My great-grandad missed the Titanic

Columbia, left, fends off a challenge from the Shamrock in 1899, first of many successive Irish bids for the America's Cup

My great-grandfather was a newsman from the tips of his toes to the brim of the felt hat on which he practised his shorthand during the sermon while in church. One hundred years ago today, 10 April 1912, he had to make a choice between two stories.

One was a chance to go on board the Shamrock III, a racing yacht that was then the latest in a series of five challenging for the most prestigious prize of all, the America’s Cup.

The alternative story was to go out on a tender to the latest in a series of ocean liners plying the north Atlantic route. That seemed a mundane assignment compared to the chance of skimming the waters of Cork Harbour in a sleek vessel owned by the tea millionaire, Sir Thomas Lipton.

My great-grandfather Michael Bowen made his choice. Sure he could always go on board the Titanic when it called back on its return voyage!

A century later, it seems like the greatest mistake one could possibly make in a journalistic career. Yet by contemporary standards, he made the correct choice. Any seasoned reporter covering maritime affairs for the Cork Examiner, as well as the Daily Mail and its sister newspapers in London, would have had little hesitation in going for the chance to sail in the Shamrock III.

Sir Thomas Lipton (1848-1931, had been born in Glasgow to parents who had emigrated from the Clones area of County Fermanagh. From exceptionally humble beginnings, he went to sea as a cabin boy and embarked on a remarkable business career, soon becoming a self-made millionaire.

Yet Lipton was also renowned as ‘the most persistent challenger in the history of the America’s Cup’ and his yachts flew the flag for Ireland with the Royal Ulster Yacht Club in every successive challenge for the prize between 1899 and 1930. This was the only time in history that Ireland was the exclusive challenger for the ornate silver jug trophy.

Self-made millionaire Sir Thomas Lipton.

In 1899, Lipton provided the finance for the William Fife-designed yacht, Shamrock. While it failed against Columbia, owned by the Pierpont-Morgan syndicate from the United States, Lipton was a mastermind of publicity. He raised the America’s Cup event to rapturous international appeal. This also boosted Lipton’s tea on a market surge that was considerably more successful than the ocean race bids.

Lipton was back in 1901 with Shamrock II, again pipped by the Columbia. Undaunted, he and the Royal Ulster Yacht Club challenged the Reliance, owned by the Vanderbilts, in 1903. This time it was the Shamrock III that carried the flag and the hope.

It was that sleek vessel that my great-grandfather boarded a hundred years ago today at Queenstown for a once-in-a-lifetime story. One suspects that as they plied the waves, he just gave passing attention to the big ship lying off the mouth of the harbour beyond. It was no more than a date for his dairy if it did not have that fateful rendezvous with an iceberg in its own race for glory through treacherous ocean waters.

The Titanic was lost, of course, and Sir Thomas Lipton failed in his further challenges for the America’s Cup with Shamrock IV and Shamrock V in 1920 and 1930.   

Yet the publicity of his challenges propelled his tea brand to the premier spot in the American market.

As for my great grandfather, three years after the Titanic, a chance remark that the tenders had gone out from one of my grand-aunts returning from school alerted him to a possible story. Michael Bowen rushed down to the harbour office and managed to get on board another boat setting out for the Old Head of Kinsale. 

When he returned with survivors a few hours later, he immediately filed a story to London.

The Lusitania was torpedoed off the Old Head of Kinsale.

The Evening Standard ran a special late edition on 5 May 1915 announcing the ‘Sinking of the Lusitania’scooping every other news organisation by a full day on the biggest story of the era in terms of its consequences.

Of the 1,959 on board, 1,198 perished when a German U-boat torpedoed the Lusitania as it approached the mouth of Cork Harbour. The huge loss of lives, including many Americans on board, caused outrage and convinced the United States to enter the First World War and help defeat Germany.

And my great-grandfather? He got a bonus and a handshake from Lord Northcliffe and spent the closing years of his journalism career plying between his home in Queenstown (soon to be renamed Cobh) and Southampton and Cherbourg while filing stories of the great ocean liners and the VIPs on board.

Yet I bet Michael Bowen would have traded all that to see Thomas Lipton lift the America’s Cup for the Royal Ulster Yacht Club with an Irish victory for one of the Shamrocks.

Map-reading errors persist on Border

Geographic confusion continues along the border with news organisations filling in blanks of knowledge on a ‘best guess’ stab at what might be almost right.

Tonight, the Frontier Post antennae went up when we saw a news item on BBC about an explosive device that ‘could have killed’ at a roundabout on the AI Dublin to Belfast road.

The report said that this was at ‘Newry, County Down’. However, the actual location was at the Cloghogue roundabout.

Now those of us who were held up – both delayed and detained – many times in the course of our duties during the recent conflict are familiar with the location of Cloghogue. A huge British Army checkpoint grew up there over the course of those years, eventually surmounted by one of those big observation towers festooned with surveillance equipment for watching and listening.

It was not something you could have missed noticing either even driving by on the AI.

Today, it seems, Cloghogue is just a roundabout, so anonymous in peacetime reporting that it has shifted counties. For if somebody had done their homework before placing it so definitively, they would find out that Cloghogue is in County Armagh.

The confusion is hardly surprising, since everywhere prefaced by the name of Newry is now assumed to be in County Down, although about half of the town/city remains in Armagh where it has always been. Yet that is not the greatest infringement of geographic confusion along the Border.

South Armagh is included in the Newry and Mourne district for administrative purposes and also for modern postal addresses that operate on a postcode numbers rather than actual places on the traditional map which in rural areas was composed of townlands.

So Crossmaglen, served from Newry, is transferred to Down, along with Forkhill, Camlough, Newtownhamilton and other communities. No wonder there were frequent reports of map-reading errors down the years from squaddies who could not hope to rely on places staying in the one spot!

The late Paddy Short, a south Armagh man who never lost his way.

The civil rights activist, guide, publican and wonderful raconteur Paddy Short of Crossmaglen used to marvel about the geographic displacement caused by substituting townland names with postal codes and signs for arbitrary road names. 

One such wonder was in his native townland of Lurgancullenboy, which had been designated as ‘Lurgan Road, Crossmaglen, County Down’ in the official housekeeping. 

Paddy laughed heartily at that, pointing out that Lurgancullenboy was still in County Armagh and anybody taking that road would be going off in the opposite direction of Lurgan which, for those who do not have a good map handy, is in the north of County Armagh and quite near both County Down and County Antrim.

Built in Belfast, County Down. Sunk in Atlantic Ocean.

In fairness, the geographic confusion it’s not just a Border problem. Anywhere north of Drogheda seems to be a grey unknown area for many in the Dublin media, just as Belfast media can barely see beyond Dromore – that is the one in County Down for our Tyrone followers. 

Maybe the ultimate justice in this is that current events in the Titanic Quarter are assumed to be happening in Belfast, County Antrim, while they are actually happening in County Down.

Such careless navigation might even explain how somebody could have missed a big iceberg! Surely if so many can misplace a roundabout, and an entire city or two, what chance is there of pinpointing a big lump of frozen water on a vast and dark Atlantic Ocean?

Back on the Border, but in the north-west this time, Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister was in Newtownstewart last week sounding off to his vast coterie of West Tyrone followers (well, almost a dozen). His clarion cry was that any improvements of the A5 road, which runs from Derry city to the border at Aughnacloy, ‘will create a united Ireland by road’. Mind you, this is after the Dublin government has withdrawn funding from the project, notwithstanding that it would vastly improve access to and from Donegal. Now it’s just Jim Allister ranting about a major road project for the use of people west of the Bann. Somebody must have misplaced his map too.

There are persistent culprits when it comes to this ‘pin in a map’ guesswork. They needn’t think we don’t notice at the Frontier Post.

Blasts from the past

Ah nostalgia, they just don’t make it like they used to (as the old saying goes).
The thought struck me more than a few times over the Christmas/New Year season… all those ghosts of Christmas past, I suppose. And probably more so this year because of reminders that we are now entering a decade of momentous anniversaries, starting with this year’s centenaries of the sinking of the Titanic and Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant, seen as the start of a political process that led to the partition of Ireland and all that ensued.

I prepared gently for the first of these by reading Omagh-born author Martina Devlin’s evocative novel Ship of Dreams. It starts with survivors on one of the Titanic lifeboats and charts their lives over the following year, during which perceptions and accounts of their shared momentous experience diverge because of need and circumstance.
As a consequence, I believe this year we will celebrate a great romance largely shaped by a 1997 Hollywood epic starring Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio.
I am still wrestling with the other centenary, but I consciously began preparing for it a few years ago while writing Blood & Thunder: Inside an Ulster Protestant Band.

On 28 September 2009, I attended an event at the Bridgetown No Surrender Orange Hall in Castlederg. It was ‘open to the public’ and the advertisement said it would feature an exhibition of relevant historical artefacts and a ‘cultural workshop’ marking the 98th anniversary of Ulster Day 1912.

The speakers included Lord Laird of Artigarvan, who would set the scene from the 1801 Act of Union up to 1912, and former Lord Mayor of Belfast Ian Adamson who would address us on the Covenant and its aftermath. The latter failed to show and Lord Laird, like a music hall warm-up, regaled us with anecdotes and quips about Ulster Scots, Border Reivers and his perplexity about whether his ancestry was English or Scots. The Covenant got a passing mention, but he admitted he was no expert.

Sir Reg Empey

Not listed on the bill, but topping the speakers nonetheless, was then Ulster Unionist Party leader Sir Reg Empey (above). He had ventured into the Wild West to rally retrospective support for his pre-emptive liaison with the British Tories. (He got short shrift on that from local unionist kingpin Derek Hussey!) So the ‘cultural workshop’ on a pivotal historical event, became an impromptu meeting of the UUP on an electoral pact with the Tories – which sent them into their next election disaster under the unfortunate acronym UCUNF!
I squirmed, aware that those present who knew me must be wondering what I – clearly from the other tradition – was doing there. A local Protestant farmer sitting beside me even ventured that, while he admired my willingness to hear about his past, this was not what he expected either.

Lord Laird

Civilities were observed, of course, although my later attempt during tea and traybakes to open dialogue about the Ulster Covenant was repeatedly interrupted by Lord Laird eager to tell me that words I was uttering were Ulster-Scots! I finally remarked that, unlike him, I had no confusion about where I came from!
I have seldom spoken about that episode since, but it was a cautionary reminder that we are embarking on this decade of centenaries with little or no preparation and even less dialogue. The events we are about to celebrate, rather than commemorate, are so ingrained in our traditions that we cannot see the wood for the trees… and there is precious little interest in taking stock of timber.
Instead, we revel in exclusive versions and use them to bait each other. We know the outlines of the nationalist and unionist versions, of course, but there are northern and southern, eastern, western, local, global and whatever-you’re-having-yourself versions. Let’s not ignore the distortions of revisionists who take subjective trawls through the past, select what suits their current ideological line with little or no empirical research, and then convince themselves and others that they are above us all. We had plenty of that during 2011 without any centenary occasion!
Yet even after that 2009 night in the No Surrender Orange Hall in Castlederg, I persist in trawling, too, convinced there is scope for honest assessment of all the passions, fears, hopes, convictions and actions of those caught up in our shared past.
I began this from birth into a community shaped forever after by the events that began a hundred years ago. I continue my quest, driven by a conviction that I might find part of my own identity hidden by current interpretations reflected through the prism of ‘national’ soccer team allegiances.

The quest prompted my first book, The Sons of Levi, exploring the experience of proud, passionate Ulster Unionists consigned to the Free State by their fellow Covenanters in the six counties who even purloined their identity for decades afterwards by insisting ‘Ulster’ was different now.

My subsequent book, The Chosen Fews – Exploding Myths in South Armagh, dealt with proud, passionate Irish people jettisoned by fellow nationalists in Dublin and demonised since.

My last book on Loyalist band culture, Blood & Thunder, dealt with those involved in a proud and passionate search for their cultural identity in another Border location.
Yes, there is a pattern and I don’t expect to be finished any time soon!
However, history is catching up because we are now into the decade of centenaries (although mine certainly doesn’t end in 1922). On which point, I note by today’s date that we have already passed what I would regard as one of the pivotal events of that period without a squeak or a peep from anyone else.
Unionist resistance to Home Rule diverged sharply following a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council in late 1911 which decided to seek exclusion for Ulster from the Home Rule Bill which about to be enacted. Up to that point, Unionist opposition demanded no Home Rule for Ireland.
The first significant public event in pursuit of that separatist Ulster policy was a big rally in Omagh addressed by Sir Edward Carson, the Marquis of Hamilton and Lord Dartreyfrom Monaghan (whose ancestor, incidentally, proposed the Act of Union at Westminster in 1801). At least 30,000 Unionists attended, most conveyed there by train.
The railway timetable for Omagh that day lists 18 separate arrivals before 11.35am. One is the scheduled Belfast train through Portadown, as one might expect. The others show that those who came to Omagh to resist Home Rule for Ulster came on special trains from Castleblayney, Cavan, Bailieboro, Belturbet, Bundoran, Cootehill, Clones, Smithboro, Monaghan and Glaslough. Others certainly came from east Donegal on the special trains from Strabane and Derry and by other modes.
Today, the Great Northern Railway station is home for the Omagh Boys’ and Girls’ Club and the railway lines for all of Tyrone, Fermanagh, Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal, as well as for most of Armagh and Derry, are long-dead victims of partition.
Yet this was the start of a momentous year for Ulster and for Unionism and among the very first to pin their colours to the mast were those who gathered in Omagh on a day that is described in minute detail by the Tyrone Constitution of Friday, 12 January 1912.
I wonder now if any of them had even the least inkling that so many of those present would be jettisoned in 1920 as superfluous to need! They certainly couldnot have known that the recent 1911 Census would be used to support arguments that including all Ulster would become a constant nightmare for unionism because of the precarious balance of Catholics and Protestants that almost exactly corresponds to the sectarian breakdown in Northern Ireland today!

Edward Carson signs the Ulster Covenant in 1912

The memories of that day, and the significance of that inaugural event in the calendar that led to Ulster Day are lost, ignored and forgotten, perhaps because an honest look into the past is bound to disappoint and trouble too many.
So welcome to a decade of remembrance and amidst all the hype and hoopla in store, please remember that I am here to debunk much of the guff you will hear.
I’ll even undertake to attend workshops in Orange Halls, Hibernian hideouts, former railway stations or other venues on either side of the Border, not excluding political gatherings, confirmations, investitures and Bar Mitzvahs.