'From Ludicrous to Logical: the Transformation of Sport in North Munster, 1850–1890. Thomas Hayes Ph. D. by Research And

‘From ludicrous to logical: the transformation of sport in North Munster, 1850–1890. Thomas Hayes Ph. D. by research and thesis Mary Immaculate College University of Limerick Supervisor: Dr. Maura Cronin September 2009 Acknowledgements Sincere thanks to Dr. Maura Cronin for patiently and wisely supervising this thesis. My gratitude to the Interim Research Council for Humanities and Social Science whose award of a scholarship enabled me to begin this work; it is now, thankfully, a dream realised. Commonly used abbreviations. LAAC Limerick Amateur Athletic Club LAABC Limerick Amateur Athletic and Bicycle Club LBC Limerick Boat Club LCC Limerick Coursing Club LCCC Limerick County Cricket Club LFC Limerick County Football Club LPYMA Limerick Protestant Young Men’s Association CLF County Limerick Foxhounds CLI Catholic Literary Institute SRC Shannon Rowing Club Dedication To my wonderful wife, Louise Anne Marnell. Contents Prologue……………1 Introduction………...3 Chapter 1………….20 Chapter 2………….97 Chapter 3………...214 Chapter 4………...268 Conclusion……....327 Epilogue…………333 Bibliography…….334 Prologue ‘O Captain! My captain.’ 1 In the summer of 2006, while driving between Castlemaine and Milltown in County Kerry on the way to a country house hotel, my wife and I encountered a large number of motorcyclists, extremely well attired and each in possession of an expensive designer vehicle; given the location it was not unduly fanciful to suggest they resembled latter day ‘wild colonial’ boys and girls. As a teenager my wife and I (separately) spent part of our social lives in an edgy pub in Limerick city frequented by many motorcycle enthusiasts and musicians. Those earlier male and female bikers affected an Easy Rider/Hell’s Angels attitude, but their youth, rebelliousness, coolness and angst appeared substantial, romantic and authentic. As a result, we were well disposed to those characters we met on Kerry’s roads and though they seemed more corpulent, affluent and greyer than the bikers we once knew, we felt they had some of the spirit of our onetime bar–mates. Further along the road the sight of a man sporting a bib over his leather jacket announcing that he was the ‘Road Captain’ interrupted our reverie. What initially seemed to us a gathering of the human equivalent of wild mustangs immediately transformed into a more bovine, bourgeois herd of weekend motorcyclists, weekday professionals on a jolly to capture a different feeling that corporate life could not provide. It was not a moment to compare with the surprise of Odysseus when his men were transformed into swine in the Circe episode of Homer’s famous tale, but our shock at the level of organisation, cooperation and planning required to produce the need for an official, so designated, was considerable.1 Sadness at the transformation of the rugged, uncouth, transgressing individual of our pasts into the polished, mannered and conformist unit of a motorcycle division remained our overwhelming impression. I am sure that the bikers of our memory exist 1 Homer, The Odyssey, (Penguin, London, 2003). That is the end of livestock puns. 2 yet, but the co-option of their pastime by the ‘man’ they once railed against cannot be gainsaid.2 Now, in a spirit of competitive parenting, the first of us to identify the need to change our daughter’s nappy will cheerfully nominate the other as the ‘Captain of the child’, just as we dispute who is the ‘Captain of the washing up’; a rueful, yet mocking tribute to the domestication of the once proud, two–wheeled Christy and Christina Mahons and Jack and Jacqueline Duggans. In our disapproval we fell into the same ‘it wasn’t like that in my day’ trap as the editorial writer of the Limerick Chronicle, in October 1886, who similarly bemoaned the younger generation and described them as regular idlers – ‘not used to the style of living’ their fathers endured,’.3 Plus ça change ... 2 The main rival to the Hell’s Angels gang in England is the ‘Outlaws’, a crew that boasts, not unlike a golf club, ‘chapters’, a three page, twenty-two-rule constitution, dress code and rules excluding female membership, MG 28 Nov 2008. 3 LC 16 Oct 1886. Introduction 3 In Limerick, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sport was gentrified and made responsible, respectable and resplendent; this was achieved by the development of the club and the creation of the office of ‘captain’ with a full panoply of lieutenant and non–commissioned officer equivalents to support him. The regularisation, organisation, disciplining and embourgeouisement of play and games in this period were the outstanding features of the sports boom. The first task of this study is to investigate and explain the processes by which sports, marshalled by its captains, was altered, disciplined, hardened and penned into the club form. This research explains how something as trivial, unpromising and marginal as play, games and sport came to enjoy such prominence in debates on gender, class, nationality and politics during the second half of the nineteenth century. Hurling and cricket became markers of nationality, skating, even, became a trial of ‘moral qualities’ in women, and rugby and other codes of football encoded a more martial masculinity. Standard historical takes on the emergence of the GAA in 1884 also seemed too casual in their acceptance of the dynamic and processes by which the GAA usurped the pre– GAA sports infrastructure. The aim was to discover a more clear, nuanced and accurate picture of the sports infrastructure to which the GAA was responding. By delineating more finely the sports world that prompted the reaction of the GAA it was hoped to acknowledge the real contribution of the Anglo–Irish and folk sports movements to Irish sporting and cultural history as well as shedding more light on the likely motivations of the GAA sports entrepreneurs, the ochtó-ceatharnaigh, that sought to supplant both. A comprehensive study of the Anglo–Irish (and as far as practicable, their plebeian counterparts) at play also promised to shed further light on part of another significant 4 question of interest; the fate of Ireland’s ‘tories’. History’s ‘losers’ are a fascinating bunch; independence era American Tories were battered and exiled to Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain and Florida, but their fate tells as much about America as do the happy scenes on the Fourth of July. Ireland’s southern unionists, to use Buckland’s formulation, variously called unionists, tories or loyalists, also endured a slow, grinding and demoralising campaign against them, but though many were similarly battered and exiled, many more adapted to an Ireland that was out of sympathy with them, and demonstrated a civic spirit and grace that contradicted many of the more outrageous calumnies laid at their feet. The fingerprints of Ireland’s tories may be detected in the transformation of a customary, rudimentary sports infrastructure into a diverse, organised, coherent and efficient infrastructure, one of the more interesting developments of culture in the industrial revolution era. A study of this process in Limerick offered the opportunity to assess how a largely agricultural economy adapted an industrial sporting culture to its needs while also offering perspectives on the interaction of sports, class, politics and gender in nineteenth century Ireland. Limerick was a town at the centre of a series of overlapping sporting, agricultural, commercial, political and cultural webs extending from Listowel in the west to Tipperary in the east, to Charleville in the south, to Gort in the north-east and to Nenagh in the north-east. One must also be sceptical of popular histories of Limerick sport that allow a great role to the military in the development and promotion of sports. The attribution to the British military a large role in the popularisation, organisation and development of rugby union, for instance, did not chime with my earlier research into the response of Loyalism in Limerick to the New Departure, an era during which the key late nineteenth century sports were marshalled into organised form, but which also 5 coincided with the army’s least popular decade. The 1880s, in particular, witnessed considerable civilian antipathy to the military and was notable for the prolonged battle between a more assertive nationalist town council under Stephen O’Mara’s mayoralties and central government about how to pay the excessive costs of policing the city. The notion of garrison sports is a durable one in Irish sports culture, but in Limerick it is clear that the ‘garrison’ most responsible for sports organisation in the years before 1884, sporting Ireland’s year zero, was the urban, commercial and professional, Protestant and Roman Catholic middle class.4 The tremendous role of non-sporting voluntary associations in the organisation and development of sport was the key discovery of this research. As the major sporting events of the period were examined, the significance of the relationship between the sporting and non–sporting voluntary associational sectors became clearer and thus a large part of the research concentrated on institutions such as bands, musical and theatrical groups, religious and secular societies. This proved not to be a detour, however, as all these groups and clubs were interconnected as strands of a social web competing with and complementing each other in a vibrant, growing and increasingly diverse civic culture. The lack of primary source material for early sports clubs trumped any excessive presumptions of a dense empirical study. Initially, I hoped to generate a picture of the late nineteenth century sports infrastructure much as Stanley Kubrick painstakingly created scenes for his films; I was obliged, however, to accept that the scene I have prepared may bear closer relation to a the staging of a Beckettian drama with the suggestion of a tree in place of a complete description of a forest.

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