Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  In 1921 he was on his way back again to the Antarctic on the Quest. On South Georgia Island he died of a massive heart attack. He was awarded the honorary title Doctor of Law from Glasgow University, a Polar Medal with three clasps, the French Légion d’honneur, the Crown of Italy, the Russian Order of Saint Anne, the Royal Crown of Prussia and the Chilean Order of Merit. There are two mountains named in his honour, as well as an ice shelf and an inlet. There is a statue to him outside the RGS.

  While Ernest Shackleton was freezing his arse off in the Antarctic, his younger brother Francis Shackleton (1876–1941), more commonly known as Frank, was interested in the sparkle of a different kind of ice, namely the Irish Crown Jewels in Dublin Castle. Frank was a bit of a dandy, and a friend to aristocrats and society snobs. He was a close friend of Sir Arthur Edward Vicars, Ulster knight of arms and knight attendant of the Order of Saint Patrick, usually known as the Irish Crown Jewels.

  Vicars got Frank a job as Dublin herald in his office in Dublin Castle, which housed the safe where the jewels were kept. Soon after, the Irish Crown Jewels vanished along with other jewels and some private family jewellery. The haul was estimated to be worth £5,000106 if broken up and sold on the black market. Frank quickly became the prime suspect, as he was known to be living far beyond his means. Edward VII, who visited Dublin Castle in 1907, demanded that everyone in the office of arms resign. Frank resigned and co-operated fully with the commission of enquiry that was set up, but he was never charged. In 1920, in his will, Vicars named Frank as “the real culprit and thief.”

  By 1910, with debts of £85,000, the equivalent of seventeen Irish Crown Jewels, Frank was declared bankrupt. He fled to Portuguese West Africa where he was arrested in 1912 on charges of fraud. He served fifteen months hard labour, and when he was released his brother Ernest got him a job in an office in London. Frank eventually opened an antique shop, as you do. In 1927 a Parisian jeweller offered to sell the apparently original Crown Jewels back to the Irish Government who, being completely broke at that time, refused to buy them. The jewels were never found. However, the box in which they had been kept was recovered. It was anonymously posted back to Dublin Castle without an explanatory note.

  Beneath the Green Waves

  In an attempt to conquer the depths of the sea, Clareman John Holland (1841–1914) invented the modern submarine. He attended the Christian Brothers School in Limerick where he showed a remarkable aptitude for science. In 1858 he actually joined the Christian Brothers, and subsequently taught in a number of schools around Ireland. But in 1873 he received a dispensation from his vows on the grounds of ill health.

  In the context of nineteenth-century celibate Christian Brothers, illness was often a euphemism for either being insane or having an interest in women. Many of us know, from first-hand experience of their pedagogical style, that insanity would not normally interfere with the teaching career of a Christian Brother. Therefore, I am assuming he suffered the latter disorder and fell in love with a woman. My hypothesis is supported by the fact that he eventually married Margaret Foley, who was a woman.

  After he left the Christian Brothers he sailed to America. In New Jersey he got a job teaching science in a Christian Brothers school. Apparently, during his time as a teacher in Ireland, he had already invented the term “submarine”. All he needed now was the contraption itself to go with it.

  In February 1875 he offered his patent to the US Navy, but they rejected his idea as the “fantastic scheme of a civilian landsman”. Experimenting on heavy machines like submarines can be dangerous. He broke a leg and, in November 1875, concussed himself while carrying out experiments.

  Holland then offered his submarine to the Fenian Brotherhood,107 arguing that Britain’s control of the seas was the key to its power, and thus the greatest obstacle to Irish independence. Holland reasoned that if the Fenians could sneak up on the British Navy in his submarine and sink lots of ships, they could negotiate from a position of strength. With remarkable prescience, the Fenians agreed to use their “skirmishing fund” to finance Holland’s experiments. With these resources he was able to give up teaching to concentrate all his efforts on building his boat.

  Holland was the first person to design a modern submarine using an internal combustion engine as the power source when the submarine was on the surface of the water, and electric battery power when it was submerged. In 1878 he produced the Holland I, also known as the Fenian Ram, which was a one-man 14-foot craft. That one man inside soon discovered that defective riveting made it unseaworthy when submerged for long periods.

  In 1881 Holland produced a more advanced 31-foot boat with a crew of three. I wonder who he persuaded to test his experimental submarines. I have a picture of him in my mind recruiting winos on the dockside with the promise of the finest clarets in return for the simple task of taking his prototype submarines beneath the waves. He launched a third vessel in 1882, which weighed 19 tonnes. This model developed engine trouble. Because it failed to comply with New York Harbour Board’s shipping laws, being a completely new kind of boat, it was banned from the port. How was a genius supposed to succeed when surrounded by such mindless bureaucrats?

  By 1883 the three submarines had cost the Fenians $60,000108 and the leaders were worried about the ever-mounting costs of experimentation without a single British ship sunk. They took possession of the submarine but didn’t know how to use it. Naturally, Holland wouldn’t show them without being paid. There followed a standoff where the Fenians had the boat but Holland knew how to operate it. I don’t know why the Fenians didn’t enquire amongst the dockside winos for a captain. Following some unseemly rows, they went their separate ways – a split amongst the Fenian submariners, if you like.

  The Fenian Brotherhood had wanted to use Holland’s submarine to regain ground against the British that was lost by their invasion of Canada in 1866 under the supreme command of Thomas Sweeny (1820–1892). Capturing Canada was a win-win for the Fenians. They could either run it as their own country or swap it back to the British for Ireland. Sweeny was responsible for drawing up the invasion plans. He developed a three-prong attack from Vermont, New York and Illinois into Ontario. The invading army would secure railways, canals and the seats of government in London, Ontario; Ottawa; and Montreal.

  While Sweeny had masterminded the invasion, another Irishman, John O’Neill (1834–1878), led the actual assault. On 31 May 1866, 800 Fenians invaded Canada. They crossed the Niagara River at Buffalo, New York, and occupied Fort Erie. Two days later they defeated Canadian forces at Ridgeway and beat off the attack of the Queen’s Own Rifles, an inexperienced student militia. However, after reinforcements failed to arrive, O’Neill retreated.

  By the time 20,000 Canadian militia marched on Fort Erie, 700 of the Fenians had already escaped safely back over the border to a hero’s welcome home. Sixteen Canadian students were killed and seventy-four wounded; eight Fenians were killed, twenty wounded and one hundred and seventeen taken prisoner. Following a brief detention for breaching US neutrality laws, the Fenians were released. Sweeny had insufficient men, supplies and artillery at his disposal; following Irish revolutionary best practice established earlier in the century by Robert Emmet,109 he overestimated the number of his own supporters; he underestimated the number of Canadian militia; he was misguided that most Canadians would welcome “liberation” by the Fenians; and the British Consulate in Washington seemed to know more about the finer details of the invasion plans than he did.

  How different would the world be now if the Fenians had captured Canada? Perhaps the Fenian invasion of Canada would have succeeded if the submarine had been perfected in time to support them. Against this view is the military impracticality of using submarines in prairie warfare. But what do I know? I am not a military genius.

  In New York, Holland built the Zalinski, a submarine funded by Edmund Zalinski, who was a Polish-born American soldier and engineer, best known for his inve
ntion of the pneumatic torpedo gun. He then formed the John P. Holland Torpedo Boat Company that built the Plunger for the US Navy, who had seemingly changed their minds about his credentials. But the engineers of the US Navy didn’t trust him. They ignored Holland’s experienced advice and significantly interfered with the design of the Plunger. Holland had the satisfaction of seeing the navy with a boat that wouldn’t manoeuvre and had to be scrapped. I imagine that he had one of the most satisfying “I told you so” meetings of the nineteenth century with the US Navy after that. Holland launched his own boat, the Holland VI, in 1897. This boat was 53 feet long and could hold a crew of six. It performed well in tests. It had a speed of 9 knots and could dive to 60 feet; it was armed with a torpedo launcher and an underwater cannon fired by compressed air. These amazing design innovations were driven by Holland’s hatred of the English. Imagine what Edison could have achieved if he had been motivated by Holland’s single-minded loathing.

  The US Navy bought the Holland VI in 1900 for $150,000110 and called it the USS Holland. This boat became the prototype for all future submarines. Holland was commissioned to build six more. However, his company sold his plans to the British Navy in 1901 to raise money for research. He was a bit upset. He had calmed down by 1910 when the Emperor of Japan decorated him for his work with the Japanese Navy.

  Holland died in 1914 on the eve of the First World War, the conflict that would see his invention make its first real impact in naval warfare. However, it wasn’t until the Second World War that the submarine became one of the most lethal and effective weapons in the German Navy, fulfilling Holland’s prediction that it could threaten the naval power of Britain practically on its own.

  That Sinking Feeling

  It is only karmically right that, since an Irishman invented the submarine, another Irishman created the depth charge used for sinking it. Walter Conan (1860–1936), from Dublin, was not an engineer but trained as a tailor after graduating from Blackrock College, in order to take on his father’s tailoring business with his brother. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series of novels, was a cousin of his father. Their tailoring business specialised in hiring out academic gowns to students for graduations.

  However, Conan was an amateur inventor. He created the combination lock, an apparatus for preserving meat, devices for preventing airlocks in pipes and a type of gas lamp. But his passion was explosives, in particular detonators. He may have had a form of pyromania. He developed the Conan submarine fuse, which could be set to explode in a prescribed depth of water. This fuse has become central to the anti-submarine depth charge used by the British Navy.

  Conan subsequently became the inspiration for Brian O’Nolan’s (1911–1966) – aka author Flann O’Brien’s – eccentric inventor De Selby in The Third Policeman. O’Nolan wrote The Third Policeman between 1939 and 1940. That wasn’t an auspicious year for producing books as the Second World War had just gotten under way. He failed to find a publisher. He made up an excuse that the typescript had been lost in the confusion of the conflict. He was so convincing that the script wasn’t “found” until 1967 when it was published to unqualified critical acclaim. Unfortunately, at that stage, O’Nolan was dead.

  Nautical Coffins

  I would rather spend an evening with a vampire than a night submerged in one of Holland’s early model submarines. Henry Hugh Gordon Dacre Stoker (1885–1966), or Harry to his forgetful friends, was Bram Stoker’s111 nephew and a pioneer submariner during the First World War. Harry joined the British Navy when he was fifteen. Maybe his superiors thought he was genetically suited to dark coffin-like places because he was transferred to submarines in 1906. In 1915 he passed through the Dardanelles Straits in his AE2 submarine. The Straits were protected by patrol boats, shore batteries, minefields and nets. His boat was caught in a searchlight as it cruised on the surface and was forced to dive. Stoker then had to evade mines, a cruiser and a destroyer while submerged. He fired a torpedo, missing the cruiser but hitting the destroyer. He eventually ran aground, setting his boat on the bottom of the sea for several hours before letting it float on the currents. When at last he surfaced, he discovered that he had actually drifted through the channel, making him the first ever Allied112 submarine commander to force the Dardanelles. He attacked Turkish shipping in the Marmara before his boat was sunk. He was taken to a Turkish prisoner of war camp where he remained for the next three years. While he was a prisoner he became interested in acting, which was one of the few distractions allowed.

  His wife had three children while he was in prison. Being amongst the minority of Irish at that time who didn’t believe in immaculate conception, he sought a divorce. When he left the service in 1920 he took up acting professionally. In 1925 he even married an actress. He was a successful Dr Watson in a series of plays based on Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1925 he wrote Straws in the Wind, which was an account of his submariner days. He became a successful stage and screen actor before having to return to the navy for the Second World War. After that, he got into television, film, theatre and writing. He died on the day of his eighty-first birthday. Turkish marine archaeologists found his boat, the AE2, in 1998.

  Following Currents

  A life at sea is best suited to the impetuous. Charles McGuinness’s (1893–1947) fate embodied the haphazard, nomadic, adaptable, join-whatever-is-happening-at-the-time devil-may-care attitude of many Irish at sea. Despite his various escapades, he is perhaps best remembered for what may have been his most lasting achievement – bringing the first monkey to Derry. He was the original Forrest Gump. His life shows us that, no matter what your circumstances, you can make the most of them. He was an adventurer at a time when there were many opportunities for adventure. Like all adventurers, he encountered an improbable number of scrapes, any of which could have been his last.

  McGuinness was the son of a sea captain, which helps when planning to run away to sea, which he did in 1908 when he was fifteen. He travelled throughout the world. He was shipwrecked when he was seventeen, drifting for two weeks on a lifeboat until rescued near Tahiti. He became a pearl fisher in the South Seas for a year before going back to his wanderings.

  In 1913 he travelled across Canada, panhandling for gold and joining the militia. In 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, McGuinness joined the British Navy and served in the Dover Patrol and in Cameroon. Following the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and its aftermath, he became so disenchanted with the British forces that he deserted and joined the South African Army. While serving with them in East Africa, he was captured by a German force but escaped through the jungle. At that point he abandoned the global war to continue his travels.

  In 1920 he returned to his hometown of Derry to join the IRA during the War of Independence, where he became the leader of a flying column. He was central to the daring escape from gaol of the IRA Sligo Brigade Commander Frank Carty (1897–1942). Next he went on the run when he was accused of the murder of a police inspector in Glasgow. The British Army actually captured him in June 1921 while he was participating in a bungled bank raid in Donegal, but he escaped from custody before they could establish his identity.

  He then smuggled arms from Germany to Ireland. After the 1922 Treaty split, which caused the Irish Civil War between the pro-treaty Free Staters and the anti-treaty IRA, he continued smuggling for the IRA but eventually left them when he became disillusioned with their incompetence. He had both soles of his feet tattooed with the Union Jack flag so that wherever he went he could trample on the flag of the British Empire. He claimed that he was arrested in Berlin for conspiring with Bulgarian revolutionaries and released only on condition that he left Germany. He spent time with Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces in China before ending up in New York where he became a building contractor, like many Irish before and after him.

  In 1928 he joined Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic expedition as a navigation officer. In 1930 he invested his entire fortune in smuggling ru
m from Canada to America during prohibition. He lost everything when his boat and cargo were impounded in 1931. Broke, he emigrated to the Soviet Union and worked as a harbour master in Murmansk. But he didn’t like the Soviet Union.

  He published an autobiography in 1934 called Nomad. In 1936, he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War but deserted after falling out with the Spanish republicans. He documented his experiences in a sensational exposé of the Brigades in an article called “I Fought with the Reds” published in the Irish Independent. By 1942 he was a chief petty officer in the Irish Naval Service at Haulbowline in Cork. He offered his assistance to the German legation to assist them smuggling spies out of Ireland. He was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison but was released at the end of the “Emergency”, the name given to the Second World War in Ireland.

  After many close encounters with death, he was eventually presumed drowned in December 1947 when his ship ran aground off the Wexford coast. But we cannot be sure because he may have gone aboard a passing pirate ship.

  That Sinking Feeling Again

  We built the Titanic, which is not in any way a metaphor for our history. Many of us went down on the Titanic, some stoically and some complaining loudly. The ship’s Captain Smith apocryphally advised his passengers and crew to “be British” as the ship went down. Was this useful advice in the circumstances, or just confusing? But many things, including the size, nature and location of icebergs, confused Smith. I assume that he meant his passengers should go down without complaining and maintain stiff upper lips, facilitated by the freezing North Atlantic water.

  Thomas Andrews (1873–1912), from Co. Down, was chief designer in 1903 and managing director in 1907 of Harland & Wolff, the Belfast shipyard that built the Titanic. When he became an apprentice at that company, he rose every morning at 4.50 a.m. to arrive at work at 6.00 a.m. He studied every evening when he got home. He was on board on the night of 14–15 April 1912 when the Titanic hit an iceberg. When he inspected the damage, he knew better than anyone else on board that the unsinkable ship would soon sink. He advised against panic and assisted the crew in helping women and children, and some men dressed as women, into lifeboats. He didn’t disguise himself as a woman and sneak off, like some. He was last seen throwing deckchairs from the Titanic into the ocean to act as improvised flotation devices, rather than re-arranging them, which has since become a popular form of distracting activity. He then stoically went down with the ship.