In desperation, the crew tried to alter course
It’s the worst maritime disaster ever off our shores, resulting in 550 deaths just weeks before the end of the First World War. 100 years on, we recall...
ADAM Smyth wasn’t even supposed to be on board the RMS Leinster that day. The postal worker from Sandycove had been called in at the last minute when a colleague fell ill, to assist with the 250 sacks of mail it was carrying from Kingstown to Holyhead on the Welsh coast.
As he boarded the ship, Adam’s daughter handed him some sandwiches his wife had just made for him, to set him up for his working day. The banter would have been free-flowing among the postal sorters. Most were Dubliners and they knew each other well — together they had gone on strike the previous April in protest against a threat to introduce conscription in Ireland.
Alongside Adam was Joseph Blake from Drumcondra, who had lost a son during the Easter Rising, and Matthew Brophy of Phibsboro, who had just learned that his wife Molly was pregnant with their first child.
Although her main purpose was to carry mail, the Leinster was also transporting 187 civilians. Civilians were the primary source of income for the City of Dublin Steam-Packet Company, which operated the Leinster and three other mail boats.
Some were very well-to-do, such as Lady Phyllis Hamilton, eldest daughter of the 2nd Duke of Abercorn and a sister to Lady Wicklow.
Jocelyn Alexander, a poet, was the eldest son of the Protestant Primate of All Ireland; his mother was the hymn writer Mrs Cecil Frances Humphreys who penned such classics as All Things Bright and Beautiful and Once in Royal David’s City.
Alfred Curzon ‘Bob’ King, a 14-yearold butterfly enthusiast, had been visiting his family in Dundrum. His father was Professor of Oriental Languages in Trinity College Dublin; his mother was a sister of the press barons Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere.
Frances Wookey was sailing home to England. She apparently carried a bag of gold sovereigns given to her by a Latvian Jew in return for her late husband’s business, the Wookey Linen Mills in Leixlip, Co Kildare. Fanny Saunders was going to visit her dying daughter in Wales; she had bought a new pair of red shoes for the trip.
Elsewhere on the ship, there were some 500 soldiers, mostly preparing to rejoin their units in Britain and beyond.
Ernest Lee, a captain with the Royal Army Medical Corps, was heading back to the Western Front where he had been based for four long years. Many were aware of his incredible heroism during the battle of Ypres.
Forty-year-old Arthur Cohen was also bound for the frontlines. Having moved to Ireland from Lithuania as a teenager, he had tried his hand at many things, including a stint as a gold prospector in South Africa. His biggest venture was the Donegal Clothing and Home Furnishing Company, based in Belfast. However, its failure in 1916 left him with little option but to join the army so he could secure a regular income for his wife and their small son.
Margaret and May O’Grady, two young nurses from Newmarket-onFergus, Co Clare, were returning to England after a holiday with their parents.
As Philip Lecane outlines in his 2005 book, Torpedoed!: The RMS Leinster Disaster, the 77-strong crew was predominantly Irish or Welsh. They included William Maher, a stoker, and Tom Connolly, a cabin boy.
In charge of this entire operation was Dublin-born William Birch, the 61-year-old captain of the ship, who had been sailing for nearly half a century.
All those who were on board the ship knew of the dangers of being at sea. Germany had previously declared the waters around Britain as a war zone and any vessels on the seas were under threat.
Shortly before 9 o’clock that Thursday morning, Captain Birch gave the signal and the ship set off on her last voyage.
Faced with the possibility of German attack, the Leinster’s 230-foot long exterior had been painted with zig-zag camouflage while a 12lb gun was mounted on her stern.
Nonetheless, with no escort, she was still very vulnerable as, below sea-level, Oberleutnant Robert Ramm of UB–123 scanned the waters for suitable quarry. The weather was fine but the Irish Sea was rough after a recent storm.
As the Leinster steamed by the Kish Bank, it passed RMS Ulster, her sister mailboat, returning from Holyhead. Adam Smyth must have thought of his eldest son Daniel, a cabin boy on the Ulster.
Shortly after 9.30am, the Leinster passed the Kish Light Vessel. And then, approximately 16 miles from Dun Laoghaire, Ramm’s submarine spotted the ship and fired.
When passengers on the Leinster saw the first torpedo approach, they initially thought it was a porpoise. As it crossed the bow, narrowly missing them, the shock of realisation set in.
Captain Birch was informed and immediately ordered the ship to turn back for Kingstown, following a zigzag course. When the Leinster was launched in 1897, she was one of the fastest ships at sea with a speed of 24 knots; the captain had reasonable grounds to hope he could outrun the submarine.
Unfortunately the horror was only just beginning. Ramm’s second torpedo struck slammed into the port side, right beside the postal sorting quarters. Only one of the 22 sorters survived. Captain Birch was blown off the bridge into the sea, as a torrent of water began gushing into the ship through holes in both her port and starboard sides.
In desperation, the crew tried to alter course and lower the lifeboats but the panic was rife. Many had already tumbled into the icy waters and started to drown.
Some heads remained unruffled. Louie Parry, a fun-loving 22-year-old stewardess, instantly ran down to the lower decks to bring women and children up, handing out lifejackets.
Alderman Michael Joyce, the nationalist MP for Limerick, was reading a newspaper in the smokeroom when the first torpedo struck. Having already survived four shipwrecks in his life, the 68-year-old calmly made his way on to one of the lowered lifeboats, which quickly went around collecting people from the sea.
‘We are quite alright,’ Lady Phyllis Hamilton assured crewmembers. ‘Not a bit excited, don’t worry about us.’
That was just before a third torpedo ripped into the starboard side of the ship, penetrating through to the engine room and blowing the funnels into pieces. Splinters riddled the deck, killing several passengers.
The Leinster plunged, bow first, hurling the majority of passengers on the forward deck into the water.
Lady Phyllis handed her lifejacket to someone else, saying ‘I’m a strong swimmer.’
Louie Parry was trying to get a woman and child out of their cabin when the second torpedo hit. Their cabin door slammed on all three of them; their bodies were never recovered.
As the ship was sinking, Ernest Lee helped a fellow officer with a metal splint in his arm to put on his life jacket. He also helped a nurse with her life jacket and then swam out to a lifeboat. He saw a woman and child in distress, jumped back in, got them safely on board and disappeared from sight.
Arthur Cohen had managed to clamber on to a raft after the first hit but fell back into the freezing water amid the turbulence of the second strike. All around him the sea was now full of men, women and children, terrified, screaming, dying.
A self-professed atheist, he clung on to a floating piece of debris and vowed that he would say his morning prayers forever more if he survived.
William Maher had just reached an upturned lifeboat when he saw 13year-old Dorothy Topping struggling in the water. He dove back in,
grabbed her and held on to her for 2½ hours until the rescue boat arrived.
Captain Birch was pulled into the lifeboat ‘Big Bertha’, his legs smashed, his eye badly cut.
The dreadful news had now reached the Admiralty at Kingstown who dispatched 15 vessels, tugboats and torpedo destroyers to the scene.
However, amid fears of more torpedo strikes, the first rescue boats did not arrive until almost 90 minutes after the initial attack, by which time unknown numbers had perished.
The torpedo destroyer, HMS Lively, eventually picked up 127 survivors but when its crew began throwing ropes at Big Bertha, there was such a mad scramble to catch them that the lifeboat capsized. Captain Birch was never seen again.
All survivors were brought to Victoria Wharf, Kingstown, to receive medical care and comfort. Boats continued to arrive back with the living and the dead until night fell. The bodies were placed in piles along the pier as distraught families jostled with the press to identify their loved ones.
Fanny Saunders’ younger sister’s heart broke when she saw a pair of familiar red shoes poking out from one of the body blankets. Fanny’s sickly daughter Janet Owens died three days later.
Also found among the dead were nurse Margaret O’Grady, Adam Smyth and Jocelyn Alexander.
Frances Wookey’s body was also recovered and she was buried in Leixlip. The fate of her bag of gold is unknown. Count John McCormack, the tenor, and his wife Lily searched in vain for Lily’s brother Thomas Foley.
When John Brophy failed to find the body of his brother Matthew, he couldn’t bring himself to tell his mother or Matthew’s pregnant wife, Molly. He arranged for an empty coffin to be buried alongside his father in Glasnevin. Molly gave birth to her first child in July 1919 — she named the boy Matthew.
Ernest Lee’s body washed ashore in Gorey a week later. The woman and child who he rescued later called to his parents to express their immense gratitude and told how Ernest had smiled so encouragingly as he saved them.
Lady Phyllis Hamilton’s body was never found, nor that of Bob King.
Nor did they find 19-year-old Josephine Carr, a shorthand typist from Cork, who thus had the unhappy distinction of being the first member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service to be killed on active service.
Arthur Cohen was hospitalised with pneumonia for six months but kept his vow to say his prayers. He later became a cinema magnate in Britain but died penniless when his housekeeper embezzled the funds. Tom Connolly, the cabin boy, survived to establish the first supermarket in Dun Laoghaire. Alderman Joyce declared he had ‘never had a more trying experience than he had that morning’. He died in his bed in his 90th year.
The official death toll of 501 was an understatement but over 550 are now known to have died. In any case, it was very much an Irish tragedy; more Irish people died in the sinking of the Leinster than on either Titanic or Lusitania.
The authorities refused to hold an official public inquiry despite an outcry over the failure to provide the ship with an escort; the Germans had warned that all ships within the exclusion zone surrounding Britain were liable to be sunk, so the sinking was deemed a legitimate act of war. Such a conclusion had unhappy consequences for families seeking compensation. Nor did it help the City of Dublin Steam-Packet Company, which went bust in the early 1920s.
Sinn Féin capitalised on the failure to hold an inquiry during its triumphant election campaign two months after the disaster.
The wreck is presently embedded in the sands about 100 feet below sea level. It is hoped it will become State property on the 100th anniversary of the sinking.
The entire crew of UB-123, the submarine that sank the Leinster, died nine days later when it struck a mine in the North Sea.
And the real tragedy is those lives may not have been lost as, just four weeks later, the war was over. On November 11, 1918, an armistice was agreed with Germany and the First World War officially ended.
The difference of a few short weeks dramatically changed the lives of the families who lost loved ones when the Leinster sank.
FOR details on the upcoming centenary, see rmsleinster.com. The Last Voyage of the Leinster, a book mostly written by descendants of those who died, is available now, visit leinster2018.com
The authorities refused to hold a public inquiry