Paul Rouse: How the game of 'hurley' rose and fell in the capital

A game called ‘hurley’ had been played by a club at Trinity College Dublin at least since the 1860s. Officially called the Dublin University Hurley Club, it published its first rules in the ‘Handbook of Cricket in Ireland’ in 1869.

The influence of those boys who had passed through English public schools on their way to Trinity College is evident. The rules, which included provisions for off-side, hitting off one side of the stick only, might be considered a forerunner to modern hockey, rather than to modern hurling.

Initially, as the only club in Ireland, the Trinity boys resorted to such internal matches as ‘Smokers v Non-smokers’, and ‘The First Team v The Philosophical Society’.

Amongst the players to have played the game was said to have been Edward Carson, the father of modern unionism. Carson’s proclaimed involvement in the hurley club has led to several generations of myth being constructed, not least the remarkable nonsense that he had played ‘Fitzgibbon Cup hurling’ from Trinity College. We live in an age of gross misinformation and disinformation, so it is probably wise to state the obvious that this was not true. Indeed, it may actually be a brother of Edward Carson rather than the man himself who played hurley.

Through the 1870s the game was spread out of the university and into the city by Trinity graduates. Hurley never exploded onto the Dublin sporting scene rather its story is one of steady progress. It became an important part in the life of various schools in Dublin, including those of High School, Rathmines School, and King’s Hospital, where students and teachers played regular matches.

Rugby clubs such as Lansdowne took on the game and clubs were also formed from workplaces such as the Royal Bank. The growth in the number of clubs led to the establishment of the Irish Hurley Union at Trinity College on 24 January 1879.

At that first meeting of the Irish Hurley Union in 1879, “the secretary was directed to apply to several English hockey clubs for copies of their rules of the game, to aid the Union in forming rules which should meet with the approval of all hurley players.” The game appears never to have spread outside of Dublin and, in reality, never managed to move beyond being the preserve of a middle-class educated elite.

What happened next is not absolutely clear, but it appears that in the early 1880s the Irish Hurley Union’s attempt to draw its own rules closer to the game of hockey as played in England was a detrimental move. The impact was to make the game of hurley progressively less physical and this seems to have led to a disaffection among certain players.

Two things happened at this moment, which essentially destroyed the future of hurley.

Firstly, a revival of hurling began with letters written to ‘The Irish Times’ at the end of 1882. These letters claimed that ‘hurling’ was emphatically not to be confused with ‘hurley’. One of the letter writers who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Omega’ was Frank Potterton and was actually a graduate of Trinity College; he derided the game of ‘hurley’.

In the letter which called for the revival of hurling, he condemned hurley as ‘a melancholy spectacle, … utterly uninteresting.’ It was, he wrote, a game which had ‘no pluck, no dash, no physical prowess.’ Ultimately, he wrote that hurley’s great defining characteristic was ‘the complete apathy’ which it inspired.

These words were echoed by Michael Cusack, who also wrote a letter to ‘The Irish Times’, responding in support of Potterton’s claim that hurling should be revived.

Cusack also made plain his view that ‘hurley’ was not ‘hurling’. He said that those who played hurley were merely ‘civilised eunuchs’ and ‘grown-up little boys.’ Cusack and Potterton then organised for a meeting to be held in the Royal College of Surgeons on St. Stephen’s Green in December 1882 to found a hurling club, and called in the newspapers for all interested people to attend.

The letters to the newspapers deriding hurley – and the public announcement that a hurling club was about to be formed – drew an immediate response from hurley players.

They sent a delegation of players to the meeting in the Royal College of Surgeons. What emerged was compromise, not confrontation. The hurley delegation promised support for the Dublin Hurling Club, but at a price. The rules for hurley were to be properly studied and incorporated as far as possible in the rules for hurling. A motion was passed agreeing to this, “with such alterations as the superiority of the old game and machinery render necessary.” It was enough of a compromise to allow members of Dublin’s hurley clubs at least to sample what hurling might hold.

The next challenge was to secure a suitable venue for play. At a meeting of the Dublin Hurling Club held in Cusack’s Academy on Monday 8 January 1883 – and with Michael Cusack in the chair – it was resolved to write to the All-Ireland Polo Club, asking for the use of their grounds, the Nine Acres, in the Phoenix Park. This request was acceded to – and the club set about holding its first practice match at 2.30pm on the following Saturday, 12 January 1883.

The Dublin Hurling Club resolved to replace the long, narrow sticks of hurley, with broader, shorter sticks. Frank Potterton – ‘Omega’ – had described hurling as a game played with “a kind of a bat called a ‘hurl’, made of well-seasoned, long-grained ash”, which swelled to four inches in width at its base (the ‘bas’).

And the ball to be used was to be made of cork that was boiled in milk and gum and then stitched with leather. It proved extremely difficult to get sticks suitable for hurling in Dublin. Eventually, it was necessary to order specially made hurls from Fitzsimons’ Factory in the city, but these had not arrived in time for the first planned practice. At the last minute, the practice had to be postponed.

It took two further weeks for the hurls to arrive and the first hurling practice duly took place on Friday, January 26 1883 at the Polo Grounds in the Phoenix Park.

Further practices took place across all the Saturdays in February. The rules were amended in the light of experience of actual play and the game of hurling began to take a more definite shape, with games continuing despite atrocious weather into March and April 1883.

And then it all fell apart.

The Dublin Hurling Club Committee met for the last time on 12 April 1883 and decided, after extended discussion but unanimously, that the club should suspend all activities. The suspension hardened into dissolution – the Dublin Hurling Club never met again. The reason for its sudden demise is not recorded in the minutes, but appears clear-cut – the tension with hurley players that had been evident from the beginning had proved impossible to manage.

This was the case not least because it was a tension that was played out in the press. For example, ‘The Irish Sportsman’ newspaper was deeply sympathetic to the game of hurley and noted, approvingly, how those who played hurley had changed “the swiping game of the savage to a scientific recreation which may be indulged in by anyone without being in constant dread of having one’s brains dashed out by an adversary’s hurl.” Michael Cusack responded to this insult by accusing hurley clubs of trying to smother the Dublin Hurling Club before it had arrived beyond a chrysalis state. The ensuing bitterness destroyed the prospects of the Dublin Hurling Club developing.

In founding the Dublin Hurling Club, several members – though not Michael Cusack and Frank Potterton – had spoken of the necessity to cultivate good relations with hurley clubs and had been at pains to stress they wished to avoid any hostility.

Every announcement in the newspapers that a practice match was to be held included an invitation to hurley players to come and play – and a number did.

Indeed, initially, several players took part in both hurling and hurley matches on the same weekend, hoping to combine the two games.

But the fact was that – for Cusack and Potterton – hurley was a lesser game – and their contempt for hurley never dissipated. Faced with confrontation between rival bodies, the hurley players drifted away.

In the autumn of 1883, Michael Cusack went at the revival of hurling again. This led to the establishment of the Metropolitan Hurling Club in the autumn of 1883. Cusack was later to say that it was from this club that the GAA essentially grew.

By contrast, the game of hurley shrank from view. Later variations of some of its schools and clubs were involved in the foundation of the Irish Hockey Union in the 1890s.

But the greatest illustration of what happened to hurley can be seen from what happened to the hurley club in Trinity College. The game of Association football had made its way into Dublin and a club was founded in the university – the Dublin University Association Football Club. That club took the place of the hurley club within the official structures for sport in Trinity College. The name ‘hurley’ lived on across the generations, but the game was essentially now lost to the city where it had once prospered.

Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin