{"id":1534,"date":"2014-04-24T15:20:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T15:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kildare.ie\/ehistory\/?p=1534"},"modified":"2014-04-24T15:20:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-24T15:20:00","slug":"punchestown-1914-the-sun-shone-down-with-mid-summer-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/punchestown-1914-the-sun-shone-down-with-mid-summer-power\/","title":{"rendered":"PUNCHESTOWN 1914 – “THE SUN SHONE DOWN WITH MID-SUMMER POWER”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Punchestown 1914 \u2013 \u201cThe sun shone down with mid-summer power\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liam Kenny<\/strong><\/p>\n

Asked to write a piece for the Punchestown supplement the travails of a columnist of a century ago come to mind: \u201cSo much has been written about Punchestown \u2026 that one cannot say anything new about the place\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such was the affectionate introduction to a column written by \u201cTurfrite\u201d in an issue of the Kildare Observer in April 1914 a week after the Punchestown meeting of that year. The writer was no doubt reflecting on the miles of purple prose written each year about the east Kildare racing festival. Because Punchestown was not just a race meeting \u2013 it was also a festival, a fashion show, a society fixture, an attraction for prince and pauper, a place full of tricksters and jesters, and a melting pot for locals and strangers. As the columnist of a century ago put it with disarming modesty: \u201ceverybody who is anybody \u2013 and a lot of us who are mere nobodies \u2013 comes to Punchestown.\u201d<\/p>\n

He went on to paint a vivid pen picture of the contrasting layers of society whose manners and fashion formed the mosaic of colour characteristic of the Punchestown festival. Firstly there were the knights of the road, pedlars and tramps, hawkers and traders for whom April meant only one thing \u2026 a trek to the racecourse nestled in the hills of east Kildare described as: \u201cthat resting place of the roving population who are content with the canopy of Heaven for their covering during the few days that precede the meeting, until the day after the races when they pack up and we see them again at some country meeting many miles away.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the other end of the social scale were \u201cThe leaders of Society and ladies of fashion\u201d \u2013 the latter wearing the most wonderful creations and the men in immaculate morning dress.\u00a0 Our observer of a century ago was not blind to the pretensions which made Punchestown a Mecca for social climbers noting that some of the men wore top-hats so that they could look like \u201creal aristocrats\u201d. Not that there was any shortage of authentic aristocrats\u00a0 with just about every titled dignitary in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland considering it de rigueur to see and be seen at Punchestown.<\/p>\n

However for Punchestown to truly have the columnists reaching for the superlatives in the newsroom dictionary the weather gods had to play their part. Notoriously exposed when the east wind slices down from the Wicklow hills, Punchestown\u2019s amphitheatre could just as easily become a suntrap if balmier conditions prevailed. And so it was for the festival of April 1914 when weather, racing and crowds combined to make the meeting something akin to heaven on earth for its patrons. As the reporter gushed: \u201cThe sun shone from a cloudless sky with mid-summer power and the heat was almost oppressive \u2026 the attendance was of record dimensions, while never had the entries been so large for all the well-known races.\u201d\u00a0 The weather was so uncharacteristically good that the observer of the 1914 festival returned to the subject again and again through his reportage: \u201cOne has to go back a decade to remember anything approaching the glorious weather.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The kindness of the weather had many advantages and our reporter was clearly besotted by the display of feminine fashions facilitated by the radiant weather. He wrote of how the glorious conditions afforded ample opportunity for the ladies to come attired in \u201cmagnificent toilettes\u201d and the scene on the stands was a brilliant one. Not for many years has fashion \u2013 the salient feature of the famous meeting \u2013 had the same opportunity of strutting hither and thither in the public gaze to such advantage.<\/p>\n

The men were not behind in the wardrobe stakes with those in the reserved stands wearing \u201cmorning dress\u201d in courtesy to the representative of the King being present. This was a reference to the Lord Lieutenant – as the monarch\u2019s representative in Ireland – being the ranking dignitary at the meeting.\u00a0 The arrival of the Lord Lieutenant and his retinue was one of the highlights of the pomp and ceremony which enveloped the meeting. Their Excellencies, the Lord Lieutenant and Countess Aberdeen made the journey to Naas by rail from Kingsbridge. They were received at Naas station by fifty men of the Royal Irish Constabulary and half a dozen mounted constables. Their travelling party occupied two more carriages and the entire procession made its way to Punchestown where they were received at the Kildare Hunt stand by Mr Percy La Touche and the Earl of Enniskillen, the Boy Scouts of the county forming a guard of honour.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The royal representatives attended each of the two days of Punchestown arriving from the capital by train on each day. However the fact that they returned to the city by motor car on the second day was novel enough to be mentioned in the paper.\u00a0 The evolving impact of the motor car on Irish life could, like so many trends, be traced in the reporting of Punchestown as the years went by.\u00a0 The bye-laws made as regards the motor traffic were more honoured in the breach than the observance according to the Kildare Observer. Never was seen in Ireland such a collection of motor cars, of all ages, makes and sizes. They packed the special enclosure reserved for them and overflowed \u201cin serried rows\u201d over all the surrounding plain. More than 700 cars paid in through the Punchestown gates on the first day of the 1914 meeting and another 1,000 were estimated and day two. The kind of local enterprise which has always capitalised on Punchestown was in evidence with local landowners running what were described as \u201cprivate garages\u201d or parking fields which netted them \u201ca considerable amount.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new char-a-bancs (open topped buses) were extensively patronised and crowded with race goers. The novel mode of transport provided passing entertainment for the youngsters in the town of Naas who voiced a cheer when a Punchestown bound vehicle sped through the streets. There was a sense that horsepower in the mechanical sense was taking over from horsepower in its original animal sense as far as the business of getting to the racecourse was concerned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Punchestown 1914 \u2013 \u201cThe sun shone down with mid-summer power\u201d Liam Kenny Asked to write a piece for the Punchestown supplement the travails of a columnist of a century ago come to mind: \u201cSo much has been written about Punchestown \u2026 that one cannot say anything new about the place\u201d.\u00a0 Such was the affectionate introduction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looking-back"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Kildare Local Studies","author_link":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/author\/localstudies\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}