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The following is a transcript of The Underestimated Mr. Wesley: Charles Wesley 1707 - 1788 given by Dudley Levinstone Cooney at Dublin City Library & Archive on 18 December 2007, the 300th anniversary of the birth of Charles Wesley. AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast.  In this episode, The Underestimated Mr Wesley, Dudley Levinstone Cooney discusses Charles Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement and younger brother of John Wesley. Wesley is primarily remembered as a writer of hymns including the Christmas favourite Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. He was also one of the most prolific poets in the English Language. Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive on 18 December 2007 to mark the tercentenary of Charles Wesley's birth.Alastair Smeaton, Dublin City Public Libraries: Today, as you all know, 18 December is the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Wesley. I’m told by a reliable authority that this is the one event that takes place on the tercentenary that is being run by a body other than a church authority; we are pleased to host this occasion. Our speaker tonight, the Reverend Dudley Levinstone Cooney is president of the Wesley Historical Society in Ireland; he is president of the Old Dublin Society and as a historian and writer, The Methodists in Ireland: a short history springs to mind. Dudley Levinstone Cooney is pre-eminently qualified to deal with the subject of his lecture this evening, Charles Wesley. Ladies and gentlemen, Dudley Levinstone Cooney.[Applause]Dudley Levinstone Cooney: Thank you Alastair for that introduction. Thank you for coming. Can I say that as you came in you were listening to some music composed by Samuel Wesley, the son of Charles and played by the Milton Keynes Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton. So we were setting the scene with some Wesley music.  I also want to thank a number of people who have been most helpful to me: the curator of The New Room in Bristol, which is also responsible for Charles Wesley’s house in Bristol, who provided a number of photographs; the Dublin City Libraries who provided a number of photographs and Martin Thorpe who made the maps that you will see in due course, marking the places that Charles visited during his time in Ireland. My warm thanks to Alastair himself who put all these illustrations together. This is the first time that I have tried to use PowerPoint. If anything goes wrong it’s not their fault; it’s mine.Considering the lavish encomiums which have been bestowed on him as a poet and hymn writer, it may seem strange to describe Charles Wesley as underestimated. The fact remains that he is generally remembered by Methodists as well as by others, simply as a hymn writer.  In his brief obituary in the minutes of conference of 1788, John Wesley wrote of Charles, 'his least praise was his talent for poetry'. Before we have finished we will consider some evaluations of his verse, but even here there are reasons for believing that he has not been fully appreciated. Writing near the end of his life to his friend, the Reverend Dr William Chandler, who was about to leave for America, Charles made this revealing comment:I took my Master's Degree, and only thought of spending all my days at Oxford. But my brother, who always had the ascendant over me, persuaded me to accompany him and Mr. Oglethorpe to Georgia. I exceedingly dreaded entering into holy orders: but he overruled me here also.The dominance of John was in part due to the fact that he was the elder by four and a half years, but certainly also owed something to the difference in character of the two men. It seems to have continued through the years since their deaths. That Methodists have failed to give Charles due credit, is certainly due to two factors of which we must take account and which are not to his discredit. One was his withdrawal from the itinerant ministry; the other was his opposition to those actions of John which paved the way for the separation of the Methodist Societies from the established church and their development as a distinct denomination.Charles Wesley was born at Epworth, in the Isle of Axholme in the North Riding of Lincolnshire on December 18 1707. He was the eighteenth child of Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth and his wife Susanna. His birth was two months premature so that at first he appeared rather dead than alive. He neither cried nor opened his eyes and was kept wrapped up in soft wool until the time at which he should have been born according to the course of nature, when he opened his eyes and caused his voice to be heard.  To this has been ascribed the fact that he never enjoyed robust health and his recurrent illnesses reduced the amount of travelling he was able to undertake. His physical frailty did not affect his mental capacity and by the age of five, he had not only mastered the English language, but had begun to read the first verses of the Book of Genesis.  Like all the Wesley children he received his first lessons at home, his teachers being his father and mother. In 1716, at the age of eight, he went to Westminster School, where his eldest brother Samuel, then aged twenty-six was a teacher. Samuel helped to pay his fees and gave support and encouragement to him, becoming something of a second father to his little brother.  Charles was a bright student, excelling in Biblical knowledge and acquitting himself well in Greek and Latin verse. At the age of thirteen he became a King’s Scholar of the school, as had Samuel before him, and in his final year was captain of the school. He was not only a good scholar he was also popular with the other boys. One of his contemporaries was a Scottish lad called William Murray, whose parents were Jacobites. A bully used this as an excuse to pick on Murray and make his life miserable. Charles Wesley, even then a champion of the underdog, came to Murray’s defence and fought the bully. Murray never forgot his champion, and in later years when as Lord Mansfield he was as Lord Chief Justice of England, renewed his friendship with Charles.Before he left Westminster a distant cousin in Ireland, Garret Wesley, having no children to inherit his estate, wrote to the Rector in Epworth, offering to make Charles his heir. The family left the choice to Charles, who surprisingly for the youngest son of an impecunious family, turned down the offer. Garret approached a cousin on his mother’s side, Richard Colley, who accepted. Richard was the father of the 1st Earl of Mornington, Professor of Music in Trinity College Dublin, who we shall meet again in Charles Wesley’s London drawing room.Charles went up to Oxford in 1727 and entered Christ Church, where both of his brothers Samuel and John had been before him.  To the disapproval of John he spent his first year at the university enjoying the social round.  Whether or not John’s admonitions had more influence than Charles was ready to admit, or he simply tired of wasting time, in the second year he became a reformed character, his letter to Dr Chandler has this:My first year at college I lost in diversions. In the next I set myself to study. Diligence led me to serious thinking. I went to the weekly Sacrament, and persuaded two or three young scholars to accompany me.This was to have far-reaching implications. When John was recalled to Oxford to take up his tutorial duties as a fellow, Charles apparently readily deferred to his seniority and better qualifications and John assumed the leadership of the group. It studied the Bible and patristic writings, as well as classical literature and began regular practice of the rules in the prayer book concerning worship, fasting, and works of piety. It was this that earned them a variety of derisive nicknames including the best known, the ‘Holy Club’ and ‘Methodists’. Charles’ reference to the latter nickname in the letter to Chandler, has led some to suggest that he was individually averse to be called a Methodist, but recent research has established that the name was not coined until after John had assumed the leadership. It was applied to the whole group.Having graduated BA in 1729, and received a college appointment as tutor in Oxford, Charles would happily have stayed there for the rest of his life, but John was becoming discontented. Chiefly because the young undergraduates were too sophisticated and irreligious to join the ideal Christian community, which John envisaged for the ‘Holy Club’.  His courtship of two young women in succession had come to nothing and he was being criticised for his encouragement of a measure of asceticism. Then he saw a way of escape. General James Oglethorpe was looking for clergy to assist him in the management of the new colony of Georgia in North America, of which he was proprietor, and John Wesley thought it might be possible the ideal community among the unsophisticated natives of the place. He persuaded Charles to come with him but first to be ordained. However reluctant Charles may have been, he was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Oxford, Dr John Potter on Saturday, September 21 1735 and priest by the Bishop of London, Dr Edmond Gibson on Sunday, September 29. Yet somewhere in the back of his mind there leapt a sense that he had been frogmarched into holy orders by his brother, and the letter to Chandler would suggest as much. Events were to prove that John’s judgement was sound. Charles’ subsequent career fully justified his ordination.Within three weeks, on October 14th, the Wesley brothers and two companions, Charles Delamotte and Benjamin Ingham, embarked on the Simmonds for Georgia. It took over sixteen weeks to cross the Atlantic. Sixteen weeks of rough winter weather, with at least one storm in which the passengers were sure that the ship would go down and all would be drowned. The effect of the voyage on Charles is reflected by the words with which he opened a letter to Sally Kirkham, the eldest of the three daughters of the Rector of Stanton in Gloucestershire and sisters of one of the members of the ‘Holy Club’. Dated from the isle of Tibey in Georgia on February 5, 1736 it opens:God has brought an unhappy, unthankful wretch hither, through a thousand dangers, to renew his complaints, and loathe the life which has been preserved by a series of miracles. I take the moment of my arrival to inform you of it, because I know you will thank Him, though I cannot.As he continues to write his spirits begin to lift and he leaves off after several paragraphs. When after an interval of nine days he resumes the letter off Peeper’s Island he is more cheerful:My friends will rejoice with me in the interval of ease I at present enjoy. I look with horror back on the desperate spirit that dictated those words above, but shall let them stand as the naked picture of a soul which can never know reserve toward you. I will still call myself a prisoner of hope.When eventually they landed the brothers were separated. John remained at Savannah as chaplain to the settlement there. As Oglethorpe’s secretary, Charles had to accompany the General, about eighty miles, one hundred and thirty kilometres to the south, where Fort Frederica was being built. If Savannah, the chief settlement was then little more than a village, Frederica hardly qualified as a village at all. A measure of homesickness, the isolation of the situation, the monotony of the work and having to deal with the rough colonists who were so very different from the people to whose company he had been accustomed, undermined his health. A disagreement with Oglethorpe completed the breakdown and Charles was obliged to face the rigours of a voyage back to England across the Atlantic once again between August and December 1737. The picture of Charles preaching to the Indians is a piece of Methodist propaganda. It has no foundation in actual fact.Brother John was hard on his heels. He too had failed to relate to the rough settlers of Savannah and he had seen few, if any of the Native Americans. His dream of the ideal Christian community in the wilderness had proved impossible and in December he too left Georgia arriving back in England in February of 1738. Both men came home with a sense of failure. However, on the Simmonds going to Georgia they had encountered a group of Moravians, by whose assured Christian faith they had been deeply impressed. They continued to meet the Moravians in Georgia and when they got back to London made a point of meeting some Moravians led by Peter Böhler there. The stage was set for dramatic religious experiences which changed the lives of both men. Interesting that it should happen in what was then quite a rough city.The story of John Wesley’s evangelical conversion, as it is generally called, has become much better known than that of Charles, though Charles had the experience three days before his brother.  The breakdown of himself in Georgia was not helped by the religious tension in which he lived for several months after his arrival back in England and in the early part of May he was confined to bed. On May 11 he moved to the house of John Bray at Little Britain, close to Aldersgate Street, but was so weak that he had to be carried in a chair. He describes Bray as, 'a poor ignorant mechanic, who knows nothing but Christ'. He was in fact a craftsman working in brass. Charles received the sacrament on Friday and Saturday, May 19and 20 but his dejection in no way abated. It was John Bray and his sister Mrs Turner who were instrumental in leading him to assurance that he needed and by the middle of Pentecost Sunday, May 21 the young Charles could write, 'I now find myself at peace with God'. His brother John found the same assurance on the following Wednesday, May 24 at a Moravian meeting in Littleton Court, off Aldersgate Street, while one of the Moravians was reading Luther’s Preface to his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.For the next fourteen months, the Wesley brothers maintained their links with the Moravians, forming a society in Fetter Lane. For three months, from the middle of June to the middle of September 1738, John left London to visit the Moravian centres of Marienborn and Herrnhut in Germany - Herrnhut was the estate of their leader Nicolas, Count von Zinzendorf. John was anxious to see Moravian faith in practice as the headquarters from which groups of families and individuals had been sent as missionaries to plant societies in Holland, England and North America. While he was away, Charles threw himself into the work of the burgeoning evangelical revival in London. He preached in whatever Church of England churches were prepared to welcome him, visited the prisons, and in an unofficial role of chaplain accompanied condemned felons to their execution in Tibourne. When pulpits were closed to him because of his zeal he took field preaching. This is a Methodist term for preaching outside a church or preaching house and need not necessarily take place in an actual field - market-places or crossroads, barns, assembly rooms, sessions houses or market houses - all were used. For a few months he served as curate to the Reverend George Stonehouse at Islington - the only curacy he ever held. Stonehouse was sympathetic to Charles’ evangelicalism but yielded to pressure from two bullying church wardens and Charles was dismissed.During 1739, a spirit of quietism grew among the Moravians, its more extreme exponents advocating that people should wait quietly doing nothing, not even attending religious meetings until moved by the grace of God. John Wesley believed that the way to wait for the grace of God was by using the means of grace – the sacrament, public worship, Christian fellowship, bible reading, private devotion and works of charity. On July 20, he and Charles left the Moravians with about seventy like-minded people and established a new society in the old king’s foundry at Windmill Street, behind City Road, which had been vacated only a short while before when the Royal Arsenal moved to Woolwich. From this base John Wesley began the frequent and extensive tours of England that developed the connection of Methodist Societies, which in time became the Methodist Church. John maintained this itinerating ministry for more than fifty years. For the first ten years, Charles participated fully in this work, of which the main bases were in London, Bristol and Newcastle-on-Tyne. However, his less robust health necessitated some reduction of both the frequency and the extent of his travels beyond the main bases.In 1747, John paid his first visit to Ireland visiting a society which had been formed a little earlier in the year. His meetings were held in the disused Lutheran chapel in Marlborough Street. He stayed for just two weeks and then left John Trembath to take charge of the society. Within days the building had been attacked by a mob and the furniture and timber wainscoting carried into the yard where the mob set it alight. Trembath wrote fearfully to John assuring him that, “Nobody was fit to be a preacher in Ireland who was not ready to die at a moment.” John felt unable to return to Ireland immediately and proposed to send Charles. He wrote to the younger man asking for a meeting at Garth in Breconshire in the home of Marmaduke Gwynne who had become a Methodist. It was to be a momentous meeting in more ways than one. Charles got to the venue first and while waiting for John became better acquainted with the Gwynne family, including one of the daughters, Sarah. She was to be the love of his life but there was no time for wooing.  The situation in Dublin was critical and to Dublin Charles accordingly went.His letters to Ebenezer Blackwell reveal the two main problems which he had to face, one was the number of people who were afraid to attend any more Methodist meetings in case of another attack and the second was the lack of premises. Not surprisingly the trustee of the Lutheran chapel Dorothea Felster asked the Methodists to go before any more damage was done to her property and nobody else would give them house or room. In little more than three weeks Charles’ calm and courage and the fact that there had been no more riots, restored the confidence of the society and a new premises had been found. This was a disused weaving shed at Cork Street in the Dolphin’s Barn area which was adapted to accommodate Methodist meetings. It provided living rooms for the preachers which delivered Charles from the conditions of his first lodgings, he had written to John a dryly humorous description of these: “A family of squalling children, a landlady just ready to lie-in, a maid who has not time to do the least thing for us, are some of our conveniences.”The mixed reactions of the people of Dublin were perhaps reflected in one of Charles’ letters, dated October 25, which served also as a journal, and was meant to be shared by his correspondents in England:Passed three hours under my usual burden, among the dry bones of the house of Israel at St. Patrick’s. How different the spirit here from that of our chapel in London. I seldom enter this place, but the zealots are ready to drag me out like that old profaner of the temple, Paul. Such murmuring, disputing, railing and loud abuse the very sight of me occasions, but I can compare the house of God to nothing but a den of thieves and murders.  The Dean indeed I must except, and give honour to whom honour is due. He has always behaved towards us with great courtesy and love; looks pleased to see us make up the bulk of the communicants; appointed us a seat for ourselves – but the underling officers soon thrust us out; and constantly administers the sacrament to me first as the order of our church requires.In later years, the Dean William Cradock invited John Wesley to assist him in the administration of the sacrament but there is no record of his extending the same invitation to Charles. It was probably too early in the development of Methodism in the city for that. In the afternoon of the same day he went to a service in St Catherine’s Church in Thomas Street and in the evening conducted the opening of a new preaching house in Cork Street, where the congregation was so large that only a quarter of them would fit inside, so Charles moved out into the garden, standing with his back to the wall. He estimated that over a thousand people were present. Estimates of open air functions tended to err on the high side. It was in this building that Samuel Handy of Coolalough in County Westmeath was persuaded to hear a Methodist preacher, was convinced of their value and invited them to make his house the base for work in the Irish midlands. Within a very short while, societies had been established at Templemcateer, Tyrrellspass, Philipstown (now Dangan), Tullamore, Moate and Athlone.The portrait you are looking at by the way is roughly what Charles looked like at the time when he was here in Ireland.Good reports from the preachers who went to these places and from Mr Handy made Charles eager to see for himself. And on February 8 1748 he set out from Dublin. He remarks that as they rode to Tyrrellspass, he and his companions overtook a lad “whistling one of our tunes”. Arriving at Tyrrellspass they were welcomed by the local landlord Stephen Fois. He addressed the local society there, some of whom expressed their satisfaction in a way peculiar to them - they whistled for joy. On the following day he visited Templemcateer and on February 10 took horse with six companions to Athlone. Samuel Handy and his brother Jonathan rode at the front. At one point on the road, three or four men ordered them to go back to where they came from and threw stones. One of the preachers John Healy was knocked off his horse and Stephen Fois was struck on the head, but Samuel Hendysetting spurs to his horse, led a charge which scattered the enemy. When the authorities in Athlone heard of the incident they ordered the solders from the barracks in the castle to guard the visitors. Charles preached in the market house. Visits to the other towns were without untoward incident.On March 8 John Wesley landed in Dublin for this second visit and Charles was free to return to England for a few months. John toured the midlands societies, further consolidating the work there, as well as in Dublin, and returned to England in May. Charles came back to Ireland in August and this time stayed with William Lunell, who had been John’s host and who had recently lost his wife and baby son in childbirth. In the interval two of the preachers, Thomas Williams and Robert Swindells had introduced Methodism into Cork City. I think that’s a lovely name for a Methodist preacher, Swindells (laughter). On August 18, Charles set out on his longest Irish tour. At Ballyboy, some miles south of Tullamore, he was welcomed by a friendly Quaker whom he does not name, but in whose house a number of people gathered to hear him preach. On the following day he road through heavy rain on roads reduced to quagmires and stopped to eat at Roscrea. Here the people would not let him leave town until he had preached to them. By evening he had reached Cashel, where he stayed for the night but could find no means of drying his clothes. He reached Cork on August 20 and stayed there for almost a month in the house of a printer named Harrison. He found 200 members in the Methodist society and noted with satisfaction the improvement in the manners of the citizens since the arrival of the Methodist preachers. This was not an illusion. It was also observed by a young Quaker woman who wrote to her family making the same comment.Charles rode out to Riverstown to call on the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork and Ross, Dermot Brown. Brown and his family received him with great affability. While staying in Cork he ventured into some of the neighbouring towns. At Bandon, he preached at both ends of the town. In Kinsale he writes, 'it is worth observing that I am of every religion; the Presbyterians say I am a Presbyterian, the churchgoers that I am a minister of theirs, and the Catholics are sure that I am a good Catholic at heart'. In Youghal he preached on the Strand and at Middleton the Town Hall could not contain the numbers that wished to hear him. Listening to preachers was obviously a form of entertainment in those days. From Kinsale, he wrote happily to Ebeenzer Blackwell, ‘rejoice with me for I have found the sheep that was lost. And not one only but a whole flock of them’.It was eight months after Charles had left Cork that a rascally ballad mongernamed Nicholas Butler fomented a succession of riots against the Methodists from which they suffered considerable personal injury and damage to property. The grand jury to whom they appealed to help, turned on them and accused the victims of being the cause of the trouble. ‘We found and present’ they said, ‘Charles Wesley to be a person of ill-fame, a vagabond and a common disturber of his Majesty’s peace and we pray that he may be transported.’ Remember these are members of the established church describing an ordained priest of the established church. When the Assize Judge saw the disreputable quality of the witnesses against the Methodists, he threw the charges out of court.Charles left Ireland in October 1748. On arrival at Holyhead, wrote to William Lunell, in the course of his letter describing the horrors of his voyage across the Irish Sea. ‘The water in Dublin Bay was so rough that it took two hours for the small boat by which the passengers were embarking to get from the quay to the ship.’ Charles was seasick for the whole journey and rather curiously blamed some cake he had eaten rather than the storm. First the main sail was carried away by the force of the wind, and then the master of the ship was blown overboard and seen no more. After two days of this the ship got safe to harbour. Fascinating description of a safe journey! Charles never again went on a sea voyage.Charles had continued his courtship of Sarah Gwynne by correspondence and occasional visits to Garth when he was not in Ireland. The fact that he was now forty-one and she was only twenty-two was not considered a difficulty as in the eighteenth century it was quite common for women to marry men considerably older than themselves. There was however, one difficulty. As would have been the case with most parents the Gwynnes were reluctant to agree to their daughter marrying a man with no settled income, Charles did not even have a curacy.  John Wesley solved the problem by guaranteeing Charles an income of £100 a year from the sale of their hymns, most of which came from Charles’ pen. An income of £100 a year in 1749 had the purchasing power of about £14,000 or €20,000 300 years later. It was not wealth but neither was it want.The wedding took place at Llanlleonfel Church, a mile from Garth and six miles from Builth Wells on what is now the A483. It was conducted by John Wesley. To mark the occasion, the happy bridegroom wrote a hymn opening with the lines ‘Thou God of truth and love, we seek thy perfect way’. The third verse originally read:Didst thou not make us one,That both might one remain,Together travel on,And bear each other's pain;Till both thy utmost goodness prove,And rise renewed in perfect love?For the word ‘both’ in lines 2 and 5, John substituted the words ‘we’ and ‘all’ respectively and published it in his collection of hymns. As such it has been happily sung by generations of Methodists as a hymn of fellowship, blissfully unaware that it was originally a wedding hymn, first sung at the wedding of Charles himself.Charles and Sarah set up house at number 4 Charles Street in Bristol. Here over a period of nineteen years, eight children were born, of whom five died in infancy and were buried in the nearby graveyard of St James’ Church. The eight were John, Martha Maria, Charles, Sarah called Sally, Susannah, Selena, Samuel and John James. In 1753, Sarah Wesley caught smallpox which so marred her features that the disparity of her own and her husband ages was no longer apparent. It was from her that the infant John caught the infection and died before his first birthday.It was after his marriage that Charles began to withdraw from the itinerating ministry that Methodism had demanded of him.  To some degree he was beginning to be nervous of some of John’s activity, which he clearly saw would eventually lead to the separation of Methodism from the Church of England, and this Jackson sees as the most significant factor in his withdrawal. This was something John would not see. But there was also the fact that Charles was now a happily married man with a family. There was a kernel of truth in the caustic wit of the eccentric rector of Everton in Bedfordshire, John Berridge, who commented, ‘No trap so mischievous to the field preacher as wedlock. Matrimony has quite maimed poor Charles and might have spoiled John and George if the wise master had not sent them a pair of ferrets’. (laughter) John Wesley and George Whitefield were both married to shrewish wives.The picture is of Charles’ house no. 4 Charles Street, Bristol and the statue of him outside the New Room. Of the three surviving children of Charles and Sarah Wesley, the girl Sally had some literary talent, and Routley detected ability as a cartoonist in at least one of her sketches, but it was her brothers, Charles Junior and Samuel whose gifts had the greatest impact on the family. Their musical genius became evident at a very early age. Their uncle John and their father had both been competent singers but Uncle John had never had much appreciation of music for its own sake. He saw it more as a convenient vehicle for the words of a hymn. Charles, the father of the two boys had a greater musical appreciation and was able to play the organ but the talents of his son went far beyond that. He began to realise that Bristol was too small a place for their development and in 1771 the family moved to London. They took up residence at No. 1 Chesterfield Street, off the Marylebone Road, then on the fringes of the city. It had been the home of a Mrs Gumby, whose lease had still twenty years to run. She gave the house free of charge to Charles and Sarah richly furnished and completely ready for occupation. The cellars were well-stocked with wine and even with barrels of table beer.It was in the drawing room of this house that Charles organised subscription concerts at which his sons could display their talents. Among those who attended was distant cousin Gareth Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, son of the Richard Colley who had inherited the estate Charles had declined fifty years before. Lord Mornington brought his violin and joined the boys in playing. Another who came was General James Oglethorpe, differences in the colony of Georgia long forgiven and forgotten. Among the leading musicians who encouraged the lads were Thomas Arne and William Boyce. As is not unusual with child prodigies neither boy in later life quite fulfilled the promise of his early years, though Samuel was recognised as the leading organist of his day in England. His great contribution to English musical appreciation was his popularising of the work of Johan Sebastian Bach, indeed one of his sons was known as Samuel Sebastian Wesley.The last years of Charles’ life was spent in an unremitting struggle to keep the Methodist Societies within the Church of England. He was shocked and saddened when in 1784 his brother John ordained ministers for America. He could not accept the theological arguments by which John justified this action. It has been said that Charles showed his love for the church by supporting it, John by trying to reform it. To Charles John’s action was separation, though the Methodists in England did not organise themselves as a separate church for ten years, by which time both Charles and John were dead. But in spite of these deep disagreements, Charles did not abandon either his brother or the Methodist Societies, continuing to preach in Methodist chapels whenever he had opportunity. Whatever else may be said about the Wesley brothers and sisters, differences of opinion never destroyed their love for each other. Rutter’s comment is apposite, ‘Charles represented the law opposition on many organisational matters.’Charles died on March 20 1788 in his eighty-first year. His mother Susanna had been buried in Bunhill Fields, the great London dissenters’ burial ground and his brother John had prepared a burial ground behind the Methodist chapel in City Road. But these were not consecrated ground as the Church of England understood it and Charles was a churchman. He chose that his body should be buried in the churchyard of the parish of Marylebone, where he had lived for seventeen years. There thirty-four years later, his beloved wife Sarah joined him, having lived to the age of ninety-six. There too the mortal remains of their musical sons were laid, Charles Junior in 1834 and Samuel in 1837.In our survey of Charles Wesley’s life there have been indications of the ways in which he has been underestimated. We must look a little more closely at these. He was, as we have observed a strong churchman, but that did not make him any less a Methodist. Throughout his life he was loyal to the primary view that the Methodist societies were part of the life of the established church and that to be a Methodist was to be more devoted and more conscientious in membership of the church. He did far more for the early Methodists than teach them to sing theology.He travelled less than his brother John in the interests of the work, but that was primarily due to his less robust health and not to any lack of enthusiasm. The serious debility from which he served on his return from Georgia was largely psychosomatic prompted by his sense of failure to achieve the purpose of his going there. The evangelical experience of Pentecost 1738 removed the sense of failure and the debility went with it. He found the energy to throw himself into the work of the revival. However, the physical weakness remained to reduce the amount he could do, though not the effectiveness of it. We have looked in detail at the record of his time in Ireland which was quite evidentially spent very energetically. One of his supporters has claimed that he planted Methodism in Ireland with a tenacity that caused it to remain and flourish. That is to overstate the case. He did some pioneering in the small towns of County Cork, but in the Midlands and in Cork City others had been there before him. Had he not come to Ireland the Dublin Society would have taken longer to rally after the initial mob onslaught, but the patient work of John in the course of twenty further visits through the following forty-eight years and the devotion of the early preachers sent from England and more recruited in Ireland itself, would have been sufficient to develop the work. Nevertheless Charles must be given credit for the speedy recovery of the Dublin Methodists in 1747 and for responding immediately to the invitation from Samuel Handy which opened the way into the provinces.It is hard to assess Charles as a preacher, but so it is of John. But one thing is certain that the 151 sermons John published were not the sermons that so deeply affected the general public. They were drafted for highly educated congregations or as teaching material. The few accounts which have survived of John’s field preaching indicate what would today be called a much more populist style. Of Charles’ sermons virtually nothing survives. The manuscript of six in his handwriting upon examination proved to include transcriptions of five by John. An examination of style has suggested that one of John’s 151 was originally by Charles. In all probability the brothers were unconcerned about who wrote which sermon as they were about who wrote which hymn; if it was good they published it. The only thing that we can be certain about is that Charles was an effective preacher and his pulpit and field preaching did much to build Methodism in England, Wales and Ireland. It is fitting that both brothers are commemorated in Westminster Abbey with their portraits on the one tablet. It is also fitting that Common Worship, Services and Prayers for the Church of England, published in 2000, includes in its calendar, a letter festival, May 24 John and Charles Wesley, evangelists, hymn writers.John R Tyson’s study led him to believe that Charles Wesley was an important theologian, often underrated. Tyson of course was studying Charles. In fact the same comment would be true of both John and Charles. The Calvinist discipline which predominated in Europe and American theology through much of the 20th century tended to dismiss both of the Wesleys as poor theologians whose position changed from time to time.  More recently theologians have began to re-evaluate the Wesleys, to recognise their apparent changes as the evolution of the experiential element in their thinking. And to perceive that this experiential approach offers the root into the 21st century thinking outside the church that is alienated by the rigidly deductive method. It is difficult to distinguish Charles’ theology from that of John and this is yet another evidence of how closely the brothers worked together. The main distinction lies in the media through which they communicated. John wrote sermons and tracts, Charles wrote poetry. It might be said that John wrote primarily for the head, Charles appealed to the heart. An example may be found in one of Charles’ hymns for the sacrament:Come, Holy Ghost, thine influence shed,And realize the sign;Thy life infuse into the bread,Thy power into the wine.Effectual let the tokens proveAnd made, by heavenly art,Fit channels to convey thy loveTo every faithful heart.Wesley does not intend to suggest in the third and fourth lines that different things happen to the bread and wine at the epithesis, the words life and power are used for poetic effect. The verses together make a powerful appeal to both the emotions and the understanding and are clear about the real presence without attempting to define it. Langford’s assessment of the theology of the two brothers is well balanced. It seems safe to attribute to John the primary role as theologian of the Methodist movement. Charles served as supportive, encouraging and propagandising role to and for John. The preface to the Methodist Hymn Book of 1933 opens with the words, ‘Methodism was born in song’.We must now turn to a consideration of Charles Wesley as a poet, but before we do one other point needs to be made: Charles the propagandist is Charles the poet and his flair as teacher of the faith lay in his ability to make theology singable. People remember songs long after they have forgotten verse or prose. Music is the finest aid to memory. It was in singing the hymns of the Wesleys that the Methodists learned their Christian doctrine. It has been said that Charles wrote between 6,000 and 7,000 hymns, but until comparatively recently it has been virtually impossible to say. Between 1988 and 1991 S.T. Kimborough Jr and Oliver A Beckerlegge completed the mammoth task of compiling and publishing in three volumes the unpublished poetry of Charles Wesley. That facilitates the task of counting and it has been computed that he wrote just a little under 9,000 poems. Given a productive period of fifty years, it averages 180 poems a year or more than three a week. When one takes account of the fact that he did not always maintain that average, his output was prodigious. But how many of these were hymns? What is a hymn? His poems fall into five broad classes; political, comment on current events, love poems, poems written for fun with children and religious poems. Even within the religious category, which is by far by the largest, the calculation will depend on how one defines a hymn. Is a hymn a poem capable of being sung by a congregation or does it only qualify if it has been actually sung in a worship service?Charles began writing verse before his evangelical experience. In the Epworth Rectory his father, his mother, his brother John and his sister Hettie all wrote verses and at least one critic has suggested that Hettie was the best poet of them all. The writing of verses including translations from the classic authors was part of the curriculum at Westminster School. In his years at Oxford and afterwards, Charles wrote a good deal of verse in the manner of Dryden and Pope. Poems that have survived from this period give evidence of his classical scholarship and his poetic talent. Beckerlegge asks the question why Charles has been so neglected by anthologists of English verse. He comments, ‘one can only assume the precious taste of so many very literary men prevented their ever knowing the work of one whom they probably thought of in their ignorance as being a mere evangelist or even a revivalist’.His classic scholarship did not desert him when he came to writing hymns and Baker has written of his, ‘Miltonic facility for incorporating polysyllabic Latinate words into his verses in a way that enhances the verbal music’. The lines he gives as examples are ‘incomprehensibly made man’, ‘inextinguishable blaze’, ‘concentred all through Jesu’s name’. John Lawson has done us considerable service by tracing the biblical references in about 150 of Wesley’s hymns demonstrating how many scriptural allusions there are in each verse. That does not suggest Charles sat down to write hymns with an open Bible, rather it is evidence that his youthful study of the bible was so thorough that its language came to him naturally and references fit seamlessly into the poetry.In the writing of hymns, Charles was profoundly influenced by the German carols to which the Moravians introduced him. But he was evidently alert to the significance of congregational singing and Shields believes that he actually wrote with tunes in mind. If that be so one must not forget that in the early hymn books music was not printed with the hymns and each congregation sang the hymns to any tunes they knew which fitted. It was possible to sing the same hymn with half a dozen congregations to as many different tunes. There is a story told of Charles preaching in West Cornwell and being interrupted by a group of drunken sailors singing the lewd ditty ‘Nancy Dawson’. Charles told them that he liked the tune but not the lurid lines and suggested that if they would return later in the day he would have a song for them all to sing together. The challenge drew a large crowd to the second meeting and Charles passed around the text of his defence of Christian hymnody “on the true use of music” which they all sang to the tune the sailors had bawled earlier in the day. Stories such as this have given rise to the idea that all of Charles’ hymns were written to tunes that were already popular. But that is only true in so far as many could be sung to ballad tunes likely to be known to the congregations. What is quite extraordinary is the variety of verse forms which Charles used. Hymns and Psalms, the hymn book currently in use in Methodist Churches in Britain and Ireland carries 150 hymns by him and they are written in twenty-eight different verse forms.It should not of course be forgotten that Wesley described his Collection of hymns, for the use of the people called Methodists as ‘a little body of experimental and practical divinity’. He was borrowing from the Dissenters who generally used their hymn books in Routley’s phrase as “word in Roman Catholicism’ they were intended as much to be read and prayed, as sung.If the verse anthologists have underestimated Charles Wesley, the hymnologists and musicologists have not. Dr John Julian in his Dictionary of Hymnology described him as perhaps, taking quantity and quality into consideration ‘the great hymn writer of all ages.’ W.J. Courthope in his History of English Poetry called him, ‘the most admirable devotional lyric poet in the English language.’ Bernard Manning gave high praise to A collection of hymns, for the use of the people called Methodists almost entirely Charles’ work.Today these hymns have to struggle against three disadvantages; the first is the limited repertoire of the average congregation; the second is the heresy spread by the advertising media that the latest is best and the dead have nothing to offer; the third is the demand for gender inclusive language and the modernising of the personal pronouns, that may not do much damage to the prose of the liturgy but it does seriously damage poetry. In the long run John Wesley has proved quite correct when he wrote, ‘Many gentlemen have done my brother and me, though without naming us, the honour to reprint many of our hymns. Now they are perfectly welcome to do so provided they print them just as they are but I desire they would not attempt to mend them, for really they are not able’. Thank-you[Applause] Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Dublin City Council has acquired a unique Dublin Fire Brigade Ambulance log-book which covers the period of the Easter Rising, 24-29 April 1916. The log-book relates to Tara Street Fire Station and records hour-by-hour the response of the Dublin ambulance service to those injured in the Rising.

Ancestry Library Edition is now available for consultation free of charge in the Reading Room of Dublin City Library & Archive. Among other items, this contains official records for the First World War, including: British Army World War I Service Records 1914-20British Army World War I Pension Records 1914-20;British Army World War I Medal Rolls Index Cards 1914-20;UK Soldiers died in the Great War 1914-1919It is a very useful resource if you are searching for Irish soldiers in the Great War. 

There is a goldmine of information and untold stories within the collections of Dublin City Archives.  This STORYBOX created for Explore Your Archive Week 2014 gives examples of how we can use a variety of different archival collections to uncover the history of a particular area or street across different centuries. The STORYBOX focuses on examples of archival sources which relate to Parnell Square (previously known as Rutland Square), one of Dublin’s finest Georgian Squares. The original items referred to below can be viewed by calling to Dublin City Library and Reading Room in person.Please bring photographic id with you on your first visit so that we can issue you with a research card.Explore Your Archive Box from Archives & Records Association on Vimeo.Source 1: Wide Street Commission Minute Book 1789-1790 (WSC/Mins/09) and the Wide Street Commission Map CollectionThe Collection: The Wide Street Commission established by an Act of Parliament in 1757 was the first urban planning authority in Europe. Its function was to provide “Wide and Convenient Streets” for Dublin and it had extensive powers to acquire property by compulsory purchase, develop new streets, demolish buildings and impose design standards on building lots which were sold to developers. The Commission had a major impact on development of Georgian Dublin between 1757- 1851Storybox Item: The Minute Book of the Wide Street Commissioners show details of a meeting held on 27 March 1790 in which plans for new street to be built between Rutland Square and Dorset Street are discussed. The new street is to be called Fredrick Street and the adjoining Barley Field is also to be developed. See:  WSC/Mins/09  pp 179-180 and pp 208.Related Records: The Wide Street Commissioners produced over 900 maps in the course of their work, many of which have been conserved and can be viewed at our Wide Street Commission Maps Image Gallery.  The WSC Map collection includes WSC/Maps/327 and WSC/Maps/245/1-2 which relate directly to the development of Barley Field and Fredrick Street in the vicinity of Parnell Square in 1790.  These three maps were conserved in 2014 with funding received from the Heritage Council of Ireland under the Heritage Management Grant Scheme 2014.WSC/Map/245/1 includes a map of proposed new street adjoining Rutland Square and a survey of the Barley Field with details of rental agreements and leaseholders.Further Research: A vast collection of records relating to Wide Street Commission (including maps, minute books, deeds & leases, architectural drawings) are held in Dublin City Archives. These records can help uncover the history of many streets and buildings within Dublin City. Search and browse the Archive of the Wide Street Commission Maps online. Source 2: Dublin City Archaeological Archive/ Moore Street/Parnell Street, Dublin 1 (98E0357) CollectionThe Collection: The Dublin City Archaeological Archive was established in 2010 to preserve the records created by archaeologists during and after an excavation.  It can include items such as maps, drawings, find sheets, photographs, slides and reports which provide important information on a site –and these records are particularly significant if the site is subsequently developed over.DCAA.01.06 related to an excavations carried out by Edmond O’Donovan of Margaret Gowen & Co. Limited on a block at the north-eastern corner of Moore Street and Parnell Street between January and April of 2003 in advance of the construction of a hotel and other retail outlets by Shelbourne Developments.Storybox Item. DCAA.01.06/Box 1/Folder 6: Archaeological Excavations Moore Street/Parnell Street, Dublin 1 Report- Edmond O'Donovan (24 May 2004)The final report describes the four phases of activity uncovered at the site: 1) the medieval phase, 2) use of site as brickfield in early eighteenth century, 3) construction of Georgian Houses between 1750-1770  and 4) occupation & alterations of site from 1770 to 2003. One of the most significant finds at the site was a wooden toy boat c.1750-1780.Further research: There are summary details of all DCAA collections available on our website, with full collection lists available on the Dublin City Archaeological Database in the Reading Room. Artefacts found during excavation are deposited with the National Museum of Ireland.Source 3: Dublin City Council Minute Book 1911The Collection: The indexed Dublin City Council Minutes (1841 –1997) record the various meetings of the municipal authority. Many buildings and streets (public and residential) are discussed. In some cases the streets under discussion may also be referred to in the Dublin City Council Reports (1841 –1997).Storybox Item: Dublin City Council Minute Book 1911The Minutes of meeting held on 12 June 1911  record that the postponement of the motion ‘…that the names of Rutland Square and Cavendish Row be changed to Parnell Square in recognition of the services to Ireland of the great Irish chief, Charles Stuart Parnell”. See item 455, p 321.The Minutes of meeting held on 9 October 1911, record that a letter was submitted by the Secretary, Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, embodying a protest from the Governors of that institution against the proposed changing of names of Rutland Square and Great Britain Street. See item 718, p 484.Further Research: Dublin City Council Minute Books (1841 –1997) and Dublin City Council Reports (1841 –1997) are available in the Reading Room.Source 4: Dublin City Council/Voters Registration Book, 1939-1940. Volume 3About: Electoral Lists (also called Voters' Registration) list the names and addresses of people eligible to vote in Dáil elections, local elections and from the 1970s in European Elections. The Franchise section within Dublin City Council is responsible for the production of the register of electors who reside within the Corporation's administrative boundaries.  The information contained within electoral lists can be used to complements and supplements sources such as Thom’s Street Directories & 1901 and 1911 Census to identify residents of a street at a particular time.Storybox item: Voters Registration Book, 1939-1940. Volume 3, Electoral Lists for Parnell Square East, Polling District-HH, Registration unit- Rotunda, pp39-43.Further Research: Electoral Registers from 1908-1983 (with some gaps) are held by Dublin City Archives and are accessible to the public in the following ways: Electoral Registers for 1908-1912 and 1915 have been digitised and made fully searchable and can be viewed for free online at databases.dublincity.ie. Electoral registers for 1937-1964 have been digitised and made fully searchable and can be viewed on databases in our Reading Room. Electoral Registers from 1965-1983 can be viewed in hard copy format in the Reading Room and are searchable by address only. Source 5: Dublin City Interiors of Importance, Volume 5Collection: In 1983 Dublin Corporation commissioned An Taisce to carry out a survey to identify buildings whose interiors might be worthy of ‘listing’ under the provisions of the Local Government (Planning and Development Act) 1976.  The results of this survey were published in six volumes titled Dublin Interiors of Importance (William Garner, editor) in the mid-1980s. The volumes provide written descriptions, floor plans, photographs and survey notes of some of Dublin’s most familiar buildings, especially of Georgian or earlier design.Storybox Item: Dublin City Interiors of Importance, Volume 5 includes floor plans, photographs and notes for No. 4 Parnell Square, No. 18-20 Parnell Square,  No 22 Parnell Square and No. 33 Parnell Square.  See pp 74-79.Further Research: All six volumes of Dublin Interiors of Importance can be viewed in the Reading RoomSource 6: Dublin City Council Development Plan 1999The Collection: Dublin City Development Plans have been a statutory requirement under various Local Government Planning Acts since 1963. The plan sets out policies and objectives for the development of the City over a six year period. It reflects consultation with the general public and other interested bodies. The making of the Dublin City Development Plan, Local Area Plans, any variation of a plan and any material contravention of the plan is a function reserved to the elected members of the Council.Storybox Item: Dublin City Development Plan 1999 contains reference to Parnell Square on pp74, 144, and 242.Further Research: Dublin City Council Development Plans 1955 –2011 can be accessed in the Reading Room. The Dublin City Development Plan 2011-2017 and the proposed new Dublin City Development Plan 2016-2022 can be viewed on the Dublin City Council website. See also www.parnellsquare.ie which has a wealth of information on the history of Parnell Square and on the project to develop the Parnell Square Cultural Quarter.

'Becoming John Gray', a talk by Jerusha McCormack as part of Dublin: One City, One Book 2010.

The Dublin-based Lepracaun Cartoon Monthly was launched in May 1905 by Thomas Fitzpatrick, one of Ireland’s foremost cartoonists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eclipsing in its lifespan all previous Irish comic periodicals, the Lepracaun would run for almost a decade. This meant that the publication was in a position to offer a vivid cartoon chronology of the great 1913-14 Dublin strike and lockout, although there would be no contribution from the Lepracaun’s founder and most prolific cartoonist, with the Cork-born Thomas Fitzpatrick having passed away in July 1912 at the age of 52.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Dr William Murphy on the relationship between the GAA and revolutionary nationalism in Dublin in the years 1913-1923. The talk was part of the Sport and the City Seminar held in Dublin City Library and Archive on 11th September, 2010. Listen to the lectureWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Dr William Murphy charts the relationship between the GAA and revolutionary nationalism in Dublin in the years 1913-1923.  Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 11 September 2010, as part of the Sport and the City Seminar.Good Morning. First of all before I start I’d like to thank Ellen Murphy, and Mary Clark (Dublin City Archives) for inviting myself and also inviting Paul along to talk today, and wish them the best of luck in the enterprise, which is the Dublin City Sporting Archive. It is very important for myself and Paul who are involved professionally in the writing of sport that archives are developed because sports history is really at its early stages in Ireland as a professional activity and without archives we are not going to make much progress. So again I’d like to wish them all the best with their project.So today, I am going to talk about a subject that is comparatively widely written in terms of sports history in Ireland and that’s the relationship between the GAA and Nationalism and very specifically the relationship between the GAA and the Irish Revolution. When people wrote about the GAA in its early years they stressed constantly that members of the Gaelic Athletic Association had contributed in disproportionate numbers what they regarded as the struggle for Irish independence. So this is a quote from the Irish Independent of January 1923:In 1916 when Pearse and his companions unfurled the flag of liberty, the men of the hurling and football fields rolled in from far and near, and it is no exaggeration to say that they formed the backbone of that company... When the Anglo-Irish war developed, go where you would up and down the country, it was difficult to point to even one man, other than a hurler or footballer, who took any prominent part in the fight.In the intervening years much of this image has lingered. The link between radical separatism and the GAA was symbolically re-enforced during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the 1916 Rising in 1966 when, according to Mary Daly, ‘it is evident that the GAA tried to claim a special place, as the inspiration for the Rising and a major force in keeping the flame of republican idealism alive.’ This was manifest in the fact that Croke Park and also Casement Park in Belfast hosted enormous pageants during the ’66 celebrations and also on All-Ireland hurling final day in 1966 the Central Council welcome 1916 Veterans to Croke Park and in the Programme they said ‘in having as its guests today the Veterans of the 1916 Rising. Their presence symbolises the indivisibility which has always existed between this Association and the aspiration of a free and Gaelic Ireland.’So there is no doubt that many members of the GAA were active in Sinn Féin or the Irish Volunteers during the revolutionary period. These included a significant cohort of energetic men who took on leading roles in both the GAA and the revolutionary movement. In the case of Dublin, perhaps the most famous of them is Harry Boland, who was chairman of the Dublin County Board between 1911 and 1918. Here you can see Harry is here with the Dublin hurling team of 1917. But he wasn’t alone Dan McCarthy of Terenure Sarsfields Club who went on to be chairman of the Leinster Council of the GAA between 1919 and 1921 and President of the GAA between 1921 and ‘24) was another. McCarthy was a prominent member of Sinn Féin and he was elected in 1922. And also Thomas Ashe in north county Dublin originally a Kerry man but living in north county Dublin, was very prominent in both promoting revolutionary nationalism and the GAA in the north of the county. Obviously Ashe died in 1917 on hunger strike. In other parts of the country there were other figures, there was J. J. Walsh in Cork, there was Austin Stack in Kerry, and there was Eoin O’Duffy in Monaghan who combined this enthusiasm for the GAA with an enthusiasm for revolutionary nationalism. Eoin was always involved in organising rather than playing. Fearghal McGarry who has written a biography of Eoin O’Duffy, has commented that"there were certainly similarities between O’Duffy’s role in the GAA and IRA, both of which involved constant travelling, organizing, encouraging activity where little existed, promoting co-operation between rival parishes, and mediating local disputes. It was an immense advantage to O’Duffy in his latter role that he knew, and was known to, the young Gaels of Ulster. "It is thought that Harry Boland and his brother, Gerry, were recruited into the IRB in 1904 when they were approached after a hurling match by the referee, Maurice F. Crowe, who was a Limerick man who again combined IRB activity with involvement in the GAA. The Bolands would have been predisposed to join the IRB, their father had been a prominent IRB member. These men were committed to the success of the GAA, but they also utilised the association to promote revolutionary nationalism as I’ve said. Just as cricket matches had facilitated Fenians in their activities in the 1860s, so too the GAA provided cover for the meetings and movements of radical nationalists during the revolution: they often saved on train fares by travelling on match-day specials. It provided a network of contacts, a school in the rhetoric of Irish nationalism, a recruiting ground. Dan McCarthy remembered that IRB members within the GAA worked in Leinster counties to get IRB men elected to become the county delegates to the Leinster Council so that then when they came to Leinster council meetings in Dublin they could exchange IRB business as well as GAA business.But that’s not the whole story. In his analysis of nationalist politics in the counties of Sligo, Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon and Westmeath in the years before the 1916 Rising, Michael Wheatley has argued that ‘virtually no trace . . . can be seen locally’ of the control which the IRB appeared to exert at national and provincial levels of the GAA. Wheatley records that the RIC County Inspector for Roscommon reported in April 1913 that ‘The GAA clubs are chiefly concerned with their games and do not display disloyalty, but that is not saying that they are loyal.’ David Fitzpatrick was surely close to the mark when he suggested that what the [Gaelic] League and GAA had to offer the politicians they offered indiscriminately to Sinn Féiners and Redmondites alike: zest for Ireland, tangible rather than rhetorical reminders of Irish nationality, Irish reels, sets, jigs, a few words of Irish, aggressively un-English games.For these reasons Irish party figures remained very active in the association, as well as Sinn Féiners as they too sought to harness the association’s vitality. Irish party loyalists were active in the GAA in Dublin, but in this city and county there seems little doubt that the GAA at least at the higher administrative levels was dominated by an IRB or radical nationalist faction which included individuals such as Boland, McCarthy, Crowe, another man called Jack Shouldice who went on to be secretary of the Leinster Council, and a man called Maurice Collins, who was the Geraldine’s Club representative on the County Board.In late 1913 and 1914, GAA members and clubs in some areas were swept up in the initial wave of enthusiasm for volunteering in the country. Jack Shouldice estimated that about a third of those who attended the first meeting of the Irish Volunteers at the Rotunda here in Dublin on 25 November 1913 were GAA members. But he went on to note that he thought that maybe half were Gaelic League, so the Gaelic League was more important, he felt than the GAA in terms of nationalism. The association did not officially endorse the Irish Volunteers, but in January 1914 James Nowlan, who was President of the GAA, advised every member to join the Volunteers and ‘learn to shoot straight.’ The Volunteers branch formed in Fairview-Drumcondra area, drilled at the Clann na hÉireann hurling club grounds in Ballybough and Clann na hÉireann had close links with the IRB. All over the country GAA matches were facilitated Volunteer displays. In Con Short’s view this was mutually beneficial for both the GAA and the radical nationalist movement. So the Volunteers turned up and they paid in and they provided a crowd for the GAA and the GAA provided volunteers in return. On the other hand, other people have argued that they got in each other’s way. So for instance in Wicklow and Kildare some of the GAA people complained that their calendar was being constantly disrupted by their members going off on Volunteer activities. So it should not be taken for granted, therefore, that the cultural and political forms of nationalism always complemented each other. In some cases active membership of the GAA militated against participation in the Irish Volunteers, as the GAA and Irish Volunteers competed for the time and commitment of the activists. In Towards Ireland Free, by Liam Deasy, Deasy makes this comment that he did not join the Irish Volunteers for a considerable period because "my activities in the G.A.A. and the Gaelic League at the time were so absorbing as to prevent my feeling any immediate urgency about joining the new movement. Besides, I felt that by being actively engaged in the two organizations mentioned I was already serving my country in a useful manner.2Cornelius Murphy was from Cork and he was very involved in the Volunteers, and he remembered ‘Ninety per cent of the GAA was just GAA, the other 10% was good. I belonged to two GAA clubs when the Volunteers started, and I was the only member of either of the two clubs who joined the Volunteers.’ Several leading members of the Volunteers complained about their members going off to play matches, when they should have been as far as they were concerned, going off drilling etc.Prior to September 1914 involvement in the GAA and the Irish Volunteers was not synonymous with radical separatism. This is illustrated by the case of Laurence Roche of Bruree, Co. Limerick. Roche had been chairman of the Limerick County Board and he had been that county’s representative on Munster Council, before becoming chairman of the Volunteers in Limerick city. But when the Volunteers split with the arrival of World War I, they split over whether they should assist the war effort or not. Roche joined the Royal Munster Fusiliers and in May 1916 he was commended for his bravery in leading the capture of Guillemont, In various places around the country you get reports of club activities being disrupted because so many of their members have joined the British Army. In The Irish Independent they reported a Gaelic football match on St Patrick’s Day 1916 at the Phoenix Park between teams representing the RIC and the Dublin Fusiliers. The fact that a number of counties contemplated a proposal to lift the ban on GAA members joining the British Army at this point kind of gives an indication that this may have been a problem for the GAA. That they felt they were losing sufficient number of members that they had to lift the ban. Unfortunately a systematic study of GAA members’ involvement in the British Army during the 1st World War just does not exist, so we cannot be absolutely clear on what the picture is.The extent to which GAA members participated in the 1916 Rising, however, has received more detailed attention. Willie Nolan’s recent history of Dublin GAA, published in 2005, contains a list of GAA players in the county who were among the rebels. This comes to a total of 302 players from fifty-three identified clubs. In the past this list would have been accompanied by ritual repetition of the conclusion that the GAA was at the forefront of providing men for revolutionary movement. But this is not done in this book; there is a good reason why. We know that about 1500-1800 people participated in the Rising in Dublin. So this means that (allowing for the participation of some GAA players from outside of Dublin) the overwhelming majority of those who fought in 1916 were not members of the GAA. GAA players were more likely to have participated than many other sectors of Dublin society, yet the rebellion remained a minority sport, even for them. At the time, however the authorities were inclined to suspect that the GAA were deeply involved, many leading figures were interned, but the GAA while acknowledging that members had participated, denied any responsibility for the Rising.In general, the association – as an association – was wary of running ahead of the political attitudes of the majority of the nationalist public and managed to retain the loyalty of most nationalists, whether they were radical or constitutional. This does not mean that there were not local splits: Eoghan Corry suggests for instance, in County Kildare, that in Monasterevin there were local Sinn Féin and Irish Parliamentary Party clubs founded. And there was a real danger of a split nationally, at least between 1914 and 1918 when the Irish Parliamentary Party’s was destroyed. There was a secessionist organisation set up called the National Association of Gaelic and Athletic Clubs. It grew out of a dispute between the Kickham’s club in Dublin and the Dublin County Board. There were various reasons for it, but one of the sets of people who were attracted to this new association were those who were worried that the GAA was becoming too radical in its nationalism.Recent historians of Sinn Féin have recognised an important overlap between membership of the post-Rising party and the GAA. In Clare, for instance David Fitzpatrick acknowledged that the GAA had a role in facilitating Sinn Féin across the county. The Clare County Board began the process that saw de Valera nominated to contest the by-election of July 1917 and during its march to the All-Ireland football final of that year the Clare team entered the field, round after round, under the banner ‘Up de Valera’. More recently, Peter Hart has suggested that a significant correlation can be found between G.A.A. and Sinn Féin membership as of July 1917 but this got smaller and smaller as the revolution progressed. That the GAA maintained a recognizable distance between itself and Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers is probably suggested by the fact that the Government actually did not ban the association. Whereas it banned obviously Sinn Féin, it banned Cumann na mBan and it banned the Gaelic League, all these associations, but it never banned the GAA.The use of hurleys by drilling volunteers who did not possess rifles, was a common sight from the foundation of the Volunteers right through to 1917-1918. This gave the impression to the authorities or reinforced the impression that there was a close association between the GAA and the Volunteers. When a meeting demanding the release of the prisoners organised for Beresford Place, here in Dublin, on 10 June 1917, the Government banned it. The meeting went ahead, the DMP moved in to stop it and in the resulting fracas Inspector John Mills’ skull was fractured and he died within hours. The weapon used, it was reported, was a hurley. So this prompted the much talked about, but little enforced ban on carrying hurleys other than for sporting use which was instituted in the summer of 1917. Despite the fact that the first convention of the Irish Volunteers after the Rising was held at Croke Park , historians of the IRA have not been convinced of the importance of the GAA to the military wing of Irish nationalism. In major studies of Irish Volunteer activity in this period, Joost Augusteijn and Peter Hart have reached similar conclusions. Basically they argue that there was no direct relationship between the local strength of the Irish / Ireland movement and violent republicanism. And this is supported by some statements: this is from Sean Clifford, who was an IRA member in Limerick, who said:men who spoke only English and who never had much time for Gaelic Games, attacked and beat the enemy whereas those who claimed a monopoly on Irish patriotism, namely the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League were nowhere to be seen when it came to a fight.On the other hand this may hide regional patterns. Particular IRA leaders probably made extensive use of their GAA for recruitment; Eoin O’Duffy, for instance certainly did in Monaghan. In summer 1918 O’Duffy travelled to Wattlebridge to address the local GAA team and seek enrolments in the Irish Volunteers. Francis Tummon rememberedOn this particular Sunday there were about thirty boys of all ages [playing football] but only about twenty assembled to listen to O’Duffy ... His words left a lasting impression on me and, I’m sure, on all present. There were at least half a dozen who listened to O’Duffy that Sunday afternoon but never joined the Volunteers. The practice game of football from which we were summoned to listen to Gen. O’Duffy was resumed, but the foundation of a company was laid.So it’s quite interesting that there were thirty potential boys and maybe a dozen listened to him. So it’s important but then there are lots of members who have no interest. Such contrasting examples illustrate the importance of treating with scepticism the notion that the GAA was politically and nationally minded above all else. Phil O’Neill’s comment that ‘Our National Athletic Association nobly contributed its quota of heroic men, who left aside their camans for more deadly weapons’ should be balanced by an acknowledgement that there were countless ordinary members of the GAA, obscure men, who chose the hurley rather than the rifle.Inside prisons and camps Gaelic games occupied an important place. The boredom of prison-life and the dearth of other activities ensured that even sceptics adopted Gaelic games. Todd Andrews, for instance who was a soccer man found himself having to play football in the Curragh Camp. He didn’t particularly enjoy the experience; he thought it was far too rough. In more conventional prisons it was harder to play; there wasn’t so much space for games so there was a lot of handball and rounders played. But in Mountjoy in 1921, the women prisoners approached the Governor C. A. Munro, and they asked that they be allowed to play some game at exercise while at exercise such as Camog – which I understand is a kind of hurley for women – or football. As a matter of fact a football has been sent in for one of these prisoners, neither game seems suitable but as regards the football I gathered that all they wanted to do was to kick it about in their exercise ring.And eventually he agreed that they be allowed to play football but not camogie. It was a pretty consistent approach within the prisons because hurleys could be used as a weapon, there was a fear, whereas the footballs were fairly harmless as far as they were concerned. These same women actually, several of them escaped within a couple of months, they used the football match as a sort of diversion, they made lots of noise playing the football match while some of the others basically scarpered out of the wing, over the wall and out of the prison. In fact the governors often encouraged the playing of these games because they dissipated the prisoners’ energies which might otherwise be used basically to attack them or the warders or to organise hunger strikes or whatever. In writing about his prison experiences in Mountjoy during the Civil War, Peadar O’Donnell noted that a rising tide of unrest would suddenly dissipate when ‘a football match seemed to catch on, the crowd cheered, and our ridiculously small exercise ground sated the fever out of our minds.’So you have lots of activists who are members of the GAA who are overlapping in their activity but again to stress that they very rarely used the organisation as a whole as a weapon in their struggle against the British state. But they did do it occasionally. The most significant example of this occurred when Harry Boland persuaded the annual congress of 1919 to confirm a proposed ban on all civil servants who took the oath of allegiance; he famously told the delegates that the GAA ‘owed its position to the fact that it had always drawn the line between the garrison and the gael’. Now historians have begun to draw more subtle conclusions. Recent scholars of the ban, for instance, have pointed out that a sizeable minority of delegates supported an amendment proposed by Jack Shouldice, which would have considerably circumscribed the impact of the ban. Nonetheless the congress banned all civil servants who took the oath by a clear majority of fifty votes to thirty-one. Reactions around the country seem to have been very mixed; some counties seem to have been very disappointed by this decision and there was an interesting debate at the County Convention in Wexford GAA in mid-March 1919 when the delegates unanimously supported an appeal circulated by Dublin Civil Servants that this ban not be introduced. So one of the things that is striking is that there is a very mixed pattern around the country when you look at different places. For instance North Wexford the GAA there seems to have been quite intimately associated with radical nationalists, whereas South Wexford less so. Or even if you take a town like Enniscorthy, which Paul has written about, there are several clubs in the town, and you have some clubs who are very associated with the GAA and others, you know, very little.As an organization, perhaps the GAA’s most explicit act of resistance during the revolutionary period came in August 1918. In one of the most successful examples of mass defiance witnessed during the period the GAA defied an attempt to halt football and hurling matches which was instituted by the government in the summer of 1918 as part of a general ban on public meetings, that summer. On 28 June when the DMP tried to stop several games at the Phoenix Park players responded with stones and several were arrested. Then the GAA decided to organise on Sunday, 4 August, what they called Gaelic Sunday, and they would organise matches in every town and parish across the country simultaneously in this mass defiance of the ban. The Irish Independent reported that about thirty matches were organised in Dublin, including two important championship games at Croke Park. It is estimated that over 50,000 people participated in games all over Ireland on that day. The police realised they just did not have the resources to compete with that sort of mass defiance so they backed down.Even if the GAA members are not actively involved, there is an interesting indication of their sympathies in the naming of clubs during this period. So these are clubs in Dublin that were founded in the years 1917 – 1921 and these are just some of them: O’Raghallaigh’s 1916, Brothers Pearse 1917, Con Colbert’s 1917, McDermott, Macken’s, Connolly, Mallin, Ceannt, Malone – all 1916 martyrs either executed subsequently or died during the fighting. Kevin Barry, obviously everyone familiar with, the club was founded almost immediately after his execution in 1920. Michael Fitzgerald died on hunger strike in Cork in 1920, the club was formed in Dublin immediately afterwards. Patrick Moran was executed in 1921. Tormey and Sloan were shot in Ballykinlar internment camp by a guard, very late 1920 / 1921 and almost immediately again you get a club founded using their name. On the other hand you get clubs like Balbriggan Commercials, Clan Eadair in Howth who are just using local names. Or generic sports kind of club names Harps, Shamrocks, Rovers, or you get local saints - St Agatha’s, St Brendan’s, and you get clubs still associated with workplaces, so the Foundry Gaels is in Inchicore and it’s related to those who worked in the railway.Throughout the period the GAA organised matches in aid of prisoners and this was one way in which people who were sympathetic but didn’t want to become actively involved, they could represent supporting the prisoners as an act of philanthropy rather than necessarily a political act. So the GAA organised tournaments across the country, in support of prisoners, and they consistently organised matches throughout the period. Obviously the most famous of such matches organised in support of Prisoner’s Aid was the match held in Croke Park on 21st November 1920, which is the match on Bloody Sunday, when crown forces surrounded Croke Park and opened fire and the figure is still disputed as to how many people were killed but eleven on the day and two subsequently is usually the figure given. I hear of people on the day subsequent praying on the pitch at the spot where Michael Hogan died. Despite the mayhem and the confusion on that day £160 was still, after they went around and collected up all the bags that people had dropped as they were scurrying away, there was still £160 there to hand over to the prisoners’ aid.The successful completion of GAA competitions – both at local and national levels – became very difficult in the years 1918 to 1923. Jack Shouldice who was secretary of the Leinster Council, in this long quote, I’m probably running over time so you can read the quote [on the slide] "stressed the difficulty they had but they still managed to keep going:This was not an easy matter. Contact had to be kept up with the different Counties, meetings of the Council held, fixtures made and carried out at different points. Difficulties had to be overcome in the way of transport, suitable venues arranged, accommodation for teams etc. We managed to keep going, however, and had games played in Athy, Kilkenny, New Ross, Portlaoighise, Drogheda and other centres. Some obstruction was experienced at a few venues where we had visits from Crown Forces when searchings occurred and threats of arrests and other action were made. The attendances at the games suffered considerably but we kept on . . ."For instance in the same year 1921 there was no Munster senior football championship and only Limerick and Cork contested the hurling, and only twenty-seven delegates attended the annual congress of the GAA in Dublin.The playing calendar wasn’t disrupted as badly Dublin as it was in other places – the senior football championship of 1920 was completed in the summer of 1921, which wouldn’t have been that unusual in that period. But the Fingal Leagues which were important leagues played in the north of the county in this period, they were an important part of the GAA calendar in the north of the county were not played at all in the years 1919 and 1924 . There was much more problems in completing the GAA calendar in counties such as Kilkenny and Tipperary, where for several years in this period there were no championships completed at all. With the truce then of 1921 such disruption ended, at least for a brief time. There are many famous photographs from this period of the troops, and lots of them come from GAA matches actually, here you can see Harry Boland down the end and Michael Collins beside him at a match in Croke Park in September 1921. So there is a general lifting of the mood in the country, matches can be freely organised, those who were on the run can now freely attend games again etc. Obviously with the outbreak of the Civil War in June 1922 this disruption begins again.So a quick conclusion then: now the stories of the GAA have been told from many different perspectives – for different places, by different people, from different ideological standpoints, and with different themes in mind – has the grand narrative emerged? Well, increasing I think one of the points that has to be made is that the picture is very fractured. The GAA in some counties offered more active support to the revolution than in others. Dublin may have been one of these counties. Perhaps even more importantly, however, some clubs tended to be centres of support for the revolution while many others were not. This is certainly true of Dublin. Historians of the GAA will continue to emphasize the strength the association drew from, and the contribution it made to, Irish nationalism, but, on balance, it seems that revolutionary activists and their opponents had more impact upon the GAA than the association or its members had upon the revolution: the GAA appears to have been a playground of the revolution more often than it was a player in the revolution. Thank-you very much. Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Dr Roisín Higgins on the rich history of Dublin's sporting grounds, pitches and clubs and the stories they tell about the social, economic and political life of city and its people. The talk was part of the Sport and the City Seminar held in Dublin City Library and Archive on 11th September, 2010. Listen to the lectureWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, 'Where Dubliners have played', Dr Roisín Higgins relates the rich history of Dublin's sporting grounds, pitches and clubs and what they tell us about the social, economic and political life of city and its people.  Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 11 September 2010, as part of the Sport and the City Seminar.Thanks very much for the invitation to speak. As Aideen said I work on the Irish Sporting Heritage Project so I’m always interested in information on particularly grounds. It’s the built heritage that I’m interested in but those grounds contain stories and histories so it’s always great for me to be able to speak to different groups of people who will have experience. It’s right across the country but actually I haven’t done enough work on Dublin yet so any information that comes in I’d be very grateful for.The most striking new building on the Dublin skyline is of course the Aviva stadium. I’ve been told by people who have done - is it called the Dublin Eye or the wheel? – that when you look down it’s just magnificent this new stadium. As Lansdowne Road, it was the oldest rugby ground in Europe, and first hosted athletics in 1872. The original stadium was a multi-sports venue, which included a cinder track for athletics, cricket pitch, croquet green, three football pitches and facilities for archery and lawn tennis. I’ve no photos of that or sketches of that; I’d love to see what it looked like as a multi-sports venue at that time. But now that site on Lansdowne Road has been transformed into a remarkable piece of twenty-first century architecture. The Sunday Tribune last week noted that for the cost of saving Anglo-Irish Bank the country could have built twenty-five state-of-the-art hospitals, or twenty Aviva Stadiums. It’s more expensive than a hospital; €410 million the Aviva Stadium cost.So it’s an obvious part of the built sporting heritage of the city and it can be seen clearly from several vantage points. But some other significant venues are almost hidden from public view, while others have almost vanished altogether. Actually this is part of the evolution from Lansdowne Road to the Aviva Stadium that concrete grandstand very much of its time built in 1925 and then just before demolition and the process of this magnificent glass structure. I remember whenever Castlecourt or maybe it was the Waterfront Hall in Belfast was built and it was just between ceasefires I think and no body could believe that anybody would build a glass structure in Belfast made of glass. It’s a sign of a peaceful society that you could have a signature building in your city built of glass.But that grandstand actually echoes, the one at Lansdowne road echoes in some ways this is the grandstand in Baldoyle Racecourse. Racing in Baldoyle began in 1829 on the Deer Park, on a course laid out by racing enthusiast and landowner, Thomas, Third Earl of Howth. There was a slight hiatus then in the 1840s but racing returned to Baldoyle in 1853. The site was perfect as it was served by Drogheda and Howth Railway Company, which regularly sponsored races. The races at Baldoyle became hugely popular. They were cheap to attend, and the racecourse was not enclosed, so there were also popular with hawkers, tricksters and pickpockets who could work the crowds. And one of the reasons for enclosing sports grounds through the course of the 19th century was to keep the tricksters and hucksters out or at the very least make money out of the money they were going to make. So that regulation of the populace, of those who assembled at racetracks was very much part of the development of sporting sites throughout the 19th century. In the twentieth century, Baldoyle continued to have an important place in Ireland’s sporting history and its reinforced concrete stand (by Donnelly, Moore and Keatinge in 1919) heralded the beginning of the influence of modernism on sporting architecture. This is the first of its kind in Ireland and it was built for Baldoyle in 1918, that bold, plain concrete appearance was radical. But in 1973 the insurers could no longer insure the grandstand and so in part because of that racing ceased at Baldoyle in the 1970s. And now the area, there is an old, we have one hoof of it stands here, you can see on the left and on right - amazingly I think Carlow Rugby Club bought the jockey changing rooms in 1972 and moved them themselves from Baldoyle to Carlow, and they are still there. It’s a lovely little corrugated iron building and we still have that left from the very famous, one of the most famous racecourses in the world and now these are all that remain. There are two thousand houses on the site where Baldoyle racecourse used to be.There was racing as well in the Phoenix Park. Racing began there in 1901, and the Phoenix Plate for two-year-olds was held over five furlongs until 1913 and was the richest race in the country, surpassing even the Irish Derby at the time. But the popularity of racing in Phoenix Park dropped after its heyday in the 1950s, and ceased altogether in 1990. The land is also now apartment blocks.So, the history of sporting sites in Dublin shifts and changes – and this was particularly true of the years of the boom, and it seemed to us that no body was paying any attention as apartment blocks gobbled all before them. That development across the city, nobody - well people did I suppose - I often quote John Healy “but no shouted stop!” So it was clear that a great deal of the Irish sporting landscape was changing and, not only were we not recording this change, we had no clear record of what had been there in the first place. So you can have - it was possible to have vast tracts, the amount of land a racecourse takes up, and that could go and houses could be put up over it and nobody had any real record, it would just disappear from view.So, in setting up the Irish Sporting heritage Project, which was the brainchild of Mike Cronin of Boston College-Ireland, our first aim was to compile a record of the sporting sites of Ireland. The Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport was already attempting to audit its facilities through county councils but we were attempting to do something slightly different: we wanted to map the sporting landscape of Ireland over the last 150 years. Almost impossible a task.We have approached the project as historians and that makes a difference, it gives a different dimension to the audit of facilities that the county councils have undertaken. We see sporting sites as social spaces so we want to reach an understanding of their significance in Ireland historically, politically, economically and culturally. We want to retrieve the stories that these locations hold, the memories, the tensions, the social networks and hierarchies, which they have reinforced or challenged. And actually the two papers which have preceded this one are perfect examples of the way in which sporting clubs and sporting sites operate within communities and form ties and form associations, but create outlets and networks, and as Hilary said at the end of her paper they also reflect, and then also Ciarán very clearly laid out with Bohemian the way in which they reflect the broader history of the city. This is not simply a history of one small group of people they all have to contacts into the broader society and we wanted to use the sites in which sport had been played to tell these stories and to link into the broader social, political and economic history of Ireland.So I’ve got a website, I’ll just do a little plug for it. The Irish Sporting Heritage website irishsportingheritage.com. And you can see we have the database up and this is what it looks like. It’s done by county and by sport, so you can put in search ‘hockey in Dublin’ or ‘tennis in Dublin’ or anywhere around the country. Or you can put in your keyword. So please look it up and if your club is not properly represented or not represented at all or if there is something you know about I’d be really delighted to have the information.And it is important that these, that these sites are recorded I think. I was looking recently through a history of architecture in Dublin and I looked up the Phoenix Park and they have listed every gate lodges and monument in the Phoenix Park and they don’t mention sport. It seemed extraordinary to me. So there’s a real blindness. And I’m also putting together a dictionary entry for the Dictionary of Irish Architecture on sporting sites and it’s really, really hard to get the information. But the information, people in Ireland hold that information; it’s held informally in their heads, in their attics, in their memories and histories. It’s not held in official places so that’s why this archive is hugely important because it will be a common place where people can come to retrieve that information.So I am just going to show you two maps. I won’t spend too much time on them, but I really like these two maps that’s why I’m going to show you them, to give you a sense of how it works on a national scale and then I’ll talk specifically about Dublin. This map I found; 1916 there’s somebody sitting there with their ballpoint pen, it’s like a little manuscript because there’s nothing else to do in 1916 but put all the golf clubs in Ireland onto a map and you can see really clearly on this map how important the railway networks were to the development of sport in Ireland. So that when we think of the sporting map of Ireland we can see multiple maps. It’s all about associations and transport links and networks. And there you have it very clearly I think there are only three that aren’t located very close to a railway line. And this one here as well in terms of the sporting map and landscape. I went through all the sporting calendars through the 19th century and what you see with the racing calendars, what you see is a much more informal process at the end of the 19th century and eventually becomes much more formalized, so that the number of racecourses becomes reduced, reduced and reduced until I think there are 25 or 30 today. But look this is a an all Ireland map, look at the North East and the North West and what you see now is there were point-to-points throughout Ulster. But the racing calendar when I was going through it I was thinking I’m from County Antrim, I was thinking “I’ve not seen anything from County Antrim in this”. You know obscure places but I thought I’d surely know them. So a sporting map of Ireland is also a religious map of Ireland. It will also tell you a story about the relationship between Presbyterianism and gambling in Ireland. So sport can tell us almost anything we ask of it, you know it can tell us about the position of women in society, it can tell us about class politics, about urban development, about the difference between the shipyard culture in Belfast and the less industrialized aspect of Dublin culture. It tells us all of these stories. So if we map and record it we have a whole new way to approach history.So what kinds of stories are being told by the city? I suppose that’s one of the things I’m going to look at today.I will first say something about the way in which history is impacted into the way in which it’s located in the places where sport has been played, even when the name changes or even when stands are changed one by one, and even when the location itself changes, there still is a traceable memory of sport in that area. I suppose I would be interested to hear what you think of that; I’m not saying anything definitive, I’m just throwing out a few thoughts on it.Then I will look at the relationship between sporting sites and social structures in Dublin.Then I will say something briefly about the way in which economic matters influenced the development of sport, and Ciarán has already alluded to some of those things. So it’s just a brief overview and really the interest for me would much more what you have to say and the information that’s held out there, rather than the information I have already.So some places are no longer in existence like Baldoyle racecourse and the Phoenix Park, they are half remembered, and still just about traceable. For others, like the former home of Shamrock Rovers, which was also victim to developers, there is a determination to remember. So the fans erected this little [monument] to Shamrock Rovers, and in my other incarnation, my other interest is the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. So I’ve looked at commemorations to the Rising around the country, and I have to say that challenges many of them in its commitment and grandeur, you won’t see a better commemorative monument anywhere in the country really. And it shows these places matter to people, sporting sites matter to the communities in which they take place.So fans do have a strong sense of loyalty to the location and history of the place, if at times, not the name. The Aviva stadium has been described by its architects Populous as ‘the first truly site responsive stadium of its kind in the world. Its form, mass, materials and aspect are defined by the site and its surrounds’. So they see it very clearly located in that part of Dublin. Dublin rugby fans said very little about the renaming of their national stadium on Lansdowne Road but they might have been more exercised if it had been decided to relocate it to Thomond Park in Limerick. There was some talk of the headquarters of rugby - you know there is a perfectly good stadium in Limerick why don’t we relocate it there. They made enough noise about having to travel to the North side of the city for a few years, I don’t know what they, what rugby fans would have said about having to go to Limerick. So you can see these links to places, sometimes it’s the name, sometimes it’s the place, but it’s no accident where these sporting grounds build up. These grounds are embedded in the social, cultural and economic environment in which they are located. They remain as markers of how the city itself evolved.Speaking of the North side a familiar ground, the headquarters of the GAA. Working on Irish sporting heritage, a lot of people think Irish sporting heritage is just the GAA because it’s the Irish Sport, but it’s not of course, everything that takes place in Ireland is part of the Irish heritage. But this is a photo of Croke Park in 1948. Look Croke Park has seen several phases of development and alteration. It is an extraordinary venue. It’s Europe’s oldest modern stadium, it predates the Stade de France by several years. As well as being the first of its type, the building is probably the largest ever built in Dublin in terms of mass.But of course when Frank Dineen bought the ground in 1908 for £3,250 the site in Jones’s Road was very different. He made improvements to the pitch and added terracing, and the ground had already evolved by the time the GAA bought it off him in 1913 and called it Croke Memorial Park.But Croke Park is a very good example of the way in which a site can modernize without losing its sense of history. It has been renovated many times, most dramatically through the four phase development begun in the 1980s, which culminated in 2005 with the opening of the ‘new Hill 16’, that’s what it was called. Even those words give some idea of how successfully Croke Park has negotiated this transition. How much of the original rubble from Sackville Street remains on Hill 16? There can’t be very much. But it’s important to people that some of it’s there and it’s still on the official tour “This is made up of the rubble from Sackville Street”. No matter how unpopular the Catholic clergy becomes in Ireland and I was watching Sky News about how they couldn’t sell their 2,000 tickets to see the Pope. No matter how unpopular the Catholic Clergy is I can’t imagine how GAA fans would respond to the changing of the name Croke Park; say we don’t want a ground called for an archbishop. That sense of history is very, very important. Or how would people respond if Croke Park was to be moved somewhere else? The GAA knows very well that its place in Irish society is also connected to its place in Irish history. It is a core part of the GAA brand, which is not to diminish it, it’s also a core part of its culture. As with the national stadium, GAA clubs across the country use the naming of grounds and clubs as a way of remembering both historical and religious figures and William Murphy had that brilliant list of the names of clubs in the 1920s in the wake of the Rising and during the War of Independence and currently there’s Parnell Par and the Wild Geese, Thomas Davis and Round Tower, being some of the names that are used to connect GAA grounds and clubs very clearly to the broader history of the country.And that’s Croke Park today. I mean that’s quite, that’s quite a journey really. But there’s the new Nally stand so you keep the name.Think again of an aerial view of Dublin and some of the expansive areas in which sport has been played, they tell us about which groups had access to land in some ways in nineteenth century Ireland. We can see the ways in which formalized sport with its built facilities were first part of an elite leisure culture. And if we think in particular I suppose a good example of that is the Phoenix Park. The first recorded cricket match in Ireland took place in the Phoenix Park in 1792 for a wager of 500 guineas between the Garrison and “All Ireland”. The future Duke of Wellington, who was then the aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant, is reputed to have participated on the Irish side. And with that kind of elite background nevertheless the Phoenix Park is now the most important multi-sports venue of Dublin. Despite the fact that when people tell the history of it and when you do the tours they’ll take you to the Zoo but they won’t take you to the sporting sites. Even though that’s how most people experience the Phoenix Park. So we have this great variety of things happening: motor racing, speed trials – in terms of the modern world coming to Ireland sport was one of the things that really did that. The Gordon Bennett motor race that was held in 1903 in Carlow, Kildare and Laois. They reckon there were about 300 cars in Ireland in 1903 and 350 cars came over on one boat to see the Gordon Bennett Motor Race. I mean imagine what that does to a society. And they had speed trials a lot in the Phoenix Park in the early 20th century and the motor racing in 1929 was the precursor of the Grand Prix and 100,000 people turned up in the Phoenix Park to see that. So the spectacle of sport and the memory, because we all remember the big sporting moments, I’d say people from Tipperary will be talking about last Sunday for a long time; but we remember those moments.Look at this, another space within Dublin that tells you about I suppose where an elite played at one point but now there’s more general access. Games had been prohibited in the college by Trinity’s seventeenth century statues, but to prevent students taking their exercise outside college walls, the authorities acceded to the demands for sporting facilities over the next 300 years and now it’s one of the key things that visitors notice about Dublin when they look over the wall on the 46a and see people playing cricket and they see the Pavilion. So it’s very much part of Dublin’s heritage and it’s history. The cricket ground was laid out there in 1842 and, just over ten years later, the football ground was also laid out in Trinity.Sports such as cricket and rugby, associated at the outset with English public schools and the middle classes, spread across Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and we can see through this, not just the social networks of the landed gentry, the British army and railway lines, but also the way in which Irish society was becoming increasingly regulated, and the way it began to adopt sports that were more formalized. What we can see, at the end of the nineteenth century, is the increasing realization that regulating leisure practices benefits and facilitates regulation of society itself. And the GAA was part of that, it was in the game at a particularly important level.So, it is part philanthropy and part common sense that has some employers sponsor teams and, in the case of Guinness, this eventually led to the opening of Iveagh Grounds on the Crumlin Road in 1928. The Brewery had supported the establishment of the St James Gate Athletic and Cycling Union in 1905 but its activities had been limited by the lack of grounds. The Union petitioned the Brewery in the years following the First World War a Trust was formed and eventually the ground was opened by Rupert Guinness in 1928. And at the point at which it was opened it contained a football field, bowling green, grass courts and a pavilion with a grandstand. So you can see in many ways they are international sports, they have a local history, they are as local as Guinness and all the people who worked in the brewery and were part of that. And sports grounds develop out of lots of different reasons communities coming together, employers coming together, the patronage of the landed gentry, all of these different things and each one has a different story to tell.Just very quickly then to signal some of the cricket, tennis clubs, these aren’t as visible as the stadiums but they are part of the community and they show an incredible commitment on the part of people who participate in them. So you have Clontarf and Leinster and these change and evolve. I suppose that is the difficulty for me really, they change but we haven’t necessarily recorded it. You know they’ll say in club histories, it’ll say the Victorian Pavilion was knocked down due to dry rot in whatever year, and then we’ve got this brilliant…and there’s no photo of the Victorian Pavilion and I could weep really. Or somewhere like Herbert Park there’s some great examples of this horseshoe throwing area and the croquet and bowls and tennis, you know all in this part of South Dublin.Another building and Jimmy Magee apparently mentioned it earlier today, I don’t think I have a slide of it, no I don’t, sorry, The National Boxing Stadium. It tells it’s own story. Now boxing is an international sport and fist fighting, pugilism, was one of the most popular sports I suppose in Ireland in the eighteenth century. It was one of the first sports to have a written code. But by the nineteenth century it was seen as very much an unruly, it was difficult to control so the official view of it was that people who attended fistfights were participating in riotous assemblies. So it became quite difficult for it until the introduction of the Queensbury Rules in 1867. So it’s actually an interesting sport in terms of one that was seen as a working class sport, and the class issue is always there in sport but you know, that working class male aggression, it was a danger and then actually it was something that if it was controlled and put into productive use, could actually serve the society. So and we can see that very much then in Ireland, that shift and we see lots of Catholic Young Men’s Societies build boxing clubs and boxing halls. And then with the formation of the Free State boxing actually became quite a central feature as it was seen as a way of training the new police and army. And I suppose it still has…and Jimmy Magee, I saw him launch the Fighting Irish exhibition in Croke Park, you know Ireland has had more success in boxing than in any other sport and yet it isn’t seen as a mainstream sport, and probably isn’t given the recognition it deserves. Anyway with the formation of the Free State and this recognition that in order to be healthy and in order to maintain the strength of the State it was necessary to maintain the physicality of the police and the army, boxing had a particular focus.In 1936 it was decided to build this National Stadium and Frank Aiken who was the Minister of Defence as was the Police Commissioner so it has support at a very high level. Ground from Griffith Barracks was given over to it and it was opened in 1939. And what Jimmy Magee has said what is the most remarkable thing about it is that this building is the fact, that the Irish Amateur Boxing Association is the only amateur boxing association in the world to control, run and own its own National Arena and Stadium.So you can see you know, from the croquet club in Herbert Park, to the National Boxing Stadium on South Circular Road, the number of stories that that tells us about the city. And when they were building the National Stadium it explicitly said in The Irish Times give money because this is a poor person’s sport, so we need to have money. So there was always a recognition of those divisions of class within the sporting environment.Just then as a last example I’ll say something about a very commercial sport, I’m just throwing out some different kinds of sports that you might not necessarily think about whenever you think about Dublin’s heritage. Greyhound racing is a twentieth century invention. It grew in the 1920s and just spread like wildfire from North America, to Britain through Ireland. Flann O’Brien, writing of it in 1940, said that it ‘seemed to fill perfectly a void which (in the absence of horse-racing at night) had existed in the spiritual and intellectual consciousness of the people’. So that desperate need to be able to gamble in the evenings. But what Greyhound Racing had it was, it was very cheap to develop that’s why it became so popular because it didn’t need its own grounds. So you could put the gambling machines, or the gambling areas and the track around existing football grounds and that’s what they did. And at Shelbourne you’ll see that, you know, it’s seen as the headquarters of Greyhound Racing in Ireland. And it’s always been very commercially driven and now I suppose we can see that very much in the way Greyhound Stadiums have developed. Although there are still some that share tracks, the Galway Greyhound Track shares its grounds. So there are lots of different ways, so you can see also the Speedway that was quite a short lived but quite an important part of Shelbourne’s experience in Dublin.So we can see if we think of the Dalymount Parks, the Croke Parks, Shelbourne, the private clubs, the Phoenix Park, Trinity College, the Boxing Stadium there are hundreds of stories of Dublin’s heritage that really we are trying to collect and get as much information about as we can. And in turn these sites tell us something about the changes in social lives, economics, attitudes to health, and to leisure. So that the history of sport in Dublin is also the story of how the city and its people have grown and developed over time. Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Hilary McDonagh on the history of Maids of the Mountain Hockey Club's and on some of the Maids who made it on and off the pitch. The talk was part of the Sport and the City Seminar held in Dublin City Library and Archive on 11th September, 2010. Listen to the lectureWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, 'The Maids Who Made it' Hilary McDonagh looks at the history of the Maids of the Mountain Hockey Club 1918-1999 and at some of the Maids who made it on and off the pitch.  Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 11 September 2010, as part of the Sport and the City Seminar.Ladies and Gentlemen - Good afternoon, Maids I should also say; it’s nice to see a few of you here.I would like to begin by thanking Dublin City Archives for inviting me here today to talk to you about the Maids of the Mountain Hockey Club. This club was founded in 1918 and after a very interesting and a very illustrious history; we merged with Three Rock Rovers HC in 1999. As Aideen said to mark the 81 year history of this very unique club, myself and another Maid, Órla McKeown, who is sitting in the audience down there along with a number of other Maids and a former Vice- President, we co-wrote the book entitled “The Lilac Years” (the name will become a little bit more obvious as my talk proceeds!). As I said Órla is also here today, so although I’m the one who drew the short straw and is standing up here talking, so any difficult questions you can put them that way!The structure of today’s talk will begin with a look at the start of the Club, the Maids who made it, the history, our achievements (on and off the pitch) as well as the other Maids who made it.... in other walks of life!When myself and Órla began researching the book, we were struck by the fondness that so many Maids looked back on their years with the Club. And we were also struck by the level of deep friendships that were made and continue, even to this day. There was definitely something very special about Maids Hockey Club.When we went to research the book we found that the Official records dated back to 1929 which we thought was actually very impressive. But since then; the book was published 10 years ago, since then we have actually unearthed the records going back right to 1918 so right to the start of the club. We are delighted that they are now being housed in the Dublin City Archives and we’ve been liaising with Ellen and they should be on show I think it’s next year they should be ready for all to see, which is great.So as I said Maid was established in 1918, and if we think of 1918 it was an era of real turmoil in Irish history. We had many young Irish men fighting in France, and indeed many of the early Maids had family members and friends who were actually caught up in this war. It was also only 2 years since the 1916 rising and the year that Sinn Féin won the big landslide General Election. So times were really changing...Now the founder of the Club seems to have been, certainly from the research, the prime mover was a woman called Hilda O’Reilly. She actually herself married a WWI veteran (Gerald Martin). Other names that are associated with the establishment of the club are Mary Martin (who was a sister-in-law of Hilda), a woman called Dorothy Avery (nee McCann), Evie O’Kelly, Mary Mahony, Vera McWeeney (nee Mahony), Dorothy O’Reilly (nee Martin), Nancy Barry (nee Pigot) and Marjorie Martin. The common theme was the link that these people had with Three Rock Rovers HC, as many were wives, sweethearts, sisters or children of Rover players. Hilda herself was born in 1898 and she was the youngest of eight children, and from what we can gather was a happy and optimistic sort of person who seems to have been well liked by most. Hockey was a very popular past time within her own family, and both her father and brothers playing the sport. And indeed, her brother went on to captain the Irish hockey team when it won the Triple Crown in the 1920’s. Hilda herself was a very talented hockey player and she went on to win many caps for her country as well as being given the Captaincy of the Irish Ladies Hockey team in the 1920’s. So I’d say that the O’Reilly parents would have been very proud of their children.Although the name of the Club has been varied in many ways – “Maids of the Mountain”, also known as “Hags of the Hill”, “Hoors of the Moores”, “the Bitches in the Ditches”, (I’m just quoting!) “the Tarts of the Town” and so on. The actual correct name originates from an operetta entitled “The Maid of the Mountains”, which was being performed at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in the August, of 1918. Now other shows that were running at that time were “Society’s Driftwood” and “Bought & Paid For”. But they were deemed not to be obviously appropriate! The operetta itself was written by the Englishman, Harold Fraser – Simson (1878-1944) and it’s a musical comedy in three acts. Very popular – because I’d say none of us have ever heard of it! The colours then chosen, as I said remember ‘The Lilac Years’, the colours chosen to represent this new club were a purple tunic with a mauve shirt, corresponding with the colours of the heather on the mountain.If you played hockey for Maids in the 1929/1930 season, subscriptions were £1-3s-0d, about approximately €1.40 in today’s terms. In 1965 the subscription was £2-15s-0d. After decimalisation the sub had only increased to £3.25 in the 1971/1972 season with a late fine payment of 25p. Things have changed a bit now.The Irish Ladies Hockey Union was founded in 1894, and it actually is the very first women’s hockey association established throughout the world. I know the hockey players here will remember but we hosted the 1994 Hockey World Cup and it was for the reason to celebrate the centenary of the Irish Ladies Hockey Union. By 1918, the sport of ladies hockey was fairly strong but there were a limited number of clubs in existence and they were mainly “closed”, for people who were either past pupils or employees. So with virtually no “open” clubs available we can only assume that Hilda, along with her friends, decided to establish their own clubs. In 1920, with the club having only completed two seasons, Maids won the treble of the Irish Senior Cup, the Leinster Senior Cup and the Leinster Senior League. That’s very impressive for a very new club. But it also shows how silly the other clubs, which were closed were for not having such wonderfully gifted players playing for them.This proved not to be once off and the club became a dominant player in Irish hockey over the next 15 years, winning Irish Senior Cups, Leinster Senior Cups and Leinster League. In 1923, the Club won the Irish Junior Cup, now known as the White Cup with their 2nd XI. So you can see that in a very short space of time the club had increased its playing membership.Now that [text] is quite small and I appreciate that you might not see all that but it was hard to include all the international Maids. Because members of the club achieved a lot of success at both international and interprovincial level with all the provinces represented. In old Irish Hockey we would have 6 provinces but I won’t go into that. A total of 32 Maids achieved international success with the honour of the top-capped player going to Ros Huet who won 22 caps between 1931-47, and then we have a Dorothy Lavery (1920-26) and Joan Shaw (1967-75) who both won 13, and a H. Wallis who won 10 caps between 1923-26.Now bearing in mind the links that Maids had with Three Rock Rovers, it is not surprising that the club’s first grounds were actually that of the grounds of Three Rock Rovers. They were located at Foxrock, near the Stillorgan station on the Harcourt Street Railway line. Those grounds had actually been given to Three Rock Rovers by Sir John Power of Power’s Distillers. In 1930, Three Rock Rovers moved to Londonbridge Road, the Headquarters of the Irish Hockey Union, down in Ringsend. Maids however remained in Foxrock until 1934, when the club submitted a written application to the Men’s Hockey Union for participation in the Templeogue grounds and pavilion scheme. It was a relative of a Maids member, a man called Mr. De Vere White, again a theatre connection, undertook to produce a play at the Peacock Theatre to raise the funds for the grounds guarantee. Maids was the first tenant club of the female part of the Templeogue grounds. Many happy years in Templeogue followed. A pavilion was made available for the use of the tenant clubs with a social area and a changing room. However it was only in the late 1950’s that showering facilities were provided for the women, and thanks for this development was due to the determination of one of the members Joan Matthews who later became Joan Blackmore. Upon joining, she was shocked to find that the showers were only available to the men. So she took her views to the next grounds meeting with very little success. So the following week, she marched, with soap and towel in hand, into the men’s dressing rooms to use their showers. Not surprisingly, the following week a shower had been installed in the women’s changing rooms. By the early 1980’s, Maids’ permanent home at the Templeogue grounds had been targeted by builders for development, some things never change and was finally sold during the 1985/86 season. Maids was homeless at that stage and they travelled around to hired pitches for both training and for matches. Part of the proceeds of the sale was divided between the three ladies tenant clubs. And a development of the Three Rock Rovers grounds at Grange Road gave Maids the opportunity to invest this money, together with the Leinster Ladies Hockey Union in the building of a second artificial pitch at Grange Road. The club moved to Grange Road under a licence agreement with Three Rock Rovers in 1988. Maids remained in Grange Road as licensees until a decision was taken in the spring of 1999 by Maids of the Mountain and Three Rock Rovers to merge their assets and become one club and the name of Maids was lost forever; not really though!When women started to play hockey in the last years of the nineteenth century, the activity was regarded as being somewhat outrageous. It was therefore important to avoid parental and society disapproval, so participating in hockey activities had to be carried out very discreetly. Hockey players wore a hat secured with a pin, a long sleeved blouse buttoned to the neck, a stiff linen collar, a loose flowing cravat type tie and a voluminous skirt long enough to conceal the ankles and high enough at the waist to tuck in the tie. No doubt they also played in stiff corsetry, elaborate petticoats and heavy woollen stockings. Their hair was worn in elaborate styles on the top of the head or back of the neck. When Maids HC was established in 1918, skirt lengths had started to rise to just above the ankle but otherwise the early players were attired much as described. We obviously don’t have a picture from the late 19th century unfortunately but that’s one of the players from the 1920 team so you can see the type of stuff they had to wear. God love them. By 1927 players were wearing loose fitting tunics, with pleats, which were cut just above the knee, no doubt encouraged by the upwardly creeping hemlines of the twenties.In 1936 the first pair of tights made their debut in Maids, courtesy of Doris Findlater, who has just turned 101, am I right? Still alive and kicking. While on tour with the Irish team to Philadelphia, Doris made the purchase of a pair of tights. She found they were a highly effective way to avoid what was termed the “smile” which was the gap between the top of the stockings and the bottom of the drawers - which was sometimes on view. For the rest of the Maids, they were forced to continue wearing the stockings until well into the 1950s.By 1959 the touring team to Llandudno had disposed of the ties, opened their collars casually and had shed their stockings or tights in favour of knee high socks. When socks became part of the official uniform, the colour chosen was that of lilac, to match the shirts. You can imagine lilac socks were not something that would be very easy to find. So white socks had to be purchased and then they were dyed the official colour. But the socks had to imported from Northern Ireland, and due to customs, could only be imported half dozen at a time. In the 1970’s short shirtsleeves became the norm. The tunic was finally abandoned in favour of the wrap skirt worn by hockey players today.So what about the Maids who made it... in other walks of life? They were many, but today time is limited so I’m only going to mention a small few.The first one is a woman named Vera Mahony later to become Vera McWeeney. She joined Maids in the 1920’s and rapidly made herself known in Irish hockey circles being selected to play for Leinster in 1927 for the first time. She went on to become an Irish International, gaining her first cap in 1932. Her playing days in Maids were accompanied by some of the greatest successes the Club has known in its history. She was twice Leinster President between 1948-49 and again in 1955-1956. She is the only person ever to hold that position twice.She made a unique contribution to Irish sport, firstly as a multi-discipline athlete – as well as representing Ireland in hockey, she also represented them in tennis, and in croquet and in squash; but also after her playing days she was particularly instrumental in bringing publicity to women’s involvement in sport through her reporting career. And I’m sure some people would remember her today. After her husband died, her husband Arthur died in 1958, he was a sports journalist, she started then to report on a free lance basis for the Irish Independent, later moving to the Irish Times and she reported on women’s hockey, she reported on women’s tennis, badminton and squash. Her name is actually commemorated in the Vera McWeeney Shield, which was presented by the Irish Times in 1981, just after her death to the Leinster Indoor Under 21 Interprovincial Tournament as a tribute to her contribution to hockey in Ireland. As a journalist she was always said very fair to up and coming players and if she ever had a criticism to make of their play, her comments were always finished in a very positive and constructive note.She was very professional in her approach she made sure to watch everything that she reported on. Former international tennis player colleagues described her coverage of Wimbledon during the 1970’s as brilliant. She also reported on all major tennis events in Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, then a bastion of male membership only. She is recalled fondly in Irish feminist circles for her no-nonsense approach to matters in the environs of Fitzwilliam. A report was reported after her death of an incident in Fitzwilliam when about to take a short cut through the men’s changing room to get to a match, she was stopped. She told the steward that she had to get through and if that bothered anybody the steward was to tell them that she had seen better elsewhere.When Vera died suddenly in January 1980, those who knew her would not have been surprised to hear that she died with the coming week’s sports fixtures marked in her diary.Uniquely among the Notable Maids, Edith Hudson never actually played hockey for Maids, her main interest lay in the umpiring area. She was Principal of Ling Physical Education College for many years; many of those graduates went on to join Maids. She was renowned for her professional approach and a very meticulous attention to detail and a scrupulous sense of fairness and integrity in all her dealings. After Ling closed in 1973 and all the Physical Education College moved to Limerick, she found herself without a Club and she was at that stage invited to join Maids. And when she did she immediately became involved in the Club’s umpiring. Although involved in Maids her main energy was in the wider field of Irish and Leinster hockey. She was a Grade A Umpire who examined aspiring umpires for their exams. She also travelled with both Irish and Leinster Touring Teams, represented Ireland at International Symposiums on Umpiring, she was a member of the FIH Rules Committee and was appointed a Judge at the FIH Intercontinental Tournament in 1983 in Kuala Lumpur, which I’m hoping that many remember it was a tournament that we actually won. She held the office of president, and I don’t think the Men’s hockey could actually say that - sorry. She held the office of President of ILHU from 1981 to 1982, having been Treasurer from 1945 to 1959. She also held the office of President of the Irish Umpires Association and was honoured with Honorary Life Membership of the Irish Ladies Hockey Union, the Leinster Ladies Hockey Union and the Irish Umpires Association; a very, very fine woman.But this is one of my favourites, it’s a woman called Muriel Gahan. And her inclusion in the selection of Maids, notable Maids, actually does not come from her hockey activities, we don’t really know how good she is, but she certainly played for Maids and you can find her in the records, but really it’s her non-hockey activities which you could fairly say that she had an enormous influence on the craft industry in Ireland. She herself was born in Donegal in 1897 and reared in Castlebar, Co. Mayo. Her father worked for the Congested District Board, and when he retired they moved to Dublin in the 1920’s and it was at that stage that she joined Maids.She joined the United Irishwomen in 1929 (which was later to become the Irish Countrywomen’s Association). One of her first major contributions to the movement was in the establishment of the Country Shop Restaurant and Country Workers in 1930. Again many of you probably remember The Country Shop, it was located at 23 St. Stephens Green, and was the meeting place for Maids Hockey Club until its closure in 1978. She was directly responsible for the establishment of the Country Markets Ltd, a co-operative formed jointly by the ICA and the Homespun Society, and she also was involved in the establishment of the Country Craftsmanship Scheme. She became the only female member of Ireland’s first Arts Council in 1952. In 1971 she set up the Crafts Council of Ireland.Throughout the years, Muriel was very involved with the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), and once again history was made when she became the first woman ever elected Vice President of the RDS. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin in 1978. In her long career with the United Irishwomen and the ICA, Muriel Gahan was elected chairwoman of the National Executive on many occasions. It was through her contact with the Kellogg’s Foundation that a grant was actually given to the ICA for the establishment of their residential centre, Grianán. The Irish American Cultural Institute endowed an annual development grant in her name – The Muriel Gahan Scholarship – and it is awarded at the annual RDS Craft Competition during the RDS Horse Show.It won’t be surprising to know that she was known as “M.G.” to all her friends because it paraphrased her dynamic character. She died in 1995 at the age of 97.But nothing would be complete for Maids without Rita. Rita was always very easy to spot coming to Maids matches, because she invariably travelled in a pony and trap. She was a daughter of one of the founders of Three Rock Rovers Hockey Club, and she joined Maids in September 1941. Although a successful hockey and lacrosse player, gaining international recognition in both, it was actually as Chairperson of the Irish Country Markets Association, a position that she held for 14 years, that she was better known. It was Muriel Gahan who got her actually, who asked her to take on that role. She also served as President of the Irish Horticultural Society. When Maids merged with Three Rock Rovers it was fitting that Rita, given her deep connections to both Clubs, became its first female President in 2001.A total of 20 Maids achieved provincial and international success in a wide variety of other sports such as lacrosse, cricket, windsurfing, golf, tennis, Olympics, badminton, fencing, swimming, netball, croquet and squash.As I said at the outset, the level of respect and fondness for the club of Maids, even given the name was quite striking, both from within the Club itself but also from other Clubs. This is probably best illustrated by the poem that was penned for the Club by Ann Cox in 1982, the then Leinster Hockey President, and it goes as follows:We are the Maids of the MountainWe hide in the gores and the fenAnd someday we hope if God spares usTo capture some wild mountain menWe’ll teach them the art of good hockeyWe’ll take off their trousers and shirtsWe’ll put on some wigs and some make-upAnd dress them in blouses and skirts.And when we have won all before usWe’ll treat them to some mountain dewAnd help them relax in the heatherAs Maids of the Mountain should doThe archival material that has been lodged by Maids Hockey Club as I said is very impressive. However these archives are much more valuable than just recording an 81-year history. They also provide a rare insight into women in sport, it really helps to chart the socio-economic life in Ireland, the changing role of women in Irish society, and also the contributions made by so women to so many aspects of Irish life – these all were the Maids who Made it! Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Transcript of a talk by Ciarán Priestley on the history of Bohemian Football Club, spanning the founding of the club in 1890, some of the club's influential players and matches and the how the history of one of Dublin's most influential clubs is connected with both the history of the city and the history of soccer in Ireland.