller, The Ginger Man (1955). The anti-hero of the novel, the hard-drinking womanising Sebastian Dangerfield was based on another GI Bill student, Gainor Crist. Ellis Bradford must have known Donleavy and Crist – Trinity’s student body in the 1940s was only a few thousand – but he was nothing like the ‘Ginger Man’ of the book: a model student and uxorious husband, he arrived at Trinity in 1947 to study mathematics together with his new bride Jane (née Dolan), who was studying English literature. Both Ellis and Jane were New Yorkers who met at St Lawrence University in 1942, where Jane was studying and Ellis was getting an accelerated officer training course, having enlisted in the US Navy. He was assigned to a ship in the Pacific Theater and served at the Battle of Okinawa. In early 1946, ‘the senior guys were sent home’, as he put it, and aged just 21, he was left in command of the ship – the smallest that the Navy considered capable of getting through the Panama Canal and across the ocean on its own – on its return trip from China to San Diego. Back in New York, he and Jane married on 2 August 1947, and then moved to Dublin. Their daughter, Carol, explains that ‘they chose Trinity because they could study in English and there was no rationing as there was in the UK, and because of my mother’s heritage – three of her grandparents were Irish, from Kilkenny, Cork and Tipperary’. They loved Trinity, where they were funded by the GI Bill which provided $7 a week, but they found the coursework challenging. Jane had exam-related nightmares all her life, says Carol, and in one particularly tough class given by an eminent quantum physicist from Eastern Europe, Ellis was the only student who stuck it out till the end of the semester – ‘he had very little idea what was going on, but didn’t have the heart to stop attending’, according to his son, Geoff – and he then switched from maths to classical languages. In their free time, the pair cycled all around Ireland and during the summers, around France and Germany. After they returned to the US with their BA’s, Ellis was recruited by the First National Bank in New York, later Citibank. He joined the overseas division and the family, now with three children aged five and under, moved to Caracas, Venezuela in 1957 just in time for the overthrow of the dictator Pérez Jiménez. Later posts included Geneva, where Ellis opened the first branch of a foreign bank in Switzerland, and Paris where Ellis played tuba with the Paris American Community Band and he and Jane were teargassed returning from the movies during ‘les évènements de ‘68’. Ellis was known at the bank as a problem solver who believed in win- win negotiations. After further stints in Casablanca and Monrovia, Liberia, they moved back to New York City in 1973, where Ellis was in the Counsel General’s office and advised the bank on regulatory relations. When he retired aged 65, after 38 years with Citibank, he was Vice-President and Secretary, one of the few authorised to sign for the bank. In retirement, he was able to explore his love of music and devote himself to both his alma maters,
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