Opening of Galway Bay Lifeboat station, September 8th, 1927

     New Lifeboat Station commissioned in 1927

Newspaper report announcing the establishment of the Galway Bay Lifeboat Station in September 1927

Galway Bay Lifeboat (Kilronan) taken by Fr.Browne in 1938

The poor lifeboat coverage on the West coast had been highlighted by a near tragedy in 1926, when two Aranmen, who had been marooned on a tiny island at the western end of Árainn, were only rescued with the help of two British trawlers, a retired army officer and the efforts of three local men who volunteered to go ashore in a small boat. We have covered that story in a previous blog. Here

Also in 1926, two Welsh trawlers had sunk off the west coast with the loss of nine men.

 The dramatic accounts of the survivors made world headlines and helped focus attention on the huge gap in R.N.L.I. coverage on the west coast.

At 5 A.M on the morning of February 14th 1926, the Swansea Steam Trawler, Tenby Castle struck a rock or  submerged flotsam, somewhere off the island of Inishturk. They sent  out a distress call which was picked up by other trawlers and by Valencia radio station. Valencia attempted to get a boat from Fenit to assist but another Welsh trawler, the S.T. Cardigan Castle was already proceeding at full steam to the rescue.

Built in 1928 to replace the boat lost in 1926. Last of three Tenby Castle trawlers.

The fact that there was no lifeboat stationed anywhere near enough to help was a huge disadvantage as trawlers are not as well designed as lifeboats when it comes to saving lives.

While attempting to launch the Tenby Castle lifeboat, the rope snapped in the swell and only for the bravery of one of the crew, fireman Leonard Cloudsdale, who swam after the drifting lifeboat, all would surely have been lost.The rest of the crew threw him a rope and although it became entangled around his neck, he bravely hung on and all managed to board her.

The night was stormy and pitch black but at about 9 A.M. they spotted a currach through the fog and were taken in tow by two Inishturk currach men who showed great strength, oarsmanship and courage in towing them over a mile to the island. Here they were treated with great care by the islanders and all twelve crew of the Tenby Castle were to survive.

The crew of the Cardigan Castle were not so fortunate. At about 7 P.M. on February 14th, while proceeding at full speed they struck a rock near the mouth of Clifden Bay and they too had to send out an S.O.S.

The lights failed soon after and the crew had little time to act as she began to sink .

Just as the other boat had difficulty launching their lifeboat, the Cardigan Castle crew also saw their lifeboat drifting away after a painter line snapped.

One member of crew, twenty six year old Henry Batchelor, asked if anybody was prepared to join him in attempting to swim to the lifeboat. Getting no volunteers, he dived into the sea and proceeded to swim for the drifting boat. 

As he swam, he came across Captain Fall's little black  Pom, "Fally", who had been washed off the stern and the two of them made it as far as the half submerged lifeboat and safely. In the foggy darkness of a stormy sea and with only a shovel for paddling, he lost sight of the trawler and drifted in the lifeboat for many long hours. 

Steam Trawler Cardigan Castle.

About a mile from Clare Island, Henry and "Fally" were taken in tow by three islanders in a currach who towed them, for over three hours, to Clare  Island pier. The islanders had spotted the drifting boat from the cliffs and had bravely put to sea in terrible weather.This was the evening of Monday the 15th of February. 

Henry and "Fally" were well treated by the islanders but were unable to make contact with the mainland as the island was cut off by huge seas. The three Clare Islanders who rescued them were reported as a Mr. McCabe, a Mr. Mahon and an unnamed third man who brought them to his home where he and his family cared for them. Henry Batchelor and the Captain's little dog were to be the only survivors of the Cardigan Castle

Because both Inishturk and Clare Island were completely cut off from the mainland, the fear was that both crews, comprising twenty two men, had been lost and the massive search and rescue attempt continued.

 For four days, newspapers around the world carried headlines about the almost hopeless search and once again the absence of a lifeboat on the West coast was commented on.

When two bodies were washed ashore near Roonagh pier, Clew Bay on the evening of the 17th February, they were identified as George Russell and Ned Lewis from the Cardigan Castle. Ned's father was the Chief Engineer on the Cardigan Castle and was also drowned.

Commander Vaux of the R.N.L.I. hired a boat in Clifden and along with local volunteers and Supt. McQuillan of the Coast Guard, searched many of the smaller islands off the coast. 

There had been a belief that some of the men were marooned on High Island but after landing there, the searchers found nothing.The local Garda Seargent Tobin in Clifden accompanied by two volunteers, John King and John Sweeney took a huge risk in landing on Friar's Island off Omey, in an effort to find the men.

The Irish fisheries protection ship  "Muirchu", formerly HMS Helga of 1916 fame, along with numerous trawlers, also helped in the search. Captain Meskill of the ferry S.S. Dun Angus was unable to take part in the search but his First Mate, Mike Folan from Cill Rónáin, provided great assistance.

Fisheries protection boat Muirchú. Formerly HMS Helga. Shown here with arrested Belgian trawler.

The fledgling Irish Air Corps brought four planes to the recently abandoned airfield in Oranmore where one was damaged when landing on a poor runway.  Colonel Russell proceeded to Clifden  by car where he found a suitable landing spot at Bunowen. This would be the first Aircraft assisted search in Irish history.

 Meanwhile, a De Haviland bomber, operating from Oranmore and piloted by an ex Royal Flying Corps and WW1 veteran, Captain Crossley, also joined the search. His observer was Lieutenant G Logan and they performed some daringly low passes as they checked out the many uninhabited islands off the West coast. They managed to drop supplies at High Island even though they found no sign of life.

It was only when a boat from Clare Island managed to get to the mainland on February 18th that the full extent of the tragedy was realised. The twelve men of the Tenby Castle were given a heroes welcome in Clifden where bonfires were lit in celebration of their miraculous survival. 

Henry Batchelor's brother James, had been fishing about 300 miles to the West when he heard about the sinkings. He had rushed to the scene and had arrived at the morgue in Westport, where he feared his brother was, only to be told  that Henry had been found safe and well on Clare Island.

The bodies of the two fishermen from the Cardigan Castle were brought back to Swansea for burial on the 23rd February 1926. Draped in the Union Jack, they were carried ashore from the trawler Caerphilly, which had taken them home from Galway Dock. 

It was to be a heart breaking duty for the twelve men who acted as pall bearers. They were the twelve men of the Steam Trawler Tenby Castle, to whose rescue the Cardigan Castle had been racing, when she herself was wrecked.

This then is some of the background to the launching, in September  1927, of a new Galway Bay lifeboat service under the command of Coxswain John Gill. This lifeboat station, renamed Aran Islands Lifeboat in 1995, was to carry out many great rescues and continues to this day. 

Lifeboat crew in London for award ceremony in 1939. Getting directions at Euston station from a friendly Bobby.

The disaster of the sinking of the Cardigan and Tenby Castles was to be soon overtaken by what is known as "The Cleggan Bay Disaster".  In late October 1927, less than two months after the inauguration of the Galway Bay Lifeboat, forty five men and boys from the West Galway and Mayo islands and coast were lost in a ferocious storm that blew up very suddenly.

Most were fishing from currachs and had little chance when struck by near hurricane winds and gigantic seas. The area was never to be the same again and the loss of ten men on the Inishkea islands off  Mayo would result in the islands being abandoned soon afterwards.

The great Irish poet Richard Murphy, born that same year, was to write one of his best loved poems, "The Cleggan Disaster" in memory of this event.

The new Lifeboat station in Kilronan operated from two sheds which lasted until 2011 when a fine new modern headquarters were opened.

The original lifeboat station with the rescued crew of the Steam trawler Nogi (1938)

Old station being demolished in 2011

Day or night, always on call.

 Aran Islands Lifeboat station today

Eighty nine years and still going strong. Leaving Cill Rónáin at full speed for a medical evacuation from Inis Meáin.
 August 1st, 2016

Michael Muldoon.

Stories from Árainn of wartime love, incredible endurance and heroic rescue.

Stories from Árainn of wartime love,

incredible endurance and heroic rescue.

When identifying people and places in old photographs, one can often uncover some very interesting stories from the past. Thankfully, some of these stories were documented in newspaper reports at the time and exist in the archives.

 Other stories exist only in the fading memories of the people who lived through them more than half a century ago. The following photograph, dating from the 1930s or 40s, has many stories attached to it.

 

 

The above photograph shows several men and women gathered next to Árainn's famous cross. In the background is the old St. Columba Hotel, as it was known at the time.  The spot had originally been the site for the local Catholic curate's thatched cottage.

N.L.I photo
 
 The St. Columba Hotel was sold and later run as 

"The American Bar" by the Connolly and O'Toole 

families. Today it is known as "The Bar".

We got the photo from George Guest, a nephew of Eileen Gill, who had kept the photograph, all her life, displayed in a homemade frame.

 The most likely date for the photo is sometime in the 30s or 40s. Why Eileen had framed and cherished it all those years, nobody knows.

The late Eileen Gill. 

 Eileen was a generous, lively and courageous lady from Cill Rónáin. Recently, a young Eileen was featured in a TG4 documentary about a body found in a railway tank, washed ashore on the South Island during World War 2. True to character, Eileen was the first to volunteer to climb in and remove the poor man. 

Not long before she died in December 2000, Eileen was asked who the people in the photo were and she identified the man on the left as Willie Gorham of Cill Rónáin and the man on the extreme right as a visiting teacher who was learning Irish.  Like most Gaeltacht people of those days, she humorously referred to teachers like him as a, "Lá breá" (fine day).  

As they could initially speak very little Irish, those two words were all the conversation one could get out of them. Amusingly, “Lá breá” was the salutation even if the seagulls were grounded because of driving rain, and the sea was breaking over the cliffs at Dún Dúchathair (The Black Fort). 

The photograph of  Willie Gorham and others standing in front of the St. Columba hotel is linked to a story of wartime love, endurance and heroism.  

 

Major Alfred Smith 1890-1926

Major Alfred Smith

Alfred Smith had been born in Calcutta in India, where his father was stationed. He later rose to the rank of Major in the British Army and fought in the Great War of 1914-18. After being injured, Alfred ended up recovering in a hospital in the north of Ireland. While recovering, he fell in love with his nurse, May Cloherty (from Galway town), and in 1916 they married. When Alfred retired, he and May moved to Árainn in 1921 and took over the running of the St. Columba hotel and bar (featured in the old photograph).

 He also worked as an agent for the British steam trawlers which called regularly as well as serving as Galway County Council's rate collector.  

Before the First World War, Alfred had been an outstanding soccer player with the famous Bohemians amateur club in Dublin and had played centre half for Ireland as an international player.

 He had been signed from the Northern Nomads, a well known English amateur side and, after his military career brought him back to England, he continued to travel over to Ireland to play with Bohemians. 

He and two of his comrades at Bohemians had written home from the war in 1914, telling their team mates that they expected to be home to play again before the season ended. Like many another soldier, on both sides of that terrible slaughter, their hopes for a short war were unduly optimistic.  

The story of Alfred Smith leads us to a small windswept, uninhabited island at the very western end of Árainn, called Oileán Dá Bhranóg. 

In the photographs below, the little island can be seen under a blue sky on a fine day, and on a dark and stormy day with rough seas. 

 

Marooned

Early on the 12th April 1926,  four or five currachs landed there to cut 

and gather seaweed. There were just two boats still at the island when 

they noticed the sea getting up. They rushed to their currachs but, even 

before they reached the mouth of the Calladh, the waves coming down

the Bealach were beginning to break. The leading boat, owned by a 

descendant of Connemara poitín (moonshine) makers and for whom 

turning back was never an option, managed to battle on and reached 

the safety of Bun Gabhla shore.

The second boat, manned by Seánín Thomás Ó Maoláin and his teenage son, Seán Tom, wisely turned back and just barely reached the safety of the small island. They found themselves marooned there with only a damaged, upturned currach for shelter. For the next four days they managed to forage on the shore for seafood and got some water from pools in the rocks above high water. On the 16th April they managed to attract the attention of a passing Scottish steam trawler, the S.T. Leukos, but the seas were too rough to attempt a rescue. (The Leukos was sunk during the war in 1940 with the loss of all eleven crew, many of them Irish) 

Men and Women of Aran

Just how big the seas were can be gauged from the fact that the men of the West were unable to launch a rescue from Bun Gabhla shore even though these men were among the most experienced currach men in Ireland, living where the next landfall was the island of Newfoundland in Canada. The wise council of some of the older men, and probably all of the women, may have prevented a currach crew from being lost in an attempted rescue.

 Launching and landing at Bun Gabhla is extremely dangerous due to the strong tides and rocky shore. The local currach men's incredible boat handling skills were shown to the entire world a few years later when Robert Flaherty made his great film, "Man of Aran".

In the 1970s, the late George Stoney film "How the myth was Made", dealt with the making of the 1934 film “Man of Aran". There was some mild controversy when some suggested that director Robert Flaherty had exaggerated the amount of physical work the women of Aran did in days gone by. 

Máire Gill Conneely humourously refuted the suggestion that women didn’t do heavy physical work long ago. 
This was at a viewing by locals in the Tec, of Flaherty’s Man of Aran as part of the 1978 George Stoney film  ‘How the myth was made’. One local man had claimed Flaherty was wrong to show island women working at seaweed  in his famous film.
 Máire disagreed. 

It is worth noting that an old man has recalled that the currach that managed to battle home as the storm broke, was "manned" by Patch Sheáin Uí Thuathail and his daughter. Proof indeed that cutting seaweed and rowing a boat was no problem for that generation of Aran women. 

Those who have read the recently published memoir of Patch Sheáin's grandson, Padraig O'Toole, will be familiar with this part of the island. Pat has written a very warm and amusing account of growing up around these shores in the 1940s and 50s. An older generation of Islanders are brought alive once more , if only for the duration of the reading. His book is called  "Aran to Africa" and is available from Amazon, Charlie Byrne's and all good bookstores. 

       Eeragh lighthouse with Oileán Da Bhranóg behind    (Photo Irish Air Corps)

The Rescue Attempts

Proceeding to Cill Rónáin, the S.T. Leukos reported their sighting and 

Alfred Smith organised a rescue attempt. Realising that a landing 

might prove impossible, Alfred prepared a barrel containing food and 

drink.

 Returning by steam trawler to the scene, they launched a 

currach and attempted to land but were driven back by mountainous seas breaking on the rocky shore. They managed, however, to launch 

the barrel with the food and drink and were delighted to see one of the 

marooned men retrieving it from the surf as it drifted ashore.

Given that he had old shrapnel wounds to his lungs, Alfred should not really have been on board at all but his competitive spirit and decency probably overruled good sense. Alfred had been decorated during the war and his instincts as a centre half and a soldier would have made him want to get close to the action. 

One newspaper report mentions Alfred Smith falling, while on board the trawler, and aggravating the old war wound; another newspaper report says that he caught double pneumonia from the drenching. The fall and pneumonia were undoubtely contributing factors when, sadly, he died on April 25th 1926, a week or so after the incident.

 A love story that began with a girl from Galway doing her best for an injured soldier was to end with that same soldier doing his best for two stranded men of Árainn. Alfred Smith was only around forty years  old when he died.

 The Eventual Rescue

Finally, on the 18th April 1926, a Welsh trawler, the S.T. Onetas, made another attempt to rescue the stranded father and son. They launched a currach with three crew and, at great risk, succeeded in rescuing the men. 

The three oarsmen were Willie Gorham (from the 1940s photo), his neighbour, Josie Doyle, and a local Garda, Edward Carey. All three were later rewarded for their efforts. The late Major Smith's surviving family, and the skippers of the trawlers were also sent letters of thanks by the minister for industry and commerce, Derry man, Patrick McGilligan.

 The two stranded men may well have survived without any intervention, as the Ó'Maoláins were a tough breed, but this does not take from the unselfish efforts of others to help them.

Josie Doyle and Willie Gorham featured in many other rescues, as they later served on the new lifeboat, which was established in 1927 under the command of Coxswain John Gill. 

Apart from his seafaring skills, Josie had the impressive ability to enjoy a smoke, while keeping two hands on the  lifeboat wheel. 

This rescue and the loss of two trawlers between Slyne head and Clare Island the previous year had highlighted the need for a proper lifeboat station on the West coast. Here is a link to a piece we did in 2016 on the lifeboat opening in 1927.

 https://www.aboutaran.com/2016/09/opening-of-galway-bay-lifeboat-station.html

Incredible Endurance   

When Alfred died, May Cloherty found herself with four sons to raise: 

Paddy, Arnold, Wyndham and Freddie, the youngest, who was just five 

years old. 

She sold the hotel and managed to get her sons educated at 

the Duke of York Royal Military Academy in Dover where she herself 

got the job as Matron. Like their father, who had also once been at 

school there, all four spent time in the military.

May Smith and her four sons, the year after Alfred died.
 (Ellen O’Connor collection, Boston public Library)

  

The three eldest survived being prisoners of war during World War 2.  Paddy and Arnold were held by the Germans, and Wyndham by the Japanese. After the fall of Singapore, Wyndham found himself working on the infamous "death railway" which killed so many of his comrades. Freddie spent most of his life with the Irish army and settled in the South Galway town of Gort Inse Guaire  (Gort). Older readers may remember when he served as masseur with the famous three in a row Galway football team of the 1960s. 

Their mother, May Cloherty, later went to Belfast and helped the great northern politician, Joe Devlin, in looking after the welfare of poor Catholic girls during troubled times. She later returned to Árainn and lived out her life in a beautiful rose-filled cottage in Cill Rónáin which is now, alas, derelict. 

 

May died suddenly in May 1961 in Árainn, while Wyndham was on board a ship, emigrating to New Zealand. She was 73 years old and was laid to rest beside Alfred in Relig Chill Éinne, a graveyard by the sea at the eastern end of Árainn. Many Islanders still remember May as a friendly, stylish woman whose only weakness was a love for nice hats.

               

Michael Muldoon

July 2015
Email: AboutAran@Gmail.com