Denis Gerard ‘Dinny’ HYLAND (1929 – 2015)

Dinny was the fourth son and fifth child of Michael HYLAND (1886 -1974) and Mary Elizabeth (Molly) WHELAN  ( 1891 – 1979). He was the great grandson of Michael and Catherine (Dooley) HYLAND of Morette, and grandson of Michael HYLAND (the older brother of my great grandfather Patrick.)

Dinny made headlines in the 1950s as a champion pole vaulter. This post shares the newspaper articles I found.

First blood for Irish army – Irish Times July 2 1955

Hyland sets up a new record – Irish Times July 12 1955

Pole vault record stole the limelight – Irish Times Aug 1 1955

Dinny – Vanishing Ireland

DINNY HYLAND (1929-2015) – POLE VAULTER & GAELIC FOOTBALLER

‘I started out with a curtain pole when I was nine years of age. I was friendly with James Dempsey whose family had a hardware shop in Carlow. They had the poles. And I got fond of the vaulting.’

Dinny’s octogenarian eyes remain steady as those gathered in the room whoosh at the thought of a nine-year-old whizzing through the skies at one end of a curtain pole. But such are the diminutive beginnings of mighty champions.

Fast forward twenty years and the same small boy was midway through an epic reign which saw him winning the annual All-Ireland Pole Vaulting Championships ten times, including nine in succession from 1952-1960.

Sport is in the blood. The Hylands were originally tenant farmers of the Earls of Portarlington and lived north-east of Portlaoise at Morette, in a landscape called The Heath. Dinny’s grandfather and father, both called Michael, were born on the farm in 1852 and 1886 respectively.[i] Michael junior was all set to inherit the farm and had developed a passion for the active life. ‘He played Gaelic football and cricket’, says Dinny. ‘Lord Portarlington would bring teams to play at Emo Court and all the tenant farmers would make an opposing team.’

However, shortly before the First World War, the Hylands ran into a crisis when their two main corn cutting machines broke down. Michael Senior was obliged to sell the farm and relocated to Emo. His seven sons moved to Carlow Towen where Michael Junior and another brother ran a pub on Tullow Street. Like many a publican before and since, they found their generosity got the better of them and they made no money. ‘They just weren’t able to run it’, says Dinny with a sympathetic shake of the head. And so they sold the pub and Michael Junior became a fitter, working first at Richard’s Foundry in Carlow, and later as a lorry driver and labourer at The Shamrock. Dinny would similarly spend most of his working life with Thompson Engineering at Carlow’s Hanover Works, and later at the town’s Hydro-Hoist factory.[ii]

Michael Junior continued to play sport when he moved to Carlow, playing cricket at the club in Palatine and, in the absence of a senior team, playing County Football for the Carlow juniors. In 1913, he played for the juniors who went on to win the Leinster Championship.

Dinny’s mother Molly was born in Dublin but came of Carlow stock. Her father Mathew Whelan hailed from a farm at Tomard near Milford and ran a pub in Leighlinbridge. ‘Aye, there was a lot of pubs in the family at one point’, says Dinny. ‘Farms and pubs’.

Michael and Molly married in 1923 and had four boys and three girls. ‘I was third from the bottom or fourth from the top’, offers Dinny, who arrived in May 1929. He was brought up on Tullow Street, just opposite the Presentation Convent, and educated by the Christian Brothers.[iii]

Not surprisingly, the Hyland children all inherited an instinctive zeal for sport. Dinny’s three sisters were feisty table-tennis players. His eldest brother Michael was frequently to be seen swimming in Carlow’s rivers and, adds Dinny’s wife Delma, he was ‘fairly handy with a hula hoop too’.[iv] His late brother Paddy played both rugby and Gaelic Football; he was on the team with Dinny when O’Hanrahans won the Carlow county final in 1945. As for the younger brother Brendan, ‘I’m not sure if you’d call it sport, but he was good at playing cards’.

Sporting options were something of a rarity in Dinny’s childhood. ‘It was during the war years and they hadn’t the price of a football’, he explains. ‘There were some league matches but there were no matches between schools in my time.’ On Wednesday afternoons the kids would make their way to run around a sports field on Carlow’s Green Road, where the regiments of the British Empire had drilled half a century earlier.[v]

Dinny was the sportiest of the Hyland siblings. From O’Hanrahans, he became one of the star players with the Shamrocks (Carlow’s town team), winning the 1949 Carlow Junior Football Club final.[vi] He also donned the red, green and yellow jersey of his county to play half-back for their National Football League campaigns throughout the early 1950s. He won the Dr Humphrey’s Cup at the Carlow Championships for the best All Round Athlete in 1952, 1953 and 1954.[vii]

But it was as a pole-vaulter that he became a household name across Ireland. It seems likely people have been using sticks and poles to shoot into the skies since the invention of hands, particularly in marshy areas. The first definitive pole vault competitions appear to be those held in Ireland during the Tailteann Games, which took place in the 2nd millennium BC. It had remerged as a competitive sport in Cumbria by the 1840s and was one of the most popular events at the inaugural modern Olympics in 1896.

At school, Dinny was often to be seen vaulting walls and hedges with a rough-cut pole.[viii] ‘We were doing six foot and thought we were great’, he laughs. At the age of 18, he became more serious about it, using a 10-foot bamboo pole to clear a timber lath, taking exact measurements every time he landed.[ix] ‘Timing is everything’ he counsels. ‘And relaxation.’ Sometimes he landed hard. ‘I never jumped on a mattress in my life’, he says. And yet he never gave himself an injury.

In 1948, the 19-year-old competed for the first time at the All Ireland Youth Championships, and won Bronze with a jump of 9 foot 5. In 1950, he won the contest and broke the Irish record for the first time with a vault of 11-5 in Enniscorthy. Just minutes later his friend and rival Val McGann of Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, cleared 11-7 in the same contest.[x] But in July 1951, Dinny set a new record at the annual Guinness Sports at Iveagh Grounds, Crumlin, with 11-8 ¾ and this time it held. [xi]

Throughout the 1950s, Dinny dominated at the three main annual contests – the Ireland Championship, the Leinster Championship and the Cork City Sports Championships.[xii] Every year the good-looking 5’ 9” vaulter from Carlow vaulted a little higher – and the crowds who came to watch got a little bigger.[xiii] The Irish Times declared that he had ‘stolen the limelight’ at the 1955 NACA (National Athletic Cycling Association) All-Ireland Championships when he soared over the lath to become the first Irishman to vault 12 foot, reaching 12-2.[xiv] He ultimately jumped 12-5, which was over a foot higher than the record when he started.[xv]

‘The Sunday Press were always publishing his picture’, recalls Delma proudly. Delma Fenelon was a fun-loving bootmaker’s daughter who lived around the corner from Dinny on Barrack Street.[xvi] ‘‘We were neighbours and he was friends of my brother’, she says. ‘He used to go with other girls in between. A lot of girls. But as someone says to me, “you got him in the end, Delma!”’ And did she have any vaulting ambitions herself? ‘I did not!’

They were married on St. Valentine’s weekend of February 1960; five children followed. Their son Michael, trained by Dinny, later won the Irish championships with a jump of 14-6. Sport remains in the blood, with a granddaughter who hurdles and a grandson who is a promising tennis player.[xvii]

***

Denis (Dinny) Hyland of Quinnagh, Carlow, passed away on May 1, 2015, at St. Luke’s Hospital, Kilkenny. He was survived by his beloved wife Delma and their children Mike, Liza, Jim, Sinead and Donncha.

Notes:

I corresponded with and spoke to Dinny in the early 2000s. He remembered going to the funeral of my grandfather’s uncle Bill HYLAND (d. 1946) from Morette.

Dinny told me about a HENNESSY relative who was the great grandson of a DOOLEY woman.

An unrelated eight-degrees-of-separation story about relationships: Dinny’s Irish born daughter lives in Australia and is married to the first cousin of a woman I went the whole way through school with in New Zealand.