Ahakista man’s solo trip to 1936 Games
BY SARAH CANTY
WITH the Olympics in full swing, a 99-year-old Ahakista resident has recalled to The Southern Star his own extraordinary journey travelling on his own to attend the Berlin Olympics in 1936 – aged just 11.
As a boy, Patrick Skene Catling had travelled with his family before. He had been on holidays in France once, and Denmark on another occasion.
Then, in the summer of 1936, when Patrick was just 11 years old, his parents sent him on a holiday – all by himself – to see the spectacle that was the Berlin Olympics. He travelled in a small steamer from London to Hamburg and then by train to Berlin where his father had arranged for him to stay with friends.
The journey was only a little daunting, said Patrick, who has lived in West Cork for five decades. ‘My parents got my tickets for me and must have thought it was perfectly normal,’ he said this week. Although, navigating Germany without understanding the language proved more intimidating for the young traveller, and witnessing the historic Olympics Games was positively overwhelming. ‘I had no German and the stadium was huge with hundreds of thousands of people. It was very overwhelming. I was excited to be there but also frightened,’ Patrick recalls.
‘There was Hitler sitting in a high chair allowing gold medal winners to come and have their hands shaken. But he was a believer that the Aryans were the master race, even though his own hair was black! So, he wouldn’t have anything to do with Jesse Owens even though he had just won four gold medals. I was there when he brushed off Jesse,’ remembers Patrick.
Jesse Owens’ exploits at the 1936 Olympics, winning four gold medals, frustrated Adolf Hitler’s plans to show Aryan ‘supremacy’ at the Games.
Patrick explained that he had been schooled by his parents on the type of man Hitler was. ‘I was pleased in a way because I had been brainwashed by dad and his friend Gordon Young (Reuters chief correspondent in Berlin from 1934 to 1937). They gave me a good idea of how horrible Hitler was. So, when he gave Jesse the brush off, I was entirely sympathetic with Jesse naturally,’ said Patrick.
Being in the Olympic stadium was in and of itself, ‘quite emotional,’ says Patrick. ‘Seeing the Third Reich… It was an overwhelming experience. It was an interesting time to be in Germany. But I was pleased to get back home.’
Home was London, where he lived with his mother and father, who was a journalist for Reuters. At the age of six he vowed to become a writer. His mother was so proud of the books his father had written that he knew he wanted to do the same.
Patrick got his pictures taken with two lion cubs in Berlin Zoo in 1936.
And so, he did. Patrick was educated in London and the United States and worked as journalist for the Baltimore Sun and the Manchester Guardian and continues to this day to contribute to The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He has written several books and is best known for The Chocolate Touch published in 1952. He wrote a memoir, published in 2004, called Better Than Working, in which he mentions his epic trip to Berlin.
Patrick, aged 99, lives in Ahakista with his partner Diana Laing, having discovered it over 50 years ago. ‘I followed a good friend, the successful writer Wolf Mankovich. He persuaded me that West Cork was a great place to live after he moved over as soon as (former Taoiseach Charles) Haughey cut taxes for artists,’ recalls Patrick.
Patrick and Diana have lived here ever since, enjoying the quiet rural Irish life and occasional trips to the Tin Pub.
When his neighbour, Sarah Webb, discovered this nugget of Olympian history and suggested to him that The Southern Star readers would be interested to hear about it, he demurred, ‘Oh, I don’t think so … really?
Yes, really!
