Wandering star – Paul Clements on pioneering travel writer Beatrice Grimshaw

When Dervla Murphy died in May her obituaries highlighted that she had gone off on her travels armed with a knife and a loaded automatic pistol for self-defence. The redoubtable travel writer had been instructed on how to fire the gun with the help of gardaí in the mountains around Lismore in west Waterford.

Murphy twice used the pistol to ward off wild animals and bandits – on one occasion she shot at a pack of wolves as they tore at her clothes in eastern Europe, and in an incident in Iran she scared off a skimpily clad man who was attempting to climb into her bed.

But she was not the first adventurous Irish female travel writer to arm herself with a weapon. Several generations earlier, Beatrice Grimshaw brought a gun with her on her journeys through the South Pacific in an era long before mass tourism caught hold. Grimshaw’s name is largely unknown today but a new book following in her footsteps brings to life her remarkable story.

Born in Dunmurry near Belfast in 1870, she became a pioneer in different fields as a cyclist, journalist, author and lone traveller in the Oceanic world.

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In 1891 Grimshaw moved to Dublin working as a journalist with the Irish Cyclist and its sister publication the Social Review. In the 1890s polo cycling had become popular and she joined the Ohne Hast Cycling Club. Grimshaw claimed that she had set a woman’s world record for a 24-hour cycle completing 212 miles on a Rover bicycle. This feat of endurance, with which Dervla Murphy would surely have empathised, reflected another commonality between them of a two-wheeled mode of transport. At the height of her pedalling prowess Murphy said that the best she could cycle was up to 110 miles a day on her sturdy Armstrong Cadet bike.

Grimshaw became bored with editorial work in Dublin and craved a desire to go to the Pacific islands. Amongst the array of places that she travelled around by steamer in the early decades of the 20th century were the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Vanuatu before settling in Papua New Guinea. Aside from contributing articles to newspapers and magazines, as well as producing short stories and novels, one of her other roles was sourcing information on the prospects for settlers who wished to move to the tropics.

The dazzling islands represented a startling contrast to life in Grimshaw’s native Ireland and she noted details about the economy, politics and etiquette of the different societies, providing practical information on the cost of living. With her lively enquiring mind, Grimshaw explored the countryside in a horse and buggy, met Queen Makea on Rarotonga and sailed around islands on a schooner negotiating the fickle trade winds.

Everywhere she went the islanders regarded her with curiosity and were astonished that a white woman was travelling alone because of the inherent dangers. Pirates and cannibals abounded in those days so a gun was essential. Grimshaw also spent time in New Zealand visiting Maori villages before retiring to Australia. She died in 1953 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Bathurst, New South Wales. In 2017 a memorial headstone was erected and unveiled at the Catholic cemetery in the town.

The resourceful writer Diana Gleadhill, who attended that ceremony, has travelled to many of Grimshaw’s locations on a quest to find out what motivated her to spend more than 30 years in the South Seas. Footstepping stories, known as “echo-tourism”, are a popular way of bringing a long-forgotten figure back to life. Gleadhill travelled from her home on the shores of Strangford Lough for her own adventure which included journeys by ship, jet-boat, canoe, local bus and turbo-prop plane. She went swimming, trekking and horse-riding through islands to deserted villages in her search for traces of where the writer stayed which resulted in her book Shadowing Miss Grimshaw: From Ireland to the South Pacific.

Aside from the cycling connection between Dervla Murphy and Beatrice Grimshaw, there are other links as both were trailblazing writers with an indomitable spirit who never married. They wrote acutely observed books with a pungency to their style coupled with a fascination of far-flung cultures. Their personalities too were mirrored in similar unconventional qualities: travelling independently with a steely determination, a fearlessness as well as a tolerance for privation, while interacting generously with locals. Murphy once said that most people regarded her travels as “wild eccentricity simply because it involved a certain amount of hardship which to our ancestors was a feature of everyday life”.