For the community of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), 10 October 1918 began like any day in a busy port town. The first locals knew of the incident was the sound of the torpedoes. The Royal Mail Ship (and passenger ferry) Leinster was on its regular…

The Welsh chapel is a story that connects Dublin with Anglesey. In the 1830s, Calvinistic Methodists in north Wales decided to build a chapel in Dublin, mainly for visiting Welsh sailors. The Calvinistic Methodists, who were later known as the…

Mary Delany (1700-1788) was no stranger to crossing the Irish Sea. She had made one trip to Ireland as a young widow in 1731 and, when she later lived in Ireland between 1744 and 1767, she made regular visits back to England. Delany generally made…

The British Admiralty had several factors to consider when they thought about escorting the mail and rail steamers. For example, the steamers were capable of 21 knots, which was fast, and they could maintain a reasonable speed even in bad weather.…

Prime Minister David Lloyd George was aware that Britain’s manpower resources were dwindling. He had prioritised shipbuilding, tanks and aircraft production before army demands. The army wanted 1.25 million new entrants. Lloyd George was only…

Between 25 and 26 October 1859, one of the strongest storms of the 19th century hit the Irish sea. Known as the ‘Royal Charter’ storm , the tempest was named after the ship Royal Charter which was caught on its way from Australia to Britain,…

Throughout the First World War, the UK imported significant amounts of food from the United States, Canada and through Gibraltar. The German naval command calculated that they could starve Britain into surrender and win the war with a five-month…

We may associate seabirds with islands – puffins standing sentinel on ledges, guillemots in serried ranks on slim ledges – but this is only a temporary habitat. On land they are edgy, vulnerable to predation. These are, after all, sea birds and the…

The London North Western Railway Company (LNWR) maintained their Holyhead to Dublin express service by switching the two Greenore ships to the Dublin service. An older ship was on standby. The potential of U-boats to destroy shipping had hardly…

In our world of instant communications it’s hard to imagine that it once took ten days to send a message from North America to Europe. That was the fastest a ship could go - if the weather was favourable. All this changed in 1858 when the first…