Granduncle William Nolan, Able Seaman

by Patrick J (Paddy) Heneghan, (The Meandering Milesian)

Grandmother Foley of Tralee was the third child of the family of great-grandfather George Knowling, who died in a drowning accident in Waterford Harbour some time in the middle of the 19th century.  There were seven children in his family, five girls and two boys.

The Cruel Sea: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end (W.Shakespeare).

William was the youngest of the family, which over time changed its name from Knowling to Nolan.  He took to the sea at an early age.  This is what I first saw and remembered about Granduncle William from visits when I was a child to Grandmother Foley’s home.  His photograph was hanging in a prominent place in the Tralee kitchen, a stern figure in the uniform of the British navy.  Grandmother never accepted the fact of his death in a Canadian warship called The Royal Edward, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1917 off the coast of Turkey.  She told us that she spoke to a survivor from the sinking warship who visited her when the war was over.  He told her that there was virtually no chance that William had survived.  Nevertheless grandmother firmly believed that her brother, who had survived thirteen shipwrecks, probably managed to reach the Turkish shore, and could well have settled down there.

Around the 1990s I visited a first cousin of mine, Timothy Christopher (Teddy)  O’Sullivan, a former RAF engineer.  He lives in Barry, a town on the north side of the Bristol Channel.  He brought me to the nearby seaside village of Margam and showed me on the beach there what was left of the wreck of a schooner called The Amazon from which William Nolan had escaped in 1908.  It is the only one of granduncle William’s shipwrecks of which we have solid details

One account of the Amazon disaster, which took place on the sands near Margam when the ship was driven ashore during a storm, tells how Captain Garrick had tried to ride out the gale by anchoring off the Mumbles headland.  However at 6am on 1 September the cables parted and the ship was driven eastwards.  At 8am it was thrown up, bow first, onto the beach at Margam.  Pounded by the waves, the stricken vessel swung sideways into the storm.  Several men tried to swim ashore but most of them were immediately lost in the huge seas. When the Port Talbot Lifesaving Company arrived on the scene only two men were left alive on the ship. Twenty-one of the crew were drowned, including Captain Garrick and five young apprentices. There were just eight survivors.

A more detailed story appeared in the Daily Mail published a few days following the storm.  It gives a slightly different account of the story of the Amazon, and lists William Nolan as a survivor. 

On the 29th August 1908 a fierce gale blew inwards from the Irish sea through the Bristol Channel.  The main events of that day concerned two ships, the Verajean of Dumbarton which was leaving Cardiff loaded with coal bricks for Chile, and the Amazon, which was caught in the same storm.

The Verajean tried to anchor off the Breaksea lightship but lost both port and starboard anchors.  All the crew however were saved either by breeches buoy or by scrambling ashore.  The following day the vessel was reboarded and the ship, having been lightened by the unloading of the coal bricks, was towed off the beach and taken to Cardiff for repairs.

The Amazon was not so lucky as the Verajean.  Driven by the gale back up the channel, she finally came to rest on the sands at Margam, where, of the crew of twenty-eight, only eight including Able Seaman William Nolan, survived. The ship was a total wreck, and thousands of people came to Margam to view the scene. Because of the increased business done by the local public house which was near the wreck, it was renamed The Amazon. The public house, unlike its namesake, still survives.

My cousin Teddy filled me in on an aspect of William Nolan’s life about which our grandmother, to my recollection, never spoke.  At some point William became engaged to a girl in Waterford, and the romance had developed to a point where together they bought a house.  Coming home on one occasion after a lengthy voyage he discovered that the girl was living in the house with another man.

Cousin Ted had no further details of the romance other than that William afterwards developed a drinking habit, and fought with the British marines during the 1914-18 World War.

There is one interesting story about the photograph of Granduncle William, on permanent display in grandmother’s kitchen during my childhood days.  My mother told me how useful it was during the urban guerilla warfare which developed in Ireland after the 1916 Irish rising (or rebellion, as the British call it).

In 1918 the British augmented their army of occupation in Ireland by a force of British army war veterans known as the ‘Black-and-Tans’ (from the colour of their makeshift uniforms).  Groups of these undisciplined troops became notorious for their numerous vicious attacks on the Irish civilian population.  They would occasionally raid the homes of people who were suspected of harbouring ‘rebels’.  Whenever they came to my grandmother’s home, on seeing the photograph of the British marine in full uniform in a place of honour in the kitchen, they would apologise to grandmother for the intrusion, saying ‘Sorry, Mother, we do not need to trouble you any further’.  They would immediately depart, often giving a friendly salute in the direction of granduncle William.  Then a signal could be given that the coast was clear to any group of ‘rebels’ who happened to have been visiting the house at the approach of the ‘Tans”.  They would hide themselves in a stable at the back of the garden.  Indeed my father who was a member of the ‘old’ IRA could well on occasion have been among them.  With the departure of the ‘Tans’ confirmed, they would emerge from the stable with a sigh of relief, and a prayer for the happy repose of William Nolan, able seaman and British marine, whether he may at this time been in heaven, or still alive in the Near East.