Rathcore teacher comes out to bat with new book on cricketing grandad

After a lifetime of looking at a picture of his grandfather’s cricket team Adam Burke, a history and geography teacher from Rathcore decided to investigate it further. In the end, he wrote a book entitled “Wielding the Willow, cricket in South Meath from 1860-1950”. The book tells the story of how cricket was the biggest sport in the county of Meath in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“I knew my grandad, Michael Burke played on a cricket team,” he said. “We had the photo of him and we had the list of names, but we didn’t have the year or know much else, like was he any good? Was the team any good? So, I went digging to find out more about it.

The more research Adam did on the cricket team, the bigger it turned out to be.

“There's a lot an awful lot more teams around the area than I suspected, and it was, you know, really as I say it snowballs from there that you realise just how big it was. And in reality, it was the biggest sport in the area at the time. For example, there was 18 different cricket teams in the area of south Meath between Rathmolyon, Enfield, Summerhill and Longwood from 1923 and 1950, with 1929 being the biggest year, with 11 teams.”

According to Adam, cricket was stronger than GAA in these areas as Gaelic Games were largely confined to more urban areas with GAA being bigger in rural townlands.

“GAA came and went in the early 1900s because there was a stronger tradition of cricket, especially after independence, because people felt they could enjoy the games they preferred, rather than show off their nationalism. It was strongest in rural areas, especially among the labourers of big landlords.

Despite last long into the middle of the 20th-century cricket, eventually began to die off in the area for three main reasons.

By the end of the 1940s cricket had dropped considerably, people think this was because Meath won the All-Ireland by 1949, but this isn’t correct. It’s true that Meath GAA had been getting progressively stronger since the early 1930s which did have an impact. Also the GAA ban on playing and watching foreign games and the vigilante squad who were responsible for watching this did have a major impact on cricket numbers”

Adam also says societal changes had a massive impact on cricket teams.

“When the Land Commission came into effect, large estates were broken up so the workers who were employed there moved away and this had a massive impact on the teams”.