I often came home to find my son insisting he wanted to go to bed to hear the next chapter
This afternoon Lansdowne Road will erupt with joy should Ireland complete its first grand slam at the stadium that first hosted a rugby international back in 1878. The Dublin 4 ground has seen many days that thrilled and delighted sports fans in the 145 years since then, but none were as tragic as 2 March, 1928, when it was the scene of a little-known tragedy.
Brian Hanrahan, a prop with the Lansdowne club, suffered a neck injury in a Leinster Senior Cup match and died in hospital next day. He was the first – and so far only – player to die playing sport in Lansdowne Road.
Hanrahan, just 22, was a victim of the way rugby was played in those days. Nowadays, referees bring the packs together slowly and carefully – some packs can weigh 900kg – with the hope of minimising the risk of injury. But in
1928 the packs stood several metres apart and ran at each other, like goats butting. There were quite a few deaths and many head and neck injuries.
Poor Hanrahan took his place in the front row against Trinity wearing the famous black, red and gold hoops of Lansdowne. But just 15 minutes after the start, a scrum was called and immediately collapsed.
The young Tipperary man suffered a catastrophic injury to his neck and was whisked away by ambulance to the nearby Baggot Street hospital. He remained conscious throughout Saturday, although paralysed from the neck down, and at 9.30pm he told witnesses that his injury was due to a head-to-head collision. ‘He attributed no blame to any person,’ a doctor told a subsequent inquest. ‘He considered it was purely accidental.’
On Sunday morning, Hanrahan slipped into a coma, and died around 4pm, just short of 24 hours after the fatal incident.
I came across Hanrahan’s story when researching a book I co-authored with Malachy Clerkin on the history of Lansdowne Road, published when it was rebuilt and reopened as Aviva Stadium in 2010. The incident isn’t mentioned in either of the earlier histories of Irish rugby, which I thought was a little sad, but I resolved to find out as much as I could about Hanrahan’s life and death. It turned out to be my favourite chapter in the book.
Hanrahan came back into my life a couple of years later. I had been reading bedtime stories to my kids for years but the youngest, Billy, was hard to please. He refused to go to sleep with the light on, so after reading a chapter or two to him I had to switch off the light and make up a story to help him nod off.
He liked these simple tales about dinosaurs or moon landings but the one he loved best was about a kid who was brutal at football – Billy identified with that! – but improves after receiving advice from the ghost of an old soccer star he meets on a school tour to a football ground. The story was quite a hit – I often came home around 6.30pm to find him sitting on the stairs in his pyjamas insisting he wanted to go to bed to hear the next chapter. The whole tale took almost a year to complete, taking the hero – also Billy – from his schoolyard to playing in the Premier League for Newcastle United.
When we finished, he said, ‘you should turn that into a book Dad’, which I smiled at and instantly forgot, being far too busy for such things.
But about three years later the newspaper I was working for closed down, and noticing I had a lot more free time, Billy repeated his suggestion. I took him up on it and wrote down our story.
It was terrible. The story was unbelievable and there was little else to commend it. Frustrated, I went for a walk where I live close to Aviva Stadium. From outside you can look up the tunnel and out on to the very spot where Hanrahan was injured in front of the west stand. It was a lightbulb moment, and I instantly decided to rewrite the book, changing football to rugby and setting it in Lansdowne with the ghost of Hanrahan.
O’Brien Press publisher Michael O’Brien liked the book and told me to go away and write a sequel. This month I published my tenth novel for children in the Rugby Spirit series. The books are based on the adventures of a youngster, Eoghan, who meets a ghost in what is now Aviva
Stadium. The books marry my love of sport with a passion for history and Eoghan and Hanrahan get to meet a new ghost in each book, so he has escapades involving the Donegal-born All Black Dave Gallaher, doomed rebel Kevin Barry, Bloody Sunday victim Michael Hogan, and Liam Whelan, the Manchester United player who died in the Munich disaster.
Brian Hanrahan’s story had been largely forgotten but this children’s series helps brings him back to life as an inspiring figure to a youngster struggling with a new sport. Nowadays kids in Japan, New Zealand and the Czech Republic know all about him.
Today, Ireland will take to that same field hoping to complete the last of their five steps to a magnificent Grand Slam. I’m sure Hanrahan’s spirit will be there to cheer them on.