Qualla: Trinity University College

Trinity University College: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Twenty-two young men arrived at Carmarthen in 1848 to train as schoolmasters. The Anglican Church had built them a new college on College Road, on the western edge of town, designed by Henry Clutton in a stripped neo-Tudor style, and called it the South Wales and Monmouthshire Training College. Three members of staff taught them. The principal was a man named William Reed. None of the founders could have predicted that the institution would still be sending teachers into Welsh schools 162 years later, when in 2010 it would finally merge with the older University of Wales Lampeter and stop being a college of its own. Trinity does not exist as a separate name on a building any longer. The buildings are still there.

Image: Public domain

Trinity University College: Anglican Discipline

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Llywelyn2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. The college was founded by the National Society for the Education of Children, the principal Anglican educational body in Victorian Britain. Its mission was to train men to teach in Church of England elementary schools - the network of primary schools the National Society had bui...

Image: Llywelyn2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Trinity University College: Becoming Trinity

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geoff Charles, CC BY-SA 4.0. The college changed its name to Trinity College, Carmarthen in 1931. It admitted its first women students in 1957, building Non Hall opposite the older Dewi Hostel for them. Non Hall stayed single-sex until the merger more than half a century later. The campus grew through the po...

Image: Geoff Charles | CC BY-SA 4.0

Trinity University College: The Old Building and the Cwad

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spiritexplorer, CC BY-SA 3.0. If you walk College Road today and turn into the main entrance, you come first to the Old Building - the 1848 quadrangle, now called the Cwad in Welsh-medium signage. The original university quadrangle has been glazed in places and turned into a study space. The Old Library is no...

Image: Spiritexplorer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Trinity University College: The Merger

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Llywelyn2000, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the late 2000s, Welsh higher education was consolidating. On 14 December 2008, Trinity announced that it was in merger talks with the University of Wales, Lampeter - which, founded in 1822, was the second-oldest higher-education institution in England and Wales after Oxford an...

Image: Llywelyn2000 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Trinity University College: Who Came Through

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marion Phillips, CC BY-SA 2.0. Trinity's alumni list is a fair survey of twentieth-century Welsh public life. Barry John, the great Welsh rugby fly-half who toured with the British Lions in 1971 and was nicknamed 'The King,' studied here. Dewi Bebb, the winger who scored Wales's only try in their 1965 victory ...

Image: Marion Phillips | CC BY-SA 2.0