Grangegorman and the value of sport
There is a wonderful Paul Durcan poem called ‘Sport’. It is almost unbearably poignant:
This poem is set in the mid-1960s, at a time when the ‘Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Mental Illness’ (1966) noted that “properly organised recreational activities should be available in every hospital. It should be clearly recognised that recreation is not provided merely for the amusement and entertainment of patients, but is an important part of their treatment.”
This was seen as not just a matter of physical exercise, but also something that should be useful for patients who would engage in the planning and organisation of activities. And it was not to be confused with those patients who are “observed walking aimlessly around a recreation ground.”
The problem was that delivery of this ambition was deeply compromised by overcrowding and under-resourcing. The story of Grangegorman – originally known as Richmond Lunatic Asylumn – is a prime example of this.
In the decades immediately after the asylum opened in 1814, sport was not part of the treatment of patients. An 1824 report from the inspectors of prisons noted that the asylum was unclean and unpleasant in aspect.
In the course of two visits, the inspectors noted how all patients were in their rooms and deplored the lack of facilities and the fact that access to the garden was extremely restricted.
Partly, this absence of recreation and even basic exercise (let alone sport) was a reflection of the overcrowding that was a defining feature of the institution. For example, in 1831 there were 272 patients resident, but just 236 beds. This problem of overcrowding persisted in chronic form through the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth.
The first meaningful development in respect of exercise for patients at the Richmond Asylum saw the purchase of 16 acres from the Earl of Rathdown in 1836 and 60 male patients were put at work to make a garden. This garden – coupled with the construction of large open sheds to allow patients to “walk and exercise, protected from the rain in winter and the torrid heat of the sun in summer” – allowed convalescent patients some recreational activity.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, it was clear that many doctors understood – or were coming to understand – the value of exercise, and of recreation in general, as part of treatment for patients in asylums.
In some of the private asylums in Ireland, there was relatively extensive recreation on offer for paying patients. This expanded as the nineteenth century progressed and came to include sporting activities. At some asylums, there were indoor activities, including a billiard table. Records from Bloomfield show patients playing chess, billiards and croquet, and various ball games. At St. John of God’s, there was chess, cards and croquet, among other recreations, and a handball court was built.
By contrast, recreational opportunities in public asylums such as Grangegorman were limited through overcrowding and through an apparent preference for labour as therapy. There were traditions of reading (a library for patients at Grangegorman was established with 18 non-fiction books in 1844) or playing cards – this is something that is recorded in the case notes of various patients. There were also isolated references at the Richmond Asylum to patients painting or playing the piano, but the most usual recreation was to walk in the hospital grounds. In short, the mentally ill poor in the public asylum did not enjoy the same access to recreation as those who could afford to pay for private asylum.
In his book ‘Defects in the Moral Treatment of Insanity in the Public Lunatic Asylums of Ireland’ (1862), John Blake – a moderate nationalist M.P and pamphleteer interested in the treatment of mental illness – quoted from evidence presented to a Royal Commission in Ireland in 1856 about the provision of adequate amusement for patients at Grangegorman. All witnesses who spoke referred to reports and recommendations that proposed significant improvements in the arrangement of recreation as part of a treatment regime. These included billiards, backgammon, chess and draughts. Some of the medical witnesses bought such games from their own money, but “great improvements are necessary”.
Even when resources were committed, things did not run quite as envisioned. For example, a ball alley was provided but a portion of that ball alley was then “fitted up as a pig-stye for the pigs of the apothecary.”
But change did come and it was driven by progressive individuals. When Dr Joseph Lalor became resident medical superintendent at Grangegorman in 1861, recreation out in the grounds was now firmly encouraged. Lalor wrote in his annual report in 1862 about the provision of football, handball, croquet, darts, bowling and walking for patients.
There were weekly trips to the Phoenix Park, also, for exercise or to play football. There was also marching around the Grangegorman grounds in time with the music of the asylum band.
The western area of the asylum – where the garden for recreation was based – was hugely expanded through the acquisition of more land in the 1860s and it thereafter filled some 57 acres.
Sport in Grangegorman was about much more than the treatment of patients, however. By the mid-1860s, by which time there were more than 1,000 patients, an Annual Sports Day was a vital part of the activities of the asylum.
The idea of a formally-organised sports day was something that had begun to take hold in Ireland in the 1850s and by the 1870s it was something that was commonplace in country towns and in the activities of many institutions.
The Asylum at Grangegorman was one of the first institutions in the country to have its own Sports Day. As was commonplace at the time, the annual sports Day generally involved running, jumping and throwing competitions, novelty contests such as three-legged- and sack- races, as well as sideshows and musical entertainment, provided in this instance by bands of the British Army.
Holding a Sports Day was partly an act of propaganda. There was reference to the huge crowds, to the presence of many local benefactors and philanthropists (with up to 1000 people invited every year), and to the happy appearance of the patients who were presented as evidence that the approach to care undertaken in the institute was working.
By 1882, it was being reported: “All the inmates evinced the keenest pleasure in the sports, and showed by their appearance the care and judiciousness of their treatment. Indeed, so far as the results yesterday could afford any testimony, the system – known as the non-restraint system – pursued in this institution seems fraught with all that is most beneficial to the insane.”
For all that there was an obvious attempt to present a particular face to the public, it is nonetheless also clear that a programme of events was designed for patients to compete, both men and women. There were running and walking racing, weight-throwing, handball matches and a wheelbarrow races. Money prizes, as well as neckties, tobacco, broches and handkerchiefs, were awarded. The sports day concluded with a concert given by patients, and then a dance which lasted towards midnight.
Sport in the Richmond Asylum was given further impetus by the arrival of Daniel Rambaut as an assistant medical officer in 1893.
Rambaut was a genuine sporting star. He was an Irish champion hurdler (120 yards) and, more famously, in 1887 was a star player when Ireland defeated England in a rugby match for the first time. He was part of a new generation who had replaced “old men overladen with the personal heritage and traditions of defeat saturated through them.”
The result was a victory that “was a great one. Without going into extravagant metaphors or poetic excursions, it will be hailed with delight by Irishmen all over the globe – from the North Pole to the South Pole, and from the East Pole to the West.”
Almost immediately after his arrival at Richmond, Rambaut helped establish teams for soccer and cricket. Later, there were both men’s and women’s hockey teams. These teams appear to have been drawn from members of staff and played matches against teams drawn from army regiments, and local hospitals and universities. The matches were considered something that “would break the monotony of the asylum”.
After the establishment of the Irish Free State, sport continued to play a significant role in the institution. The Grangegorman RMS, John O’Conor Donelan, said in 1924 that “games and sports were of the greatest assistance to the insane.”
Dedicated funding was provided on an annual basis for miscellaneous sporting expenses, but as late as the 1940s this amounted to just “£300 for outdoor sports and pastimes”, out of a total expenditure of £337,826 for the upkeep of the institution.
In sporting terms, the most significant change was the establishment of a club for Gaelic games. The fact that there was no GAA club established before 1920 is revealing about the cultural preferences (and the politics) of those who ran the institution before the establishment of the Irish Free State.
These were divides that continued to echo. In 1931 at a meeting of the management committee discussing the financial estimates for the year, one member, Luke O’Toole, intervened in respect of the £300 voted for the provision of sport for patients. O’Toole, who was then the most important official in the GAA, said that £150 of the £300 should be “devoted to the encouragement of Gaelic games”.
This brought a counter-argument that there “should be no coercion concerning games”. When another committee member, J. Costello (who falsely claimed that he had attended the founding meeting of the GAA in Thurles in 1884), said he had never been to a soccer match or a rugby match and that Gaelic games should get pride of place, the RMS Donelan was moved to intervene.
He said that “the main object of games in the institution was the provision of entertainment of patients…. He wanted to see games played, but did not care what class of game it was, and was prepared to support every game without distinction.”
And in the years that followed, despite the divides suggested in this exchange, Gaelic games thrived alongside those which had been played in the asylum before independence. Much later – in 1980 – the hurling club playing out of Grangegorman – St Brendan’s, won the Dublin senior hurling championship.
Soccer continued to be important, with teams fielded by men who worked in the institution and by others who played for its teams. These clubs – variously known as Grangegorman Football Club (who played Leinster Senior League in their best years), St. Brendan’s Football Club (who played in League of Ireland B Division during the 1970s) and Brendanville Football Club (who played in the Leinster Senior League) played a calendar of matches that drew some of the best players in the city to the grounds at Grangegorman. Other sports also continued to prosper.
Men’s and women’s hockey teams competed through the rest of the century, producing players good enough to play for Leinster and Ireland. A cricket team continued to play out of Grangegorman for decades, while the laying down of “a new green with sea-washed turf” saw the institution’s bowling team compete in the Irish Free State League and its successors across the decades.
In the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the development of community-based mental health services diminished the number of patients. In the 1940s there had been more than 2,000 patients in Grangegorman at any one time, but the mid-1980s that had fallen to under 1,000. It continued to fall into the new millennium. By the time the last patients in the hospital were transferred to the Phoenix Care Centre and the site ceased to function as a mental hospital in 2013, the place of sport had been transformed.
The cricket and hockey clubs were gone, the GAA club had slipped down the divisions in Dublin and the sporting infrastructure in the site had fallen into decay. The old ball alleys were demolished, as was the pavilion used by the cricket and hockey teams. The GAA and soccer pitches were torn up to be remade for the students who would soon be arriving from the Dublin Institute of Technology’s constituent colleges (later renamed as Technological University of Dublin).
What remained were the trees that had been sown around the walkways that had been used for more than a century for exercise by patients and staff. New pitches – some grass, others artificial turf – were set out around the old recreation grounds, tennis courts were built and an all-weather surface for basketball constructed. Two table tennis tables were installed on the stone passageway through the middle of the expanding campus. A modern gym was fitted out in buildings which were once used to house patients. It was a reminder of the centrality of sport and sporting practices to modern Ireland.
For an extended version of this story, see the Grangegorman Histories project at the Royal Irish Academy