As part of the GAA’s 125th anniversary in 2009, the final resting place of John McKay in London was tracked down after research led by GAA Historian Dr Dónal McAnallen and Kieran McConville. Unveiling a headstone on his grave that year were Michael Hasson (Ulster GAA), Aogán Ó Fearghail (future Uachtarán CLG), Kieran McConville, Philip Byrne (great grand nephew of John McKay), Tom Daly (Ulster GAA), Dónal McAnallen and Oliver Galligan (Ulster GAA).
Dónal McAnallen
100 bliain ó shin inniu, fuair John McKay, duine de phríomhbhunaitheoirí agus na chéad Chomh-rúnaithe CLG, bás i Londáin. B’as Dún Phádraig ó dhúchas dó, agus b’ionadaí Chorcaí é, ach déanfar comóradh air i Londáin inniu.
A hundred years ago today, on 2 December 1923, John McKay died at 20 Dumbarton Road, Brixton Hill, London.
His death certificate recorded ‘Press Agent’. In the GAA pantheon, however, he is remembered – though somewhat vaguely for decades – as one of the founders and original joint secretaries of the association.
McKay was born at Cargagh, near Downpatrick, in October 1852. His father Joseph, an agricultural labourer, died before John was 10, leaving his mother Ann Jane to raise 5 children by herself.
John benefited from a solid national school education and decided to become a journalist. He joined the staff of the Belfast Morning News in the mid-1870s before taking a post as reporter with the Cork Examiner in April 1878.
In his role, he saw at first hand some of the transformative events of modern Irish history. Around Munster he attended and reported on over 200 meetings of the Land League and the Parnellite Irish National League.
The headline event of them all was his attendance at the foundation meeting of the GAA at Thurles on 1 November 1884. He had recently become an official for Cork Amateur Athletic Club, and was the only representative of the largest county at that meeting. He was also the only Ulster native present. The fact that he and Michael Cusack and John Wyse Power were elected as joint secretaries owed much to the fact that all three were journalists, as the association recognised its need to secure publicity.
McKay’s report of that initial meeting for the Examiner is the most extensive contemporary account that we have of that day. It contains a speech from McKay, in which he extolled: ‘the formation of a general athletic association for Ireland — composed of representatives from all the leading clubs — to regulate the management of all meetings, to frame rules of their own for the government of such meetings, and put an end once and for ever to their being bound by the rules of the English A. A. Association.’
Appropriately then, McKay sat on the subcommittee that adopted the rules for hurling, football and athletics in early 1885. To govern as a multi-sports body was hugely ambitious, especially as the local enthusiasts around the counties had yet little experience of governance, let alone a firm grasp of the new rules.
Track-and-field contests were McKay’s chief sporting passion, and as such he played a critical role in ensuring the successful growth during the first couple of years. Munster was the key battleground against the rival Irish Amateur Athletic Association, and he was assiduous in corresponding with organisers of sports all over the province, attending their events, ensuring all was in order, acting as timekeeper, and writing reports for the Examiner.
John McKay, one of the founders of the GAA.
Besides all that, he had to take on a great added burden of diplomacy. His fellow secretary Cusack was firing off frequent insults at the press, other sporting officials, and within the GAA executive. Only for McKay’s smoother approach, the progress made could have been lost. After the expulsion of GAA Vice-President J. F. Murphy of Cork for promoting a Munster National Football League in competition with the GAA, a protest meeting was called in the city in March 1886, and the threat of a more concrete breakaway from the association was real. Seeing the danger on his own turf, McKay attended the meeting, bravely and selflessly. While Cusack and the pro-Murphy faction got locked in another verbal spat, McKay appealed for unity in the GAA and nationwide. Mr Cusack was ‘a strong and vigour Irishman’, he said, but he ‘was not the Gaelic Athletic Association, and never would be as long as I am secretary.’ Although the meeting was compared to ‘a bear garden’, and the national officials were roundly insulted and jostled on their way out, no split ensued.
Cusack pushed it too far, though, when he challenged Archbishop Croke, GAA Patron, in a public letter. McKay penned a letter to the Examiner to repudiate it and disassociate the GAA from it.
John Wyse Power went further, compiling a list of allegations of maladministration by Cusack. Top of the agenda for the Central Council meeting on 4 July was essentially the trial of the GAA’s father. Power did not turn up, however. This left McKay, as joint secretary, to read out the rap-sheet of another secretary against a third. With regret, he raised his hand with the majority to eject Cusack from office.
McKay had reached him own limit too. His secretarial workload had increased rapidly as the association’s network spread. His wife Ellen – née Browne of Ballyclough, Mallow – was pregnant with their third child, the first having died as an infant. Something had to give between family, job and voluntary service.
Pictured at the gravestone of John McKay are, left to right, Donal McAnallen, historian, Philip Byrne, great-grandnephew of John McKay, and Kieran McConville.
He announced his retirement as GAA secretary in August 1886. Friends and admirers called a meeting in Cork to raise a testimonial to McKay, and opened a subscription fund. A club secretary wrote in tribute to Sport:
‘No words of mine could fully portray the services rendered to the GAA by Mr McKay; no words are needed, as every athlete knows that the GAA has no more efficient officer – no better champion and guardian of its rights.’
McKay continued to serve as an official of Cork AAC up to 1892, but he had little involvement in the GAA thereafter. He returned to Belfast from 1894 to 1899, writing for the Irish News and three other papers. After moving to Dublin in 1900, he appears to have attended the 1902 Congress as a stand-in Cork delegate, and he was noted among the congregation at Cusack’s funeral in 1906.
Following a brief stint back in Cork in the early 1910s, on the staff of the Cork Free Press, John ventured to London with Ellen and daughter Johanna. There he would spend his last decade. He combined some press work with office duties for his son John Paul, AKA ‘Paul Murray’, an internationally famous theatrical producer. They also tended to his other son, Patrick Joseph, through protracted illness.
John McKay died, aged 71, at 20 Dumbarton Road, Brixton Hill, one hundred years ago today. In the decades afterwards, his legend faded. By the turn of the millennium, no one knew where exactly he came from, or where he died.
Then in 2009, the GAA’s 125th year, an exhaustive research effort revealed his Down origins and his burial in an unmarked grave at Kensal Green, London. The association’s 125 Years Committee organised the installation of a gravestone memorial for John McKay, his wife Nellie (1852-1949), their son Patrick Joseph, and their grandson Patrick Joseph Junior. It was unveiled and dedicated in November 2009.
And at 11.00 a.m. today they will be remembered at a special graveside ceremony, hosted by the Provincial Council of Britain and London County Board, in Kensal Green. There will be prayers, wreath-laying, an oration, piping, and some songs. John McKay and his family will not be forgotten again.
Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a n-anamach uaisle.