Derry boat was a vessel for memories

AT THE outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the regularity of the Derry boat sailings began to dwindle, as U-boat activity in the North Atlantic made a dangerous journey much more hazardous. Ships like The Thistle were re-commissioned for war service and only returned to Derry quay after the conflict. This, however, was at a time when Ireland’s conflict with Britain for its national independence was just getting underway and in which the Derry boat would play an important role.

A route to freedom

Throughout the 19th century, the Derry boat had offered a route to freedom for a diverse number of fugitives, from members of agrarian secret societies hunted by the police for their actions against landlords to Republican activists with the Fenian movement, and a good number of criminals too. People travelled on the boat in disguise or concealed by fellow passengers or crew.

Derry Republicans, such as Michael Collins’ long trusted Greenock and then Dublin-based operative, Liam Devlin (1877-1964) would have known the boat, route and many of the dockers intimately and messages as well as weapons no doubt found their way aboard. On the Derry side, the IRA had important connections with the Burns and Laird merchant fleet through Waterside man, George Armstrong and on other lines with Charles McGuinness, and Swedish-born, Oskar Norrby.

It was through the connections of the latter two that Derry jail escapee, Frank Carty was smuggled out of the city on the coal boat, Carricklee, in February 1921 and although recaptured, he was the subject of another escape attempt in Glasgow during the events known as the ‘Smashing of the Van’ on May 4, 1921. A daring plan was hatched around this time involving Charles McGuinness to hijack the Derry boat set to return Carty to Derry for trial with the support of some of the crew, but the Glasgow IRA had already planned their own escape attempt and so it did not take place.

Tragic ties

The Irish Free State—although pledging to halt and indeed reverse the tide of emigration from Ireland, and particularly the Gaeltacht—was largely ineffectual in tackling the endemic poverty in much of the rural west. Seasonal potato harvesters and other migrants continued to make the long and tiring journey east to Derry quay and onwards to Glasgow and beyond.

By the 1930s, the Lairdsrose was the main servant on the Derry-Glasgow route and it was on that fateful return voyage from the tattie hoking season of 1935, that a gang of Arranmore islanders were travelling together. After taking the train from Derry to Burtonport, on the last leg of their voyage home for Christmas, their boat sank with the terrible loss of 19 young lives.

It was probably the same ship, which just over a year later took another group of tattie hokers, this time from Achill Island, to the potato fields of Kirkintilloch where ten young men died in the bothy fire of September 16, 1937.

Although these were unusually terrible events, tragedy was a continual feature of the Derry boat in a whole number of ways and coffins were regularly carried on the final voyage home.

On one sad occasion, in November 1936, the Lairdsrose was laid up in Lough Foyle unable to proceed to Derry until the fog lifted on a journey that had already been delayed by more than 48 hours. On board was the body of a young eight-month-old baby and her grieving parents from Quigley’s Point in Inishowen, anxious to return the child for burial. Thankfully, an agreement was reached that allowed her parents to disembark onto a small rowing boat with an Irish customs officer aboard for burial in the nearby cemetery at Drung.

The Lairds Loch

World War II intervened in much the same way as the Great War in disrupting the Derry boat, but a brand new ship, the Lairds Loch, was built in 1944 at Ardrossan dockyard and entered service on July 6, 1946. This was to be the ship perhaps most associated in the public mind with the Derry boat, an iconic vessel that plied the route with occasional refits until its withdrawal in 1966.

The Lairds Loch weighed 1530 gross tons and was 263 feet in length, powered by two eight-cylinder Polar Oil engines. She had a large low red funnel with a black top, divided by a blue band. The ship had a full complement of officers and crew, a captain, three deck officers, a chief engineer, second and third engineers and other engine room staff, such as greasers. The bosun had charge of the deck hands and able-bodied seamen. The ship also had a radio officer and stewards, mainly from Derry, such as Paddy McGuinness and Gertie Whittingdon, alongside galley staff, cooks and assistants. The dining room staff dressed in white and third-class passengers, who made up the overwhelming bulk of those onboard had two serving hatches for mugs of tea, sandwiches and pork pies. This service closed at midnight and opened again about 4am in the busier summer months. The ship’s bar also did a roaring trade throughout the year and was the scene of many impromptu sessions, debates and not a few fights.

From May to September, the Lairds Loch sailed from Derry on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and in the winter, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In the summer, wooden benches were fixed to the deck to accommodate more passengers, though being on deck even in relatively good weather for the voyage was a rough and uncomfortable affair. Around 40 dockers were employed in Derry, the cross-channel men as they were known, among them Jimmy ‘Smokey’ Rodgers, Leo ‘Shooders’ McCallion, the Hannaways, Paddy and his son, Bernard, Willie McShane and Willie Quinn. The voyage took around 12 hours and when carrying livestock, the boat called at Merklands to discharge cattle with some of the dockers on the boat to help. Very few people of the hundreds on board for each trip had a berth.

In the autumn of 1950, an American woman who worked for American Express travelled alone on a third-class ticket and described the scene she witnessed for Derry Journal readers: “In the women’s lounge I found that there were wooden benches along two sides of the small room, benches that were hard, uncomfortably curved and separated by irons that prevented anyone, even a child, from stretching out. The dark, wooden floor was very dirty. A tiny heater, encased in a heavy mesh gave a little warmth to those who were close to it. There were nine of us, seven women and two young boys. In telling this account of my trip I am protesting against such conditions being furnished to third-class passengers. They were first-class human beings.”

Dominance to decline

Despite such conditions, the boats remained packed going both ways in all weathers, but especially during the Glasgow Fair and Derry Fortnight holidays. In the summer of 1958, the sailings from the Broomielaw brought 1000 passengers per voyage on Saturdays and Sundays, with many families returning to their ancestral homes, alongside first-time visitors to Derry and Donegal, and more than an occasional Apprentice Boy travelling over for the annual Relief of Derry parade on August 12.

Numbers did show a decline though over the years. In 1953, 23,000 people arrived in Derry and 25,000 left for Glasgow, though by 1963, those same voyages accounted for 18,000 and 17,000 respectively. Crucially, the sale of train and boat tickets from Larne to Stranraer became more attractive to the potato harvesters heading to southern Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway as did faster and cheaper crossings from Belfast.

A lack of interest and investment from Stormont mirrored and was informed by a wider sectarian disregard for the mainly Nationalist city. The Derry boat was just one of a number of grievances by the early civil rights movement against the Northern Ireland unionist government and although widely opposed in the city, the removal of the Derry boat in 1966 met with little in the way of surprise.

The Lairdsrose was sold in 1969 to Israeli operators who renamed it the Hey Daroma, where it operated on the Red Sea though in 1970, Egyptian frogmen in support of the Palestinians, attached limpet mines to the hull, which damaged the ship below the waterline and it sunk not long after in the Gulf of Aqaba. It was a strange end for the historic vessel, a storage house for many memories—both good and bad—over many years. Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann!

Dr Máirtín Ó Catháin taught modern Irish history at Ulster University and the University of Lancashire. He lives in Derry and has written on the Irish community in Scotland, aspects of Scottish and Irish labour and oral history