Donald Dinnie

10 July 1837 – 2 April 1916 · Birse, Aberdeenshire → London

Donald Dinnie was the dominant figure in nineteenth-century Scottish Highland Games athletics and one of the earliest professional athletes whose career is reasonably documented. Contemporary obituaries credited him with more than 11,000 successful competitions in a career of over fifty years. He gives his name to the Dinnie Stones at Potarch, and through them to the modern stone-lifting tradition.

Origins

Dinnie was born on 10 July 1837 at Balnacraig, in the parish of Birse near Aboyne on Royal Deeside, one of the sons of the stonemason Robert Dinnie. He won his first event at sixteen, a wrestling bout at nearby Kincardine O'Neil, for a prize of £1. Highland Games athletics in this period was a paid, partly itinerant profession: champions toured the summer games circuit, taking cash prizes at each meet.

The work

Dinnie was regarded as Scottish champion for twenty-one years, from 1856 to 1876, and competed in an unusually wide range of events: sprinting, hurdles, the jumps, putting the stone, the hammer, tossing the caber and several styles of wrestling. He stood about 6 ft 1 in (185 cm). He first toured the Caledonian games circuit of the United States and Canada in 1870, and later made repeated tours of Australia and New Zealand between the 1880s and the late 1890s, where he also wrestled challenge matches in several styles. In 1903 his image was used to advertise Barr's Iron Brew.

His public reputation as a strongman rests above all on the Potarch stones. The story is that in 1860 he carried two granite stones with iron rings, used as counterweights during work on the bridge over the River Dee at Potarch, across the width of the bridge, a distance of about 17 ft (5.2 m). The stones together weigh 733 lb (332.5 kg). The episode is known essentially through later accounts; there is no contemporary press report of the carry itself.

Notable feats

Figures credited to Dinnie in Australian obituary notices of 1916 include:

• Putting the 16 lb stone 49 ft 6 in (15.1 m), 1868.
• Throwing the 22 lb weight by the ring, fair stand, 39 ft 9 in (12.1 m), 1868.
• Throwing the 56 lb weight by the ring, fair stand, 29 ft 4 in (8.9 m), 1868.
• Hammer throw, fair stand, 104 ft 6 in (31.9 m), 1871.
• Carry of the Potarch stones — about 188 kg (414.5 lb) and 144.5 kg (318.5 lb), 332.5 kg (733 lb) together — across the Potarch bridge, 1860.

Such figures were achieved with implements and rules that varied from games to games, and are not directly comparable with modern marks.

Method

Dinnie left no training book. His preparation, so far as it is known, was the competition itself: a long summer season of games in which he entered many events at each meeting.

Legacy

Dinnie's legacy is the stone-lifting tradition. The Potarch stones were lost after the First World War and rediscovered in 1953 by the Scottish strength historian David Webster. David Prowse made the first recorded modern lift, with straps, in 1963; Jack Shanks made the first unassisted lift in 1972 and the first full carry across the bridge distance since Dinnie's day on 3 June 1973. Several hundred people have since lifted the stones off the ground, but only a handful have matched the full carry. Jan Todd became the first woman to lift them, with straps, in 1979.

Dinnie's later years were hard. By 1913 he was living in poverty in London and a testimonial fund was raised for him. He died in London on 2 April 1916, aged seventy-eight, and is buried at Hanwell Cemetery. He was inducted into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2002, and a number of his medals are held by Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums. The stones remain beside the bridge at Potarch, where they are still attempted.

Disputed and unresolved

The 1860 carry of the Potarch stones is the central episode and the least well-documented. Some accounts say his father, Robert Dinnie, carried them too, and some that Robert did so first. The reasonable position is that an episode of this kind took place — Dinnie was associated with the stones in his own lifetime — but that its precise circumstances cannot now be reconstructed with certainty.

The tally of "more than 11,000" competitions comes from accounts published at his death; it is plausible for a career of half a century across several continents but should be treated as approximate. His birth date is sometimes misgiven; 10 July 1837 is the date reported in contemporary notices.