DAUGHTER’S SEARCH FOR DAD’S ROOTS LEADS TO THE SHOWGROUNDS
DOBROWITSCH’S DAUGHTER IN AN EMOTIONAL VISIT TO THE SHOWGROUNDS.
IT was an advertisement in a French newspaper for Sligo Rovers that is credited with attracting Hungarian international Siegfried Dobrowitsch to Sligo in the 1940s.
And it was her father’s love for the Bit O’Red that drew his daughter, Alda Cornish to The Showgrounds last week, accompanied by her husband Brian. Dobrowitsch’s story is unique, certainly in a Sligo Rovers sense. And his daughter Alba has her own story to tell.
But this is about her search for information. Her father never spoke much about his early years, she doesn’t even know whereabouts in Hungary he is from.
But she is determined to find out. And that determination put her in touch with Aidan Mannion, of Sligo Rovers Heritage Group, which led to last week’s meeting at The Showgrounds.
“The interesting thing for me is, in a funny way this club changed my life. Because of this club and him getting out of horrendous Europe to come to Ireland to play football, to end up with an Irish passport, his daughter then ended up with an Irish passport. Because of that Irish passport she was able to get out of a dictatorship and get out of Africa. It’s amazing the tentacles of what happens,” she said.
Dobrowitsch came to Sligo in 1949. He played on the Hungarian team in five international games and he fled from his native country in 1947 after his farm had been taken from him by a Communist official.
He played against Austria and Bulgaria in 1938, against Germany in 1939 and against Po- land and Romania in 1941. Before Sligo Rovers, he plied his trade with Racing Club de Strasbourg.
A rule that was then introduced by the French FA meant that teams could only have two foreign players, so Dobrowitsch was essentially surplus to requirements.
He was all set to move to Portugal, when his wife, a linguist, spotted an ad in a French newspaper for Sligo Rovers. She felt that she would settle better in Ireland as she could speak English. And so began the journey.
As Alda stood back and looked at The Showgrounds last Wednesday, having travelled from Australia, she was overwhelmed by the wealth of information available about her father. Information that she previously could not get her hands on.
It was thanks to members of the Sligo Rovers Heritage Group that she was able to learn more about her father, but there are still so many gaps.
“One of the things she’s trying to establish is his place of birth and his date of birth. That’s not surprising in sort of post-war Europe, a lot of those records disappeared. He was an Irish passport holder, he got one when he was here,” said Aidan Mannion.
Alda grew up listening to Siegfried’s stories about Sligo Rovers and indeed Sligo itself. She had been searching for answers for some time, and had wanted to visit both Hungary and Ireland. One of the popular trips being sold at the minute in Australia is the Amsterdam to Budapest cruise, a trip down the river. Which was an opportunity that Alda felt she could not let go by.
“I saw that, and friends of ours are going and I thought ‘ this is my chance, we are going to Hungary at last’ and then it seemed simple in the beginning. ‘So where exactly in Hungary? I have nothing’. I thought that someone must know something. So I started with the Hungarian Football Federation, Aidan, Racing Club de Strasbourg, Irish Embassy, French Embassy, Hungarian Embassy, and here I sit in Sligo, the only place that’s made any sense.”
Having done her research, she contacted
Sligo Rovers and there she was pointed in the direction of Aidan Mannion.
Emails have been sent over and back for years, and last week she finally got to visit The Showgrounds on her quest to find out more about her father’s life.
“There is some stuff I don’t know about him. What I do know is that he was born in some part of Hungary which has now become, we don’t know now because some of it became Yugoslavia and then that was smashed to pieces and become new countries. It was only when I went to look for a birth certificate I realised we don’t have one. I think getting out of Africa was where we lost a lot of stuff. “
She added: “I believe he lost both of his parents by the age of seven, and he was put in a Jesuit boys home, a very cruel place. He was an orphan. And the next thing I knew about him was he was playing soccer and doing electrical work. The next piece I know is he ended up in France in 47/48ish, and had an involvement with Racing Club Strasbourg. He then met his first wife, who is not my Mum, and thanks to Aidan I found out that as a result of a Sligo Rovers advert he ended up here. He became a naturalised Irish man. He left here and ended up with Drumcondra in Dublin, I can’t find any stuff on that.
“Because he was an electrical engineer he ended up in what is now Zimbabwe doing a big hydroelectric scheme. That’s where he divorced and met my Mum and lived the rest of his life as an electrical engineer and died in 1994.”
His papers to be accepted into Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) are from 1956, meaning that he was here at least eight years. Aidan Mannion has done his research and was able to provide more information: “When he finished with Drumcondra he went and joined a local junior team in Dublin, Larkhill because he was regraded. A senior League of Ireland player couldn’t played junior football so he was regraded. That was probably to pass time.”
What’s most impressive is that Dobrowitsch kept a scrapbook of his time here. Match reports, interviews, teamsheets, the lot. Not only did he create it, but he kept it for his whole life, it travelled the world with him. That has helped his daughter’s search for information massively. Among Mannion’s collection was a handwritten letter sent to the club at the end of the season, with Dobrowitsch asking the club for an extra week’s wages of £7 because he had spent all his money on equipment.
“That meant nothing to us until Alda said he was an electrical engineer so he was obviously buying his equipment. We were trying to get him a full-time job in Dublin at the time as well. Freddie Kiernan was in Dublin too. Stephen Levy was in Longford and they used to train in Dublin.” Dobrowitsch dislocated his shoulder blade in a car accident in Collooney while he was on his way to a game with the aforementioned Kiernan and Levy. He missed out on some game time, and it’s possible that may not have helped his career.
“I don’t understand how he was coming to Sligo and ended up staying in Dublin but maybe that was how it was or else his wife got a job or something I don’t know,” Mannion said.
He added: “In the court case after the accident he said he was a driver in the army in his native country, he must have seen action.
Alda added: “I know he was in the army because as a child I remember him saying that as an able-bodied Hungarian male you either went and fought with the German army or you were shot. Those were your options. As a little girl I remember him saying ‘we ate horse’ and he said ‘we were in Russia and we were starving’. At first you’re like ‘what?’ ”
At the meeting in The Showgrounds, both Aidan and Joe Molloy of the Heritage Group exchanged information with Alda and her husband Brian. Almost like an episode of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’
Aidan continued: “Some information is in Irish newspapers so it must be coming from him. This comment like ‘ the American legation in Austria helped him to get out after his farm was taken over’ ”.
Again, this is new to Alda, as with very little information from when he left school until he signed for Racing Club de Strasbourg, anything is possible.
“There’s a big blank after him coming out of the Jesuit school so when you say something like a farm, I don’t know. “
Mannion, who would be well used to collecting information, is pleasantly surprised himself with the amount of documents Dobrowitsch kept from his time here. “What staggers me is the amount of information this man kept. When you consider he travelled the world and this went with him. It shows how important the whole thing was to him. We all know when we move things start to go missing.
These are items from his own personal scrapbook which is amazing in terms of what it says of what he thought at the time.”
He then turned to Alda, after an emotional look back at her father’s life: “When you look at what you yourself came through, in relation to the political regimes you lived under and got out of and what your Dad had come through, the odds on you sitting here this morning are phenomenally low. I’d say we haven’t a clue of what kind of life he had.”
Mannion urged anyone with any sort of information, not matter how trivial it may seem, to get in touch with the Sligo Rovers Heritage Group.
“One little piece of the jigsaw suddenly adds 20 together. That’s why we say it in the Heritage Group, it doesn’t matter what it is, give us a look at it. He was a player that we knew was significant in the history of the club but we could never nail him down.”
The whole experience was an emotional one for Alda and her husband. So much so, that she plans to return to The Showgrounds in the near future.
“It’s been bigger than Ben Hur. I’ve been very touched by being given a book. I thought a couple of newspaper articles. I was given a club scarf. I had a feeling I would find the Irish friendly and warm and that is an understatement of what I’ve found. This is real to me. This exists. We had a walk this morning and we were kind of like ‘wow this is history’. It’s changed the course of our lives. More than worthwhile. It’s exceeded expectations, I will never forget this. It’s been an overwhelming experience for me.”