“He was a lovely man. I asked him in for a cup of tea and a look around but he said he didn’t want to intrude,” said Jens Hansen, the current owner.
Although he has lived in Carrickmines in Dublin for over 30 years, Delany harbours a great affection for his childhood home. “I didn’t need to see the house as it is today,” Delany says, “because my memories of it are so vivid. It was a very happy period in my life. The house was in the town but there was no traffic about in those days, so I was able to run up and down to the shops. There was a river to the rear and my mother was so worried that I’d drown that she instilled a fear of water in me that I have to this day,” he said.
Delany’s first sporting memory dates back to his time in his childhood home. “The first game I ever remember playing was one I invented myself, where I had to lift my father’s ledgers from the bottom of the stairs to the top. My father worked with the Customs and Excise, so they were giant tomes, or at least that’s how they seemed at the time. It’s one of my first memories, so I mustn’t have been much older than a toddler,” he said.
Despite only spending the first five years of his life in number 4 Ferrybank, Delany, who won his Olympic gold at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, considered the erection of a plaque on the front of the terraced house a great honour. “When I came back from the Olympics, my homecoming celebrations were in Dublin, and the Dubs considered me one of their own, but I’ve always thought of myself as both a Wicklow man and a Dublin man.
“I’ve always maintained my links with Arklow, and only a few weeks ago I was invited to the town to meet the visiting athletes from Singapore that were competing in the Special Olympics,” he said.
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Although he took up an athletics scholarship in Villanova University in Pennsylvania in the early 1950s, he returned every summer to holiday with his mother in the port town. “All her friends lived in the town, so we’d rent a hotel room and stay for a week or two every summer,” he said.
Now on the market for €320,000, Delany’s childhood home was transformed by its current owners in the late 1980s.
“The house dates from 1892 and was originally part of Lord Wicklow’s estate, so it has a lot of history behind it. When we bought it, it still had its marble fireplaces, shutters, coving and ceiling roses, but it had fallen into ruin. A few efforts at modernising it had been made that didn’t really suit the house, so we set about stripping it back to how it would have looked originally. We paid €25,000 for it but spent another €25,000 restoring it,” Mary Hansen said.
A retired sea captain, Jens Hansen carried out much of the work himself. “The whole house was covered in half an inch of paint that had to be scraped off before we could start working on it. When we did strip it back, it turned out that much of the house was in surprisingly good condition,” he said.
Hansen, a native of Denmark, first visited Arklow in 1976. “I was captain of a ship that used to deliver goods to a factory in Arklow. At the time, there was a regulation at the port stating that a tanker couldn’t leave after dark, so if the loading wasn’t finished by nightfall, we’d go for a few jars and stay the night in Arklow. After meeting Mary, I ended up settling down,” he said.
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A three-bedroom home with three reception rooms when they bought it, the couple transformed 4 Ferrybank into a four-bedroom home with two reception rooms. With 1,850 sq ft, it’s now nearly twice the size of an average semi-detached house and could be bought for commercial purposes.
“It’s in a terrace of four where two of the houses are private residences and two are solicitors’ firms, so it may well be turned into an office,” Jens Hansen said.
Whatever happens to the house, the plaque commemorating Arklow’s most famous former resident will remain in place. Still the only Irish athlete to win a track gold in the Olympics and the seventh man ever to run a four-minute mile, Delany’s achievements were all the more remarkable considering the absence of resources available to an aspiring runner in 1950s’ Ireland.
“To become a top athlete in the early 1950s was a gruelling challenge, taking superhuman dedication and focus. There was little by way of training resources or facilities, sponsorship, professional coaching or sports medicine. If an Irish athlete aspired to an international standard in their chosen field, it was on a strictly amateur basis,” Tommy Dunne, the president of Arklow Chamber of Commerce, said at the public unveiling of Delany’s plaque in 2001.
Sherry FitzGerald O’Gorman, 0404 66466, www.sherryfitz.ie