Well my trip to Dublin did not start well. As the weather
had been so cold, I decided to start up the Morris Minor well in advance. Well
that was the plan, but it did not start – nomatter what I tried. I will not go
into detail as this is not an old car blog. Suffice to say I left it a bit late
before calling a taxi. £75 later I
arrived at Liverpool Airport with 10 minutes or so to spare, but had not
reckoned on security (shoes off, trouser belt off, coat off, shaving foam
examined and bagged, cough mixture examined and confiscated etc etc) plus 3
miles of retail area to get through (I exaggerate only slightly). I was about 2
minutes too late. My pre-booked return fare was £58, but I had to pay a further
£110 to transfer to the next flight. Now is that an administrative fee or a
fine? And I forfeited my pre-booked
airport parking fee and I left my gloves in the taxi and I had another 6 hours
to kill! So far, so bad. Anyway, My Dublin friend David Ryan met me at the
airport, in spite of the late hour and things began to go right.
The next morning we were ensconced in the Manuscripts
Department of the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, poring through
photo albums donated by the Commissioners for Irish Lights. What a treasure
trove! There were over 40 photographs of lightships. It seems that the
Commissioners, as part of their duties, would tour around Ireland visiting
lighthouses and lightships to make sure all was in order. They did this in
reasonable style aboard the good ship Princess Alexandria (Photo 1),
although
occasionally the transfer by cutter to a lightship or a lighthouse must have
been exciting in rough seas! (Photo 2)
Well I now have a collection of photographs of Irish
lightships dating from the 1890s, when they all seem to have the hoistable
lanterns; through the early 1900s, when some were hoistable and some fixed.
Most of the ‘collection, were acquired during my Dublin trip and many of them
are courtesy of the very eminent photographer who accompanied the Commissioners
on their inspection tour, taking photographs with his Kodak Panoramic Camera
and his No3 Folding Pocket Kodak. He was Sir Robert Ball, the Astronomer Royal
of Ireland. I have to say that he took a very large number of ‘seascapes’ –
acres of sea with nothing to see (except sea!).
The Commissioners obviously took their task seriously and
I found a lovely record of who was on the 1905 tour (Photo 3).
On an earlier tour, again headed by Sir William Watson,
Mr W Douglass was one of the inspectors presumably in his capacity as Chief
Engineer of CIL (Photo 4).
He was the engineer who produced the 1880 specification
for the steel lantern masts – like the one which was judged to have collapsed
and sunk the Puffin with all hands in 1896 (Photo 5).
All these photographs are © Commissioners for Irish Lights and courtesy of The
National Library of Ireland.
Next time I will be showing you some more of the
fascinating photos we found.
David
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