Where Dubliners have played transcript

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 lecture

Welcome 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.

 

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