Ok, let’s throw in the ball for this week’s column. Leonie McGrath. It was from Leonie McGrath that I first learned that girls too played hurling. From Leonie I got my first camogie history lesson. And from a Leonie sporting an enchanting English accent too! In hindsight I think I was in love!
But way back then all this eight year old was concerned with was learning about this girls hurling!
The said Leonie was a daughter of old Guard McGrath who with his wife Loll lived a few houses down the way from us on Brownes Hill Road. John, the son, was working in Dublin, Leonie, with her sisters Dolores and Mary had emigrated to England. Our phone was often the link between the exiled girls of Éireann and their parents while my brother Michael and myself also had the job of dropping down the daily paper to Guard McGrath when Daddy was finished reading it.
It was on one such excursion with hurl and tennis ball in toe I first met Leonie. She was home on holiday and out in the little front garden of ‘Carrig’ took a loan of stick and ball and with dextrous wrists lifted, struck, caught and balanced the little green sphere far far better than I had managed to date. I was in awe! And she was a woman!
“Oh I used to play camogie (first time I heard the word) in my youth, we had a handy little team, a good few of us played with the county” informed Leonie as she continued to play tricks with the stick and ball (and my head!) A county player!
Knew her father had a great sporting pedigree, he was one of my first sporting teachers, recounting how as one of the first Garda in 1922 he was stationed here, there and everywhere, winning football championship medals in Mayo, a useful handballer, played at the opening of Talbot’s Inch in Kilkenny, a boxer too and was ahead of his time when utilising barrels of cold water to aid recovery when training Palatine to win the 1952 Carlow senior football championship.
But Leonie was my new hero! She looked, smelled (perfume was another word entered my eight year old vocabulary that day!) and looked a lot lot better than any of my previous sports heroes, Tom Neville, Eddie Keher, Tom Kiernan and George Best also relegated that day!
Time moved on, Leonie went back to England, your scribe grew up a bit (a bit I said, I’m still working on it!) but I still had never saw a game of camogie played in Carlow and glimpses of it on television were confined to brief one camera highlights, the presence of a second crossbar at the top of the point posts catching the eye (not sure what year this second crossbar was taken down for good, guessing early 70s)
Guard McGrath passed away in 1975 but not before in the Summer of ’74 broadening my sporting education when I was dispatched as a ‘runner’ to Finnegan’s bookies across from the Garda Barracks on Tullow Street to place a bet on ‘Bunclody Tiger’ to win the Galway Plate. While Guard McGrath was a native of the old Newtownbarry it wasn’t just sentiment that fuelled his punt. It had been raining in Galway the entire week, the ‘Plate’ postponed to the Friday and for ‘safety reasons’ the two fences in the dip were omitted, leaving a five furlong run in. This suited the ‘flat’ horses of which the ‘Tiger, owned and bred by famed publican, Andy Redmond, was one. Trained by Kevin Bell and ridden by Tommy Browne our mount – I had been given a few bob to back the horse myself! – took the lead on the turn for home and won by two lengths at a price of 4/1.
At Guard McGrath’s wake less than a year later his was the first corpse I ever touched, and at the funeral Leonie asked me if I was I still playing hurling; but now an awkward teenager the conversation didn’t flow as freely as, for shame, I had forsaken my first love for a much younger woman!
It was at another funeral, though, many, many years later that the passion Leonie McGrath carried for the game she loved as a young girl growing up in Carlow, really came home to me. We are going back to 2013, Leonie was in town for the funeral of her brother-in-law Frank Cleary, Dolores’ husband, a Fermanagh man, worked in Perry’s in Carlow for years. At his wake Ciss Carpenter, herself a inter-provincial Camogie player, told me there was a woman waiting to have a chat with me. Leonie! Now Leonie Gibson and long living in Longford.
And she wanted to talk camogie! 1961 to be exact. Carlow reaching the Leinster Junior final for the first time. Lost narrowly to Kildare in Graiguecullen, Leonie one of Carlow’s prominent performers. Lost narrowly to Kildare in Graiguecullen without three or four star players due to an internal dispute which reached a head the morning of the match. Leonie had heard I had interviewed one of the ‘dissidents’ and was anxious to give the other side of the story.
The hurt of that defeat, even over a half-century later, was still clearly evident as she spoke with vehemence, fire in her eyes, of the disappointment, the salt in the wound the fact that it was a self destruct button that detonated an implosion, the fall-out from which effectively left Carlow without camogie for nigh on a decade and a half.
Leonie Gibson (nee McGrath) was laid to rest in St Mary’s Cemetery, Carlow, last Thursday, interred in the same grave as her beloved father and mother. We extend deepest sympathy to Leonie’s husband Tony, her children Shena, Michael, Alan, her adored grandchildren Dylan, Sam, Aoife, Eírinn, Lucas and Bruno and her sister Mary
CAMOGIE CAMEOS: Having acquired old issues of the ‘Gaelic Sport’ magazine from the late 1950s, early 1960s the camogie column, penned by Agnes Hourigan (aka Una Bean Ui Puirseal, an esteemed camogie writer and hard working national official) mentioned on a couple of occasions that ‘internal differences interfere with Carlow’s progress’
A case in point: 1955. The Carlow County Board acceded to a request from Ballylinan of and Goresbridge from Kilkenny to play in the Carlow championship as only Ballymurphy and Ballinabranna had affiliated. Played on a league basis, the two Carlow teams conceded walk-overs in and the 1955 Carlow Camogie final was contested by a Laois club and a Kilkenny club and played on Laois soil!
The fall out here saw no camogie played in Carlow for three years but it was revived again in 1959 with seven teams contesting the championship, Carlow Town Camogie Club having sufficient numbers to field an A and a B team despite the fact that a third club was affiliated from the urban area, St Killian’s who drew their resources from the Crescent area.
In the ’59 County final in McGrath Park, Bagenalstown Kilbride, ‘the bigger team’ beat Carlow Town, ‘the more polished hurlers’ 3-1 to 0-3. Anne Boyle scored Carlow’s three points from frees, Leonie again prominent in general play.
Leonie was not just playing camogie she was deeply involved in organising it too as in early 1960 we read ‘The Nationalist’ that the following officers were elected at the Carlow Town Camogie Club AGM; President: Rev Br Collins; Vice-President: Rev Br Rogers; Chairman: John Walsh; Vice-Chairman: Mrs B Williams; Secretary: Leonie McGrath; Assistant Secretary: Breda Matthews; Treasurer: Anne Fenlon. Committee: Therese Quigley, Maureen Lyttleton.
Carlow Town again qualified for the county final in 1960, a game fixed for mid-November but “a number of the team were ill and so Ardristan (Brigidines) were awarded the title, Carlow hoped to be able to play up to Saturday when their Chairman notified the Co. Secretary and Ardristan officials that they could not go on.”
PLAYING WITH THE COUNTY: The Carlow county team played Kilkenny’s first team in the inaugural Leinster Junior Championship, beaten 4-2 to 1-6 in a Goresbridge semi-final, mentioned among the Carlow ‘played wells’ one Leonie McGrath. It was Kilkenny v Carlow again in the ’60 semi-final, this time in Ballyhale, the home side 6-3 to 2-0 victors, The Carlow team and subs for that year’s championship (teams were 12-a-side and lined out in a 1-1-3-3-3-1 formation) was: M Townsend (Carlow Town); T Nolan (Ardristan); P Sharpe (Carlow Town), E O’Boyle (Carlow Town), K Doyle; A Kennedy (Kilbride), L McGrath (Carlow Town), H Nolan (Ardristan); B Haughney (Carlow), A Crean (Ardristan), A Monaghan (Erin’s Own); J Doran (Kilbride). Subs: K Kennedy (Erin’s Own, Bagenalstown), P O’Brien (Erin’s Own, Bagenalstown), AM Curry (Kilbride), L Hutton (St Killian’s, Carlow), P Harvey (St Killian’s, Carlow).
So to fateful ’61, the Leinster Junior Championship, also referred to as the Smyco Cup (see below). Carlow got by Longford to reach the final, played in Fr Maher Park, Graiguecullen on Sunday, July 23, where Kildare inched out a depleted ‘home’ side by 3-0 to 1-0.
“Teresa Nolan, their schoolgirl full-back played up to her senior inter-provincial form for Carlow, while Anne Kennedy at mid-field for the losers was the most stylish player on view” wrote Agnes Hourigan in the ‘Irish Press’, Kennedy also scoring the Carlow goal from a free, Leonie McGrath again lining out in the mid-field engine room.
SMYCO? Down Railway Street in Balbriggan, Co Dublin stood the company of Smyth and Co. For decades and decades, it ranked as one of the most outstanding manufacturing companies not only in Ireland but the world. Victoria was not an easy woman to please but when she wanted the best, she ordered pure stockings, made by Thomas Mangan, at the factory. And Victoria was by no means the only ‘Royal’ to don the famed Balbriggan hose. The Empress of Austria would die for Balbriggan hose, as well as the Princess Eugenie and the Czarina. Smith’s presented the Smyco Cup to the Leinster Camogie Council in 1960.
PHOTO STORY: Standing at Leonie’s graveside on Thursday Mary Amond O’Brien showed me the happy photo accompanying today’s column. “Leonie was a great friend to our Mam Lena Amond who passed away in January 2023, a friendship that stayed strong while living apart for so long” wrote the Amond sisters, Mary, Patricia and Eleanor on RIP.ie. “Growing up we often heard stories about Guard McGrath and his family in Browneshill Road. I heard recently from a friend of Dolores’ that Mam used to go up to the house on her bicycle to buy eggs … we may have also heard stories about playing cards. Leonie was great for keeping in touch with Mam, we have a lovely photo of them both from August 2022 when Leonie visited and we kept in touch with Leonie by text and WhatsApp since that visit and after Mam passed away. Rest in peace Leonie and thank you for keeping in touch with Mam over all these years”.
Lena and Leonie
THE AS I ROVED OUT COLUMN APPEARS EVERY WEEK IN THE NATIONALIST
Travelling the highways and byways of gaelic games with ‘The Barrowside Gael’
