Recalling Nenagh's Olympic hero Bob Tisdall
One of the greatest sportsmen that Ireland ever produced, winning Gold in the 1932 Olympic Games was the high point of the long and remarkable life of Bob Tisdall.
Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1907, Robert Morton Newburgh Tisdall was raised from the age of 5 in his mother (Meta Morton of 20 Summerhill)'s homeland of Nenagh, Monsea and Hazel Point. He spent a short spell at Nenagh's Church of Ireland school and played rugby with Nenagh Ormond and Garryowen.
He won his Olympic Gold in the 400m hurdles in Los Angeles. His winning time of 51.67 seconds remained the best in the world for decades afterwards.
When he died in 2004, at the age of 97 - the world's oldest Olympic champion - Tisdall still held the Tipperary record for the 400m hurdles. He is credited with inspiring many of Nenagh's greatest athletes to take up the sport and in turn begin the success story of Nenagh Olympic Athletic Club, of which Tisdall was patron.
SPORTING SENSATION
Educated at Cambridge University, Tisdall became a sporting sensation in England, winning four events in an athletics match between the Cambridge and Oxford universities in 1931. He went on to achieve Irish, UK, Canadian, South African and Greek records, but he wrote to the Olympic Council of Ireland to say that he was Irish and wanted to represent his country in the 1932 games.
He lived with his wife, Leicester-born Peggy, in a converted railway carriage in an orchard in Sussex, where he spent three months training for the games without any hurdles to practice with. Trials were set up for him on a specially laid track in Croke Park, and the Nenagh man set an Irish record of 54.02 seconds on his second attempt, paving his way to LA.
Tisdall won his Olympic title in a time of 51.67 seconds. It would have been a world record but for the fact that his eyes watered, causing him to knock over the last hurdle. The rule at that time was that all 10 hurdles had to remain standing for the world record time to be ratified, so the record went to the man in second place, American Glenn Hardin (51.9), the subsequent 1936 Olympic champion, and also the champion of the 1924 and 1928 games.
Remarkably, Tisdall's Gold victory was only his sixth race in the 400m hurdles event. Also at the 1932 Olympics, he competed in the decathlon, finishing in eighth position and setting a new Olympic best for the 400 metres.
AN EVENTFUL LIFE
After the Olympics, Tisdall worked as a teacher and gym instructor, and he wrote about his early life exploits in an influential book, ‘The Young Athlete’.
He served as an Army officer in the Second World War, seeing action across north Africa and attaining the rank of Major. He remained in Africa after the war, engaged first in the mining industry before turning his hand to agriculture. In 1950 he bought his own farm in Tanganyika (Tanzania), on which he provided employment for 150 people.
Tisdall brought his young family back to Ireland for a time to live at Bantry in west Cork (home of his father, who had emigrated to Ceylon to become a tea planter) before moving again, this time to farm at Nambour in Queensland, Australia, which would become home for the rest of his life.
Frequently returning over the years to the Nenagh heartland of his youth, Tisdall remained fit and active throughout his long life. Among many other outstanding moments, at the age of 86 he undertook his first parachute jump from 12,000 feet. He played tennis and swam regularly in old age, and he literally sailed into his 90s, crewing in the Lough Derg Regatta in his first nonagenarian year.
At 93, Tisdall enjoyed another great honour when he jogged 500 yards with the Olympic torch on its route to the 2000 games in Sydney.
But he regarded it an even greater honour when in 2002 the Tipperary Olympic Gold Committee unveiled a life-sized statue of Tisdall and his fellow local Olympic champions Johnny Hayes and Matt McGrath outside Nenagh Courthouse. Though too frail to travel over for the unveiling, Tisdall said in a video message from Australia: “I have never been paid such a tremendous compliment in my life. After all, I am not even dead yet and there's a statue unveiled to me!”
NENAGH EXHIBITION
An exhibition on Tisdall's life and times is currently on display at the recently reopened Nenagh Heritage Centre. It features an array of items from the Olympic champion's personal collection that had hitherto never been seen in public.
The exhibition was launched last February by local historian Donal A Murphy, biographer and personal friend of Tisdall's. Among those present at the launch was Peter Hooker of Dromineer, Tisdall's grandnephew.
In his address, Mr Murphy observed several themes of Tisdall's life that are evident in the exhibition. Though he left Nenagh to live in many locations elsewhere around the world, he never lost touch with the place he called ‘home’, as evidenced in the naming of his farm in Tanganyika ‘Tipperary’, the naming of his daughter ‘Nena’, and his donation of three hurdles to the then recently-established Nenagh Olympic Athletic Club.
A key theme also was how Tisdall kept tabs on athletics happenings on each return and how he was a proud spectator in the stand in 1997 – at the age of 90 – when Nenagh's women's team won their first inter-club title.
Mr Murphy concluded his presentation with a quote from Tisdall that very much summed up the legacy of this Nenagh man: “I hope that I have made my footprints in the sands of time deep enough for the youth to follow.”