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Thursday, July 08, 2010
Mystery Football team
CALLING A convention of the GAA brains and statisticians along and across the south east including professionals such a sports writer Dom Williams, GAA Museum curator Anthony Furlong, Sean Whelan and other savants, which may possibly include an odd cleric or two (elderly).
The team photo we have been given today has intrigued every scholar on the Furlong at Large floor. In the photo is one four-times All-Ireland medal-winning footballer of so great a skill and influence as was Joe Dopley of Offaly, Dan Quigley or George O’Connor, Matty Forde, Tony Doran, Colm Cooper of Kerry or Brian Dooher of Tyrone. His name which lives on in legend is Edmond Wheeler, later Father Wheeler.
Edmond Wheeler is fourth from right in the back row. The date on the football says “GAA 1914”.
It is a very formal posed photo. We have no idea in the world who any of the remaining fifteen are. Nor have we been able to identify the place or team. We want your help because this is a photo, I, after years in the business have never laid eyes on before in my life.
For readers of any age or sport, Edmond Wheeler’s story is the stuff of a sporting epic. He was a native of Killurin. The important matter in his young life is that he was a committed aspirant to the priesthood and entered St. Peter’s College former seminary.
He was accepted and, as the ecclesiastical phrase had it, was “incardinated” for the Diocese of Ferns.
That means that his life and vocation was committed to the bishop of Ferns, then Most Rev. Dr. James Browne (of Big Barn, Mayglass). The rules meant that under pain of expulsion no engagement in public sports was permitted. Here then was the problem.
It could be called a challenge, an insoluble problem and as certainly looked on by the County Wexford GAA board and selectors, a ghastly waste of a genius with the large ball behind strictly enclosed seminary walls.
The secret logistics of what came to pass have been concealed to this day. Certainly everyone knows now WHAT happened.
What no-one knows or has recorded is HOW it happened. There certainly was no record of any Edmond Wheeler on any team list.
It would take a full book to record the football and hurling romance of Wexford and Edmond Wheeler between 1910 and 1920, between peace and war.
It’s hard enough to conjure up the separate campaigns between 1910 and 1918.
Following the All-Ireland hurling win of 1910 the footballers, a truly remarkable combination, certainly unfancied, drew with mighty Kerry in the 1913 All-Ireland football final but lost the replay narrowly.
Wexford won the next four Leinster and All-Ireland senior football championships in succession. It is a feat that has never been surpassed. Let us quote that which was a summing up of Edmond Wheeler’s career as a camouflaged football star.
“Father Wheeler’s name will be forever linked with the glorious period of Wexford supremacy in Gaelic football for he was an outstanding member of the famous teams (plural NF) which brought honour and glory to Wexford from 1913 to 1918. Fr. Wheeler was a seminary student at St. Peter’s College, Wexford, during those great years. He had earlier begun to learn the art of hurling and football with the Glynn and Ballyhogue teams.
He was regarded as one of Ireland’s best full backs and between him and that peer of goal keepers, Tom McGrath, who also did duty for Wexford in those years, there was an understanding which baffled their opponents and paved the way for Wexford’s many successes”.
Yes, but how?
The late John Barker Snr., Quality glassware merchant and pioneer travel agent, IRB organiser and sportsman, was one of the mentors of that great four-in-a-row team and spoke often to me as a schoolboy about Edmond Wheeler.
It was not about his already accepted football brilliance. It was how he was whisked “over the wall”, so to speak, from St. Peter’s College seminary.
He did not tell me too much for fear young ears might be scandalised no doubt. What he did say was audacious and told with hearty chortles.
Edmond Wheeler, a big framed man was often extracted from the Seminary disguised as a woman in the long clothes, hat and boots of the period.
He played under several assumed names, the most frequent of which was “James Furlong”, “Joseph Quinn” and “E. Phelan”. I think that they must have been real players within the county in case of an identify check.
What is more, the subterfuge must have had “inside help” and to blazes with canon law. Has any reader any further evidence or rumour otherwise?
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