The smallest of the ships that have perished off the cost of Ireland over the years (listed in a recent Irish Times supplement about our offshore waters) was the nation's first fisheries protection vessel, the Muirchu, writes Wesley Boyd.
For a ship with such an eventful life the Muirchu had an inglorious death - a demise witnessed at first hand by one of Ireland's most distinguished journalists, the late Brian Inglis.
In its early days the Muirchu was known as the Helga, a ship so infamous that even in the late 1940s a writer in this newspaper thought it necessary to point out that girls in Ireland called Helga had not been named after it but, along with the Hildegardes and Katarinas, were a reminder of the generosity of Irish people who had taken refugee German children into their homes at the end of the second World War.
Built in Dublin in 1908 as a fisheries protection vessel, the Helga was called into service by the British Admiralty to help quash the Easter Rising of 1916. With a 12-pounder gun fitted to its deck it steamed up the Liffey with orders to bombard the old Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army. The hall had been evacuated but, orders being orders, the Helga began its task from an anchorage opposite the Custom House.
Accurate shelling was impossible as the Loop Line Bridge blocked the direct line of fire to Liberty Hall and one of the Guinness steamers used to transport stout to Liverpool was lying close to Butt Bridge. When George Bernard Shaw was taken to France after the first World War to see the devastation caused to towns such as Arras after almost three years of German artillery assault, he declared that the Helga had caused more damage to Dublin in a week.
With what must have been a wry sense of humour the Admiralty presented the Helga to the new Free State Government. Renamed the Muirchu, it became the first - and for many years the only - ship in the fledgling Irish navy. It returned to its duties of protecting our fishing grounds from the ravages of British and French trawlers. Obviously it operated with limited success for it got the frequent ribald mention in the pages of Dublin Opinion. In the Dáil in March 1930 a Deputy Powell complained that English trawlers were fishing day and night off the Cliffs of Moher, reaping a rich harvest, but it took three weeks for the Muirchu to reach the scene.
Brian Inglis made his rendezvous with the Muirchu in 1947, a couple of years before he emigrated to London to find fame and fortune in Fleet Street, where he became editor of the Spectator and a famous television personality and author. He had returned to the newsroom of The Irish Times after wartime service in the RAF. The Government had bought a few used corvettes from the Royal Navy and the Muirchu was declared surplus to requirements and sold for scrap to the Hammond Lane Foundry in Dublin. The owner of the foundry was Davie Frame, a neighbour of R.M. (Bertie) Smyllie, legendary editor of The Irish Times.
Hearing of the scrap deal from his neighbour, Smyllie assigned Inglis to go to Cobh to sail with the ship on its last voyage back to Dublin. He joined the crew of about a dozen which had been hastily cobbled together and with nourishment from a crate of Jameson whiskey they sailed down the estuary and out to sea. Inglis recalled the voyage in his autobiography Downstart: "Night fell as we reached the open sea. When I woke up the following morning, it was as if the hangover had taken a new and unwelcome form; it felt as if my aching head was hanging below my knees. This was in fact the case: the Muirchu was at an alarming angle, down by the bows. Staggering out on deck, I found the captain (who must have been older than his ship), the mate and the representative of the foundry nervously conferring, wondering what to do next." The ancient craft had sprung a leak off the coast of Waterford and the front bulkhead was filled with water. It was decided to put the Muirchu into reverse in order to lift the bows and allow that water to flow out.
The manoeuvre succeeded in lifting the bows - but the water, instead of flowing back out to sea, burst through the bulkhead into the engine room, bringing the ship to a halt.
There were some Welsh trawlers fishing nearby and the captain decided to summon assistance. He sounded the standard distress signal, a quick succession of toots on the ship's siren.
"But", wrote Inglis, "there was hardly any steam left; the only sound when the captain pulled the cord was a sigh we could barely hear ourselves." As the Muirchu appeared to be sinking the order was given to abandon ship.
Ten men, including Inglis, were put in the lifeboat and dropped, rather than lowered, into the heavy swell below, as the captain and his two officers had never had to deal with a lifeboat before. They escaped in the ship's dinghy.
One of the lifeboat's four oars proved to be rotten and broke when it was used to fend the boat away from the sinking hull. The remaining three were sufficient to row the survivors to within hailing distance of the nearest trawler. "We were not lifted aboard until the crew had some fun at our expense," said Inglis, "asking each other why they should do anything for the Muirchu, which had chased them when they strayed within the fishing limits." Inglis and his companions were taken to Milford Haven. The first news to reach The Irish Times was an unconfirmed report that the Muirchu had gone down with all hands. Smyllie immediately repaired to his habitual corner in the Pearl Bar, across the road from the newsroom, to recover from the shock. In the meantime Inglis managed to telephone from Milford Haven his report of the sinking and the rescue.
An elated Smyllie ordained that Inglis's name should be used on his report - a dramatic innovation at a time when all journalists wrote anonymously or under a pseudonym. It was the first byline in the history of The Irish Times. Having discharged his editorial function, Smyllie returned to the Pearl to raise a glass to the last voyage of the ship with two names.