Josef Veselsky, at 97, is Trinity’s oldest student. He tells me he’s not a fan of novels. Give him Das Kapital to read, or get him into a discussion on Brexit, and he’s happy. Novels however? He was never really a fan.
Which is ironic, considering his life reads like a story plucked from the pages of The Boy’s Own. Veselsky, to paraphrase Patrick Kavanagh, is someone who has lived when all the great events were decided.
Trained as a banker, he joined the underground resistance movement to fight against the Nazis when the war broke out in 1939. After the war, just as communism was beginning to take hold of Czechoslovakia, he left Prague and his bureaucratic job, escaping with his wife and two children, before moving to Dublin and establishing a jewellery business.
Yet his real passion? Table tennis. An international star of the sport, Veselsky represented his country at numerous Olympics and world championships, before eventually becoming the captain of the Irish team upon arriving in the country in 1949. He remembers playing his first tournament, the Slovak Championship of Elementary School, when he was 10 years old.
It was the war that forced Veselsky to leave the bank and become a member of the resistance movement against the Nazis.
He also remembers the events that led to war in 1945. He asked me at one point what I know about The Munich Agreement and its failure to protect Czechoslovakia from invasion – his face clouded over slightly mentioning them. It was the war that forced Veselsky to leave the bank and become a member of the resistance movement against the Nazis.
“When I went into the mountains to do some fighting, all I wanted to do was get back to the bank, because I was very happy there”, he said.
“In the mountains, you know, when they sent us on a difficult mission, they gave us a glass of vodka. But I never drank it. I changed it with the boys for half a loaf of bread, so I was the best fed.”
Europe in 1948 was a mass of nation states, newly formed countries and redrawn borders. The Iron Curtain was beginning to loom across Eastern Europe, while in Yugoslavia General Tito was developing his own brand of authoritarian national communism – something not looked on at all favourably in Moscow. I asked him what it was like in Czechoslovakia after the war. “Chaos”, he said.
Yet it was amidst all this geopolitics that Veselsky just wanted to play table tennis: “Since my childhood, nothing interested me more than sport and politics.” Of course, during the years after the war, Veselsky would find that even sport was political. He recalled being stopped at the Hungarian-Yugoslavia border as he and his team tried to cross into Serbia for their first-round match in the European Cup. As a response to Tito’s rejection of international communism, trains had stopped running through Yugoslavia to Serbia.
“We arrived at the Hungarian-Yugoslav border, no train. Nothing. So there was the Yugoslavian customs people, and they welcomed us very warmly, and I said, ‘So what about transport, how will we get further?”. “We arrange all this. Could you play a match against us, we have a club here?’”, Veselsky recalled. So, in an unlikely turn of events, he and his team ending up playing the customs officials to secure their route to the world championships.
I always said he became the President of the Czechoslovakian Republic, I became the President of the Irish Table Tennis Association. I did better
It was following this brief excursion to Serbia that Veselsky was forced to flee Czechoslovakia. His visit to Yugoslavia had aroused the suspicions of the secret police – they raided his house in attempt to find evidence of a connection to Tito. Around this time, Veselsky was working as a minor bureaucrat in one of the Czech ministries. I asked him what might have happened to his career if he had stayed: “I had a colleague called Gustav Husak, who was also accused of the same crime. But after I left he got six years. But after they let him out, he became the President of the Czechoslovakian Republic. I always said he became the President of the Czechoslovakian Republic, I became the President of the Irish Table Tennis Association. I did better.”
Yet Ireland wasn’t Veselsky’s first choice as a new home. Instead, he had his mind set on making it to Australia: “Everybody who escaped went either to Canada or Australia. So where else would you go?”
After months of waiting on the necessary forms to allow him to go to Australia, Veselsky met an old acquaintance from his ministry days in Prague who promised him a job if he came to Dublin. As he showed me photographs of his wife and two children on a day trip to Wicklow after they had arrived in Ireland, I asked him if he knew much about the country before arriving: “No, no, no, no, absolutely nothing. I knew about three people. Three Irish people. One wasn’t even very Irish.”
The three people he’d heard of? An Olympic hammer-thrower, an Olympic hurdler and Eamon de Valera.
To say de Valera’s Ireland of the 1950s – Catholic, conservative and homogenous – was unused to refugees from Eastern Europe would be an understatement. Yet Veselsky and his family soon settled in. His wife, he said, loved it here: “We went twice to Australia. I wanted to get it out of my system. And she said there must be a God that he didn’t allow us to come there.”
Veselsky, quickly recruited as a coach and captain to the Irish table tennis team, became something of a celebrity in Ireland’s sports community. He was Director of Shamrock Rovers Football Club between 1974 and 1978, and is Life President of the Irish Table Tennis Association. He is also Executive Vice President of University College Dublin (UCD) Football Club, and still coaches his two grandchildren. After our interview, walking across Front Square, he asked casually if I know Michael O’Neill, former Shamrock Rovers coach and manager of the Northern Ireland football team – a lovely man, apparently.
Veselsky, quickly recruited as a coach and captain to the Irish table tennis team, became something of a celebrity in Ireland’s sports community
His latest plaudit was receiving an honorary degree from Trinity in June, alongside physicist and Trinity graduate Peter Higgs and author of The Ginger Man JP Donleavy.
He confessed to never having read the novel. Describing himself as the “biggest idiot” when it comes to anything technical, he admitted he also didn’t know much about the intricacies of particle physics. One of his personal highlights of the day was impressing the Chancellor of University of Dublin, Mary Robinson, with his Latin learnt as a Jesuit schoolboy studying Cicero.
He told me that he felt somewhat undeserving, receiving the award: “I was all my life very lucky. And this was also just luck that I got this.”
Now, nearly 70 years after arriving in the country, Veselsky is Trinity’s oldest student. Following the death of his wife a few years ago, his daughter decided to enrol him in one of Trinity’s extramural courses.
One of his favourite courses has been on World War II: “I did it for a whole year, and I was so impressed… I learnt such a lot of things.” Prof John Horne, from the department of history, taught the class: “Prof Horne was always so pleased because he asked me, to come out and introduce me to the other students, and he said: ‘Experience.’ It was such a success that he asked me to please come and tell us something. He always said that I’m getting bigger applause than he ever got.”
There is still something youthful about Veselsky, despite his age. It might be the gaudy trainers he wears alongside his blueish suit, but also might be the obvious joy he takes in learning. When he found out that I’m from Northern Ireland, an interrogation of the region’s politics post-Brexit began, and soon moved on to a brief chat about my favourite political philosophers.
He’s planning to take on a course on Transylvania next, and maybe one on American politics. He told the department, after he received the award: “You think that because you gave me a degree you got rid of me?”. I don’t think anyone, least of all Veselsky, would consider this the end of his story.
