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.

Stormy Waters and Strong Gales

Lighthouse on Skellig Michael (off the Co Kerry coast).  Credit: Wikipedia

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

 

My mother used to tell us about "The Night of the Big Wind" (Oíche na Gaoithe Móire in Irish literature).  It is recorded that on the 6th-7th January 1839 a violent storm hit Ireland, causing massive damage not alone in the town of Tralee where she lived, but all over Ireland. Winds reached a force beyond any others in living memory. It was more than just an “ordinary” storm.  It left trees uprooted and did considerable structural damage. According to meteorologists, speeds up to seventy miles an hour can be expected during such violent storms.  I am not aware that the wind on the occasion in question was scientifically recorded.

Unfortunately I can remember very little of the detail recounted to us by my mother, who had had it from her father. He in turn must have had the details from his own father, whose family were merchants in Tralee at the time of the event. The heavy iron gates of the County Gaol in Ballymullen, my mother said, were lifted by the storm and deposited some distance away.  She had heard a story about an “ass and cart” which had been lifted bodily from one street to another, an occurrence which the animal had apparently survived.

For reasons other than the memory of the January 1839 event, my mother and her family were never very easy when storms were brewing. There was a foreboding about high winds which haunted my mother and grandmother, and “trimmings” were always added to the family Rosary for sailors and others at sea.  My grandmother’s father had drowned in Waterford Harbour late in the 19th century when a sudden squall upset the small craft from which he had been fishing. My mother’s uncle William (grandmother’s brother), while engaged during World War I in an action against Turkish troops, was drowned off the Turkish coast from a Canadian warship, the Prince Edward.