By Lar Joye
J.P. Duggan in his history of the Irish Army observed that in the 1930s sport was one of the cheaper means of keeping interest alive in the forces. In January 1933 the assistant chief of staff, General MacNeill, requested that an investigation be undertaken on how physical training was taught in the armies of Germany, Sweden and Czechoslovakia. He also wanted to know whether an Irish Army officer should be sent abroad to train or a foreign officer be asked to come to Ireland.

While this report was being put together, Minister for Defence Frank Aiken insisted that only the Czechoslovak Sokol system of physical training be examined. Sokol is a gymnastics organisation still operating in the Czech Republic and, like the Gaelic League and GAA in Ireland, has been an important part of Czech nationalism since 1862.
In June 1934 Major P. Ruzicka, Czech consul in Dublin, gave a series of public lectures around Ireland about the Sokol movement, while a Lt J. Tichy, a Czech artillery officer, arrived to begin teaching at the Irish Army’s school of physical culture at the Curragh Camp. Frank Aiken announced that he was very excited by the potential of Sokol Drill in view of the recent creation of his Volunteer Force and that an almost perfect analogy existed between the Sokol movement and the GAA in Ireland.
The first course ran from 16 July to 20 December 1934, with eleven officer students. Sokol Drill was performed to music, which the Irish Press, in an article on 10 May 1934, hoped would soon be Irish music and not Bohemian music. Tichy spent two years attached to the Irish Army and by the time he left in 1936 every unit had a trained instructor.
The first public display was at the military tattoo in the RDS in Ballsbridge in 1935, and Lt Tichy gave a series of ten-minute talks on Sokol on Radio Athlone in January 1936. However, despite the public displays and attempts to expand Sokol into the teacher-training colleges, the Irish Army was not happy with progress. The first challenge was Lt Tichy’s lack of English; the need to translate meant that courses took longer than planned. The second challenge was that there were no manuals in English. During his second year with the Irish Army Lt Tichy therefore spent much of his time writing the manual that you can see here. This was criticised for ‘giving a bare outline and virtually no explanation and could only be understood by a person who had already qualified in physical training’. By 1947 Chief of Staff Daniel McKenna was requesting that the Army adopt the British system, which was focused on training soldiers to ‘defeat the enemy and reduce casualties and had a continuous supply of excellent manuals’.
(Many thanks to Noelle Grothier of the Military Archives for her assistance.)
Lar Joye is Dublin Port Heritage Director and current chair of the Irish Museum Association.