John Pentland Mahaffy was described as a contradictory and often extravagant legend by William Stanford and Robert McDowell in their 1971 biography. Mahaffy’s remarkable life certainly was contradictory, at times extravagant and often controversial and we cannot hope to do him justice in a mere 20 minutes. He was a polymath, a professor of ancient history, a scholar of ancient Greek who also had a doctorate in music and was effectively a native German speaker. He entered Trinity College, Dublin aged 16 in 1855 and embarked on a highly eventful academic career that was to keep him there until his death, aged 80, in 1919.
Highly sensitive about his nationality and class, Mahaffy saw himself as part of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, was dismissive of Gaelic culture and sought to downplay his own Ulster-Scots origins as too Celtic. He generally disapproved of the wave of athleticism which swept into public schools and universities in the mid-nineteenth-century and held that country pursuits and cricket were the only sporting pastimes in which a gentleman should indulge. Yet despite his disdain for organised sport, Mahaffy represented Ireland at both cricket and shooting in the 1860s and 70s, thus becoming one of Ireland’s first multi-discipline international sportsmen. However, Mahaffy’s impact on sport was not limited to these performances. As a historian, he was responsible for introducing the notion that ancient Greek sport began with aristocratic amateurs, and suffered a catastrophic decline with the introduction of professionalism. Although subsequently shown to be inaccurate, these ideas found a ready audience among the classically-educated elite that controlled British sport, and played a significant part in contemporary debates around social exclusivity and financial reward in sport.
He was born in Switzerland in 1839, spent the first four years of his life in Lucerne and then moved to Kissingen, a fashionable spa town in Bavaria which was to be his home until he was 9. His father, Nathaniel Mahaffy, was an Irish Anglican clergyman who had moved to Europe to serve the spiritual needs of wealthy English tourists.
Nathanial Mahaffy disdained to learn German and relied on Latin for any communication he needed to have with Bavarians who did not speak English. However, the young John Mahaffy picked up German with ease and was to remain fluent in the language throughout his life. He was also exposed to some very grand acquaintances at this early. The young Tsarevitch of Russia, the future Alexander II, spent time with him to practice his English, and King Ludwig himself, perhaps influenced by the fact that his mistress, the notorious Lola Montez, was from Limerick, took him under his wing.
Receiving such attention from royalty early in life left a lasting impression on Mahaffy and perhaps gave him an elevated impression of his own social standing. As an adult Mahaffy was frequently accused of snobbery and he gravitated towards those with aristocratic backgrounds whenever he could.
He believed that there were basically three classes in society, the gentry, business people and the rest, which he dismissed as ‘the lower classes, the rabble, the poor, the socialists and the peasants.’ Having dismissed the larger part of society as being irredeemably below him, he had a surprisingly egalitarian, if not hypocritical view of how the gentry ought to work. Here, he felt that there should be a sense of basic equality, irrespective of formal rank. He admitted that he came from the lesser landed gentry, but expected that his rank should give him access to the highest echelons of society. Sport, it turned out, was to be a useful tool for Mahaffy. He attributed his initial introduction to Lord Carlisle, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, as being a result of his reputation as a useful bowler and he took full advantage of his cricketing connections to make lasting friendships with members of the aristocratic families that frequented Dublin Castle and the Viceregal Lodge.
However, this was still all someway off for the young Mahaffy, who aged 9, was still to set foot in Ireland.
His life changed abruptly in 1848, when revolution swept through Europe and Ludwig was deposed. The Mahaffys were already in trouble. Although Nathaniel Mahaffy was partially supported by collections from Kissengen’s British community, he was largely able to stay in Bavaria due to the income from his wife’s estate in County Monaghan. However, the potato famine slashed rents and, as the situation deteriorated in Bavaria, both personal safety and financial necessity forced the Mahaffys to return home.
In Monaghan, John Mahaffy and his two older brothers soon got used to life as the sons of a rural landlord, throwing themselves into the country pursuits of shooting and fishing. The Mahaffy brothers were not well off and shared one antiquated muzzle loading rifle between them, but John evidently became an accomplished shot.
Nathanial Mahaffy did not seek to continue his clerical career and seems to have been content to live on his wife’s rents. However, being a country landowner came with a certain social responsibility and after a couple of years the Mahaffys found that the obligation of keeping a more or less open house for tenants and neighbouring gentry threatened to eat up nearly all of their income. They subsequently decided to become absentees and rented a modest house on the northern outskirts of Dublin.
The Reverend Mahaffy’s straightened circumstances meant that he was never able to send any of his sons to school, but he had little to do with his time except educate them himself. So that is sons would not miss out on games, he used his connections to allow them to play in informal games at Trinity College, Dublin and St Columba’s College, Rathfarnham. John enjoyed cricket and developed some talent, but also saw it as an important means of gaining useful social introductions.
Cricket in the nineteenth century was enjoyed by all classes, but was a sport in which class divisions were clearly on display. In the first-class game there were strict divisions between amateurs and professionals and below this level clubs were often quite restrictive about who could join and who they would play against. These restrictions were even more evident in Britain’s colonies, where the added dimensions of race and religion were added to the equation. Ireland of course was nominally a fully-fledged part of the United Kingdom, but in many ways had a semi-colonial feel about it which was not so evident in Scotland or Wales, and the cricketing circles into which young Mahaffy entered excluded the vast majority of Irishmen, being largely confined to middle and upper class protestants.
John Mahaffy was soon playing club cricket around the Dublin area. In 1853, at the age of 14, he appeared, with his brother Richard for Juveniles against Roebuck. The press reported that John took 2 hours 20 minutes to score just 21 runs and at one point maintained the strike for an impressive 40 consecutive balls.
Throughout his cricketing career, Mahaffy was to be regarded as an all-rounder, often opening the batting as well as contributing significantly to the bowling. As a bowler, his figures were often impressive taking five wickets or more in an innings on many occasions, and in 1866 he took 13 wickets in a match for Ireland against I Zingari, but his scores as a batsmen would make a modern cricket fan question why he kept being put in so early in the batting order. His first-class career best innings was only 52, although this was achieved against a South of England side featuring W.G. Grace and several county professionals in 1876. For most of his career it was actually quite rare for him to make double figures, but he appears to have been an excellent stonewaller, capable of wearing bowlers down by blocking for hours on end, after which more able batsmen could come in and run amok.
By 1857 John was firmly established in the Trinity College, Dublin team of which he was to remain a stalwart well into middle age. The college’s social status meant that its cricket team was also occasionally afforded first class status for its games, although only usually when playing against elite English opposition such as the MCC or I Zingari. Nevertheless, although the college’s status as a cricket team was due more to social standing than actual cricketing prowess, it elevated Mahaffy to a level where he was considered to be playing in superior games and from which he could make the step up to play representative cricket for Ireland.
In June and July of 1860 Mahaffy was selected for the United All Ireland XI which played against 18 of Ireland in Dublin and then toured to Belfast and Scotland playing against 22 of the North of Ireland, 16 of Glasgow and 16 of the North of Scotland
In September 1860 he appeared for the XXII of Ireland against the All England XI in Dublin and thereafter played for Ireland throughout much of the 1860s.
Mahaffy also appeared as an opening batsman for the Gentlemen of the North v the Gentlemen of the South at Phoenix Park on September 30th 1864 scoring 18 and 5 and also being the North’s top wicket taker with 5. In a nod to his Ulster roots, he played in this fixture for the North until 1871 despite being a resident of Dublin.
In June 1867 Mahaffy, representing Dublin Shooting Club, did well in the Irish Rifle Association’s Abercorn Cup competition at Dollymount. Mahaffy finished 4th overall in the 4 day event, just missing out on the cup which was valued at 50 guineas. This was a competition using high powered rifles over a variety of distances up to 1100 yards.
Immediately afterwards he was selected for the Irish Eight to take part in the Elcho Shield, an annual triangular competition between England, Scotland and Ireland held at Wimbledon Common.
Mahaffy acquitted himself well in the competition, consistently scoring in the top half of the Irish team, his individual scores standing up well against the competition generally, but the Irish finished a distant third 170 points behind the English and Scots who were separated by only a single point.
On examining the lists of competitors, the reason for Ireland’s comparatively poor performance becomes clear. The Irish team were entirely civilian with just one former soldier in their ranks, while the Scots team featured seven serving professional soldiers, and the English team eight. The Irish were effectively amateurs up against professionals. It was a lesson the Irish team took to heart. From 1868 onwards, the Irish team was entirely composed of serving members of the British Army or Irish police and amateurs like Mahaffy were no longer selected.
As somebody who was selected to represent Ireland at two different sports when the very concept of international sport was in its infancy, Mahaffy undoubtedly deserves a place in Irish sporting history, even if both the sports he was in involved in were dominated by a social elite based on Lord Abercorn’s circles at the viceregal lodge and hardly representative of the Irish people as a whole. Mahaffy was undoubtedly an Irishman, but saw himself as part of the British establishment. He was generally contemptuous of Irish culture, particularly the Irish language. Within the context of home internationals however Mahaffy had no problem with the concept of representing Ireland, as a separate sporting identity did not yet challenge the political union between the kingdoms.
Mahaffy’s own sporting career was most definitely an elite amateur affair and in common with most sportsmen of his class he had something of a disdain for professional sportsmen, which probably took on a personal aspect after his exclusion from the Irish shooting eight. His academic work as an expert on ancient Greek history was soon to inflame an already bitter debate on sport and amateurism which was to reverberate across the British Empire and beyond.
and was subsequently used for the Zappas Games of 1875 and the first
Modern Olympics in 1896
In 1875, Mahaffy was a 36 year old professor of ancient history. Yet despite his acclaimed expertise on ancient Greek history and language it was not until that year that he made his first visit to Greece. Like many other British classicists, he was confused and dismayed to find that his ancient Greek was of little use in modern Athens, where most inhabitants in the 1870s actually spoke Albanian, but while there he was invited to attend the second of Evangelos Zappas’ revived Olympic games at the Panathenaic stadium. This primarily featured a mixture of gymnastic and athletic events and took much of its inspiration from British track and field, although the standard of competition was as yet far below British levels and the organisation somewhat shambolic. Mahaffy described for example how the competitors in the 200 metres final had to swerve around an elderly lady who was walking her dogs on the track.
On his return to Dublin, Mahaffy wrote a scathing account of the games for Macmillan’s Magazine. However, his interest was sufficiently stimulated that he decided to investigate ancient Greek sport in some detail and he produced a follow-up article for Macmillan’s Magazine entitled Old Greek Athletics. It was a short piece, only nine pages in length, but it was highly significant.
Mahaffy opened his article by drawing attention to English athleticism, with the accompanying assumptions regarding British sporting prowess compared to other nations and the place of the Anglo-Saxon as the true cultural heirs of classical Athens.
Importantly, he drew a distinction between athletic and agonistic competition, contending that the former was ‘rather a low thing among the Greeks’ whilst the latter were purely amateur. Mahaffy had invented a simplistic divide in ancient games in which he set the four great religious festivals, the Olympic, Nemean, Pythian and Isthmian games apart from other meetings, such as the Panathenaic games. He claimed that religious games involved no financial reward and took place solely in the pursuit of agon, a pure form of manly competition. He contrasted this with what he called athletic competition, because the Greek word Athlon implied a prize of cash or other intrinsic value, was on offer. This assertion, which was to have far reaching consequences, not just for the study of ancient sport, but for contemporary sporting debate, particularly in relation to the Olympic games, was completely without basis. The sporting landscape of the ancient Greek world blurred athletic and agonistic together, and circumstances changed from one games to another in a culture which lasted for a millennium and was spread over a huge geographical area. That Mahaffy sought to condense this down into a few sentences on the differences and relative merits of amateurism and professionalism had as much to do with his views on sport in his own time as the reality of two thousand years earlier, and was betrayed by his observation that the Greek’s ’highbred contempt’ for ‘running for the pot’ was ‘not so common nowadays.’
His article prompted a spate of writing about ancient Greek sport by other British and Irish academics over the next 40 years. The recurring theme was that ancient Greek sport had begun as a noble and amateur aristocratic pursuit and had degenerated with the participation of the lower classes and the supposed advent of professionalism. The historians of ancient sport were able to come up with a host of anecdotes chronicling the supposed degeneration of ancient sport and sportsmen, and show how not only sport, but the very fabric of Greek and Roman society, had been destroyed as a result of unfettered professionalism. Needless to say, these arguments were accompanied by dire warnings for the future of the British Empire, if contemporary sport followed a similar path.
As the originator of these ideas, Mahaffy arguably had an impact that went far beyond the classics classroom and played directly into the arguments about professionalism in sport that raged between the publication of his article in 1876 and the eventual slow death of amateurism a hundred years later. In the 1980s, the American classicist, David Young, would accuse Mahaffy, and his followers, Percy Gardner and Norman Gardiner, of deliberately distorting the ancient Greek past in order to wage an elitist class war in Victorian and Edwardian sport.
While there is an element of truth to this, with some sports such as rowing, athletics and rugby union, adopting particularly harsh and unforgiving interpretations of amateurism inspired by a past that never was, it is harsh to lay the blame entirely at Mahaffy’s door. Mahaffy and his followers were themselves conditioned by their educational background to see the modern world through a classical lens. Elite education in the 19th offered few other reference points, but although the classical scholars of Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin could quote ancient texts in the original Greek and Latin they had little feel for the ancient world as it actually was. The alien nature of ancient Greece was often lost on them and they imagined it and its people to have similar feelings and motivations to themselves. This led scholars like Mahaffy to project certain contemporary issues and concerns onto the distant past and draw inaccurate conclusions. Unfortunately, the confidence which Mahaffy and his followers had in their own abilities meant that conjecture was all too often presented as fact, and that such ‘facts’ were sometimes seized upon by contemporary sports administrators with their own agendas.
HIND ZEIT 