The Louth 1957 Senior Football Championship Final team

The Irish Photo Archive were in attendance at the Louth Agricultural Show last weekend on Sunday, 14 June. It was a great day out at Bellurgan Park, with fantastic warm sunshine all day long. The crowds at the show seemed to be having a great time, and had so much entertainment to choose from: trade stalls, livestock judging, horse-riding, the Bonny Baby competition, Best Dressed competitions, and the IWW wrestling ring.

The parade ground for the dog shows was just beside the Irish Photo Archive's stand, and we had a great time all day long seeing the variety of dogs brought along by their proud owners, from a tiny Chihuahua dressed in pink to a humungous St Bernard and Great Danes, as well as a few whose breeds were less specific, shall we say.

As usual, the Irish Photo Archive had a selection of our most popular images for sale at the show, in both A3 and A4 sizes. We'd love to have all our images with us, especially when people look for something specific, but it would be difficult to bring all 3.5 million of them with us! Even setting up a computer in the middle of a field can be tricky!

But one of our images in particular grabbed a lot of attention on the day, but not for the reasons we would like. We had brought a framed photograph of the Louth line-up in the 1957 football final to the show, thinking it would be of interest to people there. We soon discovered how well-informed locals are about their football teams when they were able to tell us our caption was wrong. One helpful man called Jim Thornton gave us the correct line-up for the team. (If anybody knows him, please pass on our regards to him again.)

The disputed 1957 Louth team.
22 September 1957

So here is the line-up according to Mr Thornton:

Back row (from left): Dermot O'Brien, Jim McDonnell, Ollie Reilly, Tom Conlon, Seamie O'Donnell, Sean Óg Flood, Don O'Neill.

Front row (from left): Kevin Beahan, Stephan White, Frank Lynch, Peader Smith, Sean Cunningham, Patsy Coleman, Jim Roe, Jim Meehan.

(Not in this Photo): Jim McArdle, Jackie Reynolds, Jim Judge, Alf Monk, Barney McCoy, Mickey Flood, Aidan McGuiness, Jim Quigley.

If you want to dispute this line-up, and think a player has been misidentified, we would love to hear from you. We try to make our captions as accurate as possible, but we are working with caption sheets, diaries and other documentation that can be up to 60 years old and in handwriting that's not always very clear. So if you do see a mistake in one of our captions - whether it's the wrong person named, a misspelt name, an incorrect location - please do get in touch on info@irishphotoarchive.ie.

A sample of the caption sheets we work with.