Handball History Group Uncovering Fascinating Heritage

By Paul Fitzpatrick

It began, as these things often do, with a chance discovery.

During Covid, Paddy Donovan was ill and receiving treatment in St Luke’s Hospital in Dublin. Well enough to get out for a walk, he made his way to the Phoenix Park and decided to call into the Garda Depot with a simple request.

“I walked in the gate of the Garda Depot, explained who I was, and I said, ‘Is there any chance I could go over and see the handball alley?’” Donovan recalled.

What he found there helped set in motion a remarkable research project which is now attempting to piece together the story of some of the great characters, trophies, photographs and forgotten tales from the formative years of organised handball in Ireland.

Limerick native Donovan is part of a handball history group along with Goresbridge, Co Kilkenny man Liam Mahon and Dubliner David Nowlan, whose grand-uncle took a large collection of photographs in the 1920s.

The project initially began informally, driven by their own interest in the history of the game, but has now been formalised under the auspices of GAA Handball, with the exact structure of the new history committee still being worked out.

The timing is particularly appropriate. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the All-Ireland Hardball Championships, hardball doubles having been introduced in 1926, a year after the first All-Ireland softball singles and doubles championships. This weekend, the All-Ireland hardball singles championships are down for decision.

The group will make a presentation before the senior hardball doubles All-Ireland finals, where approximately 20 to 30 historic cups from around the country will be displayed. Relatives and descendants of some of the great players of the early hardball era, painstakingly tracked down by the group in some instances, have also been contacted and invited to attend.

They are putting out a call to the wider handball community, too. Anyone who has old handball trophies or cups is asked to bring them along so they can be identified, categorised and photographed, adding another piece to a historical jigsaw which stretches back generations.

For Mahon, who has a long-standing interest in local history in Kilkenny, the project grew naturally from conversations between a small group who were fascinated by how little was widely known about handball’s early organised years.

“It’s a lovely history from the start because we know very little, or knew very little at the time, of this association and how it got started,” Mahon explained.

“We have loads of stuff. We have a lot of research done and my area was more or less doing the games and who played and where they were played, and little reports on a lot of games.

“It has been formalised now. It’s under the auspices of GAA Handball and we need that recognition, to be country-wide.

“Anyone who has stuff or wants help with stuff, we can help them. There are a number of clubs coming up on 100-year anniversaries and we’re doing stuff for a few people.”

And if the history of handball is best told through its people and its stories, Donovan and his colleagues have already uncovered some extraordinary ones.

That visit to the Garda Depot was an important starting point.

“Some fella said, ‘I think there’s handball stuff in a box in there at the back’,” Donovan explained.

“Of course there is lot of history up there... I found a couple of pictures of Caddens playing handball and fellas in the ’50s and the ’60s. And the next thing, a picture of John Lalor awarding some kind of a cup outside in Clondalkin. And a second picture.

“When I found David Nowlan, I sent those two pictures to him and he said, ‘Oh, my granduncle took those. I have those pictures here’.”

That connection would prove invaluable. Nowlan had access to a large number of old family photographs and the images became clues which sent the researchers down one historical avenue after another.

Donovan began trawling through photographs and matching faces and names. Before long, they were looking closely at images connected with the Tailteann Games and the political and sporting figures who surrounded them.

One photograph in particular caught Donovan’s attention. In the front were Eoin O’Duffy, Andy Harty – the second president of the handball organisation – and Ned Broy.

Donovan, who is an administrator of a Garda history and genealogy Facebook page, recognised the names immediately and began digging.

“I said, ‘What is Eoin O’Duffy doing there in 1921?’ I started researching. He was only just out of jail, and the Treaty talks were about to take place.

“And here’s the two of them with Andy Harty getting ready with TJ Reilly and Daly, who were two Dublin Metropolitan policemen who had retired, resigned when the Tans came. And here they were, the committee for the Tailteann Games.”

One discovery led to another.

Newspaper archives produced two prolific handball correspondents writing under the pen names ‘Game Ball’ and ‘Alley Cracker’. Game Ball was a writer named Clarke, while Alley Cracker was Seán O’Hanlon.

Between them, Donovan estimates the group has located approximately 900 newspaper articles.

With Nowlan using AI to help process the enormous volume of material, fixtures, results, clubs and players began to emerge from the archives.

“We found 2,000 names that played in the 1920s and 1930s from fixture lists, what clubs they’re from,” Donovan, a retired Garda himself, said.

From there, the detective work expanded.

Donovan picked up county GAA histories from Kilkenny, Kildare, Limerick and elsewhere, cross-referencing photographs, names, newspaper reports and other fragments of information. Paddy was fulsome in his praise for "excellent researcher" Frank Semple, who, he said, has great local knowledge of courts in Dublin.

“We’re two years at this now, maybe three, but we’re piecing together who did what, when, where.”

Some of those players had lives which stretched far beyond the alley.

Among them was Jack Shouldice, who fought on North King Street during the 1916 Rising. Another was TJ O’Reilly, whose story Donovan traced through the RIC, Dublin Castle and eventually An Garda Síochána.

O’Reilly later became a superintendent and was involved in opening Hospital Handball Club – Paddy’s home club - in 1926.

The deeper the group went, the more family connections they uncovered.

Donovan tracked down relatives of John Lalor and found Lalor’s grave. He located the Soye family, who possess a replica of the Dr Harty Cup presented by the GAA in 1930 after the original trophy had been won five times. The original Harty Cup itself is no longer accounted for.

Other pieces of handball history may have disappeared through less mysterious means. Donovan learned of a burglary in Kilkenny in which a collection of 23 medals was stolen.

But priceless material survives in unlikely places.

The mothers of two great players, Fintan Confrey from Louth and JJ Gilmartin of Kilkenny, meticulously maintained scrapbooks recording their sons’ careers. Donovan has obtained copies of both.

He has also tracked down families connected to many of the champions whose names dominate the early All-Ireland roll of honour, including Martin Joyce, the first softball champion, who came from Urlingford and later served as a Garda in Dublin, as well as the Aldridge family in Athy and relatives of iconic names such as Bowles, Gleeson and others.

Yet perhaps the most evocative discovery concerns one of the giants of the sport, Paddy Perry of Boyle, Co Roscommon.

It began when Donovan heard that somebody was selling an old gold handball medal.

“I do bid at auctions, and I was told to ring this lad, so I did, and I met him. And he had Paddy Perry’s Tailteann Games medal from 1932.

“I bought it off him and he reached into his pocket anyway and he said, ‘I’ll give you this as well to go with the medal for free.’

“And he gave me Paddy Perry’s passport.”

The passport opened another door.

Perry, one of handball’s great champions, had been preparing to emigrate to New York, where an uncle was in business. According to the story uncovered by Donovan, Eoin O’Duffy attended Perry’s ‘American wake’ and spoke to Perry and his mother.

O’Duffy persuaded the great player to remain in Ireland by offering him a job in the Gardaí. Perry had one condition.

“Perry said, ‘Well, I want to be beside an alley.’

“And he said, ‘You can play in the depot and Croke Park.’ They were only after building the alley.

“So Perry served out his entire service out of the depot and played all his home All-Ireland finals.”

It is exactly the type of story the new history group wants to preserve.

The names and results matter, of course, particularly in the centenary year of the All-Ireland Hardball Championships. But behind those records lie photographs in boxes, medals in drawers, cups on mantelpieces, passports, newspaper cuttings and scrapbooks lovingly assembled by mothers almost a century ago.

Many have never been properly documented. Others may disappear altogether unless they are identified now.

That is why Donovan, Mahon, Nowlan and their colleagues are asking handball people around the country to have a look in cupboards, attics and family collections and bring any old cups and trophies in their possession to the hardball doubles finals.

They may appear to be simply old pieces of silverware. But, as the group’s research has already demonstrated, each one may have a story to tell.