Seventy-five years this coming Sunday, the Irish yachtsman Conor O'Brien returned to Dun Laoghaire harbour two years - to the minute - after he had successfully set sail to circumnavigate the world. His feat is being commemorated at 2 p.m. on Sunday, when a fleet of vessels, led by a Galway hooker, The Lady Mor, enters the bay in the company of an escort of An Slua Muiri, to arrive at 4.30, just as Conor O'Brien did.
The sailor they commemorate was a truly remarkable man who, nine years before his circumnavigation of the world, had been involved in smuggling arms for the Irish Volunteers. Two vessels were involved; one, Erskine Childers's Asgard, landed guns in Howth; the other, O'Brien's yacht, the Kelpie, offloaded guns to the motor yacht Chota, owned by Sir Thomas Myles, the eminent surgeon.
Erskine Childers
This was very much gun-running by toffs. The Childers crew included Mary SpringRice, whose father had been British ambassador in Washington and had also written the words of the quintessentially English anthem I Vow to Thee, My Country to Holst's Jupiter suite from The Planets.
Of the male gun-runners, Erskine Childers became a much-decorated flier with the Royal Naval Air Service. Sir Thomas Myles served with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Graham Shephard, accompanying Asgard, went on to serve in the Royal Flying Corps directly alongside many Irishmen, such as George McElroy, Mick Mannock, Robert Gregory, Robert Smith-Barry and William Hervey-Kelly. (All in all, a subject which yet awaits its author.) He rose rapidly through the ranks to become the youngest brigadier-general in the RFC, winning the DSO and the MC and becoming a hugely popular and respected officer before being killed performing stunt aerobatics in 1917. Yet no career of any of those well-connected toffs compared with that of Hervey de Montmorency: gun-runner, commandant of the Wicklow Volunteers, a British army officer, concluding in the amazing volte-face of being an intelligence officer for the RIC Auxiliaries in Westmeath.
Conor O'Brien was a scion of the grand O'Brien's, rather than the Johnston Mooney variety; an ancestor had been William Smith O'Brien, who had been up to mischief in 1848. The Kilcoole escapade was indeed no more than in the family tradition - as was what followed, when Conor served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. No doubt he did hard work and bitter work, but with little enough (in terms of personal glory) to show for it at the end. But the end was not so bitter as that of Erskine Childers, shot - almost out of hand - by a Free State firing squad, or as that of poor Shephard, a youthful and gallant general, dead on a flying field in France, nor yet as bizarre as de Montmorency's loyalty-hopping.
Escapism
Myself, I prefer the humdrum to the heroic: in the idiocy of civil war, is Conor O'Brien's sense of civic duty in becoming a fisheries inspector not vastly more reassuring about the future of Irish society than others' desire to fight for abstract and indefinable things such as the "Republic"? Is not guardianship of the real assets of Ireland a nobler and better duty than quests for the unadulterated intangibilities of political purity? One might call it escapism; but what is better - escapism from fratricide, or its free and dutiful indulgence?
O'Brien took his yacht Saoirse out of Dun Laoghaire harbour in June 1923 to head off into the oceanic Himalayas beyond those continental peninsulas of evil repute, the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. The fortitude and insane courage that must have driven him and his crew (whose names remain unknown to me) to take their tiny, 42-foot ketch into those howling wastes is beyond my powers of understanding. Sea at the best of times is wet and cold and frequently drowns the imprudent, even in Greystones. But off Tierra del Fuego or south-west Namibia, Lord love a duck. . .
Some 30,000 people welcomed Conor O'Brien when he returned triumphant to the infant State in 1925. The Civil War was barely over, and the State lay in ruins. Animosities which were to remain simmering for a generation were still close to violent expression. O'Brien's feat was one of the first international triumphs of an independent Ireland, and must have been the source of a huge amount of pride to a bruised and battered little island.
Fastnet race
His vessel Saoirse remained in existence until 1979, when she was destroyed by a hurricane in Jamaica. Was this the same great storm which then swept across the Atlantic, wrecking the Fastnet race? Because there would be an awful symmetry about it if it were; and not merely did it kill so many yachtsmen off the West Cork Coast, but it also plucked from his rock and drowned the great writer J.G. Farrell. Saoirse's sister ship, the Ilen, also designed by O'Brien, has been rescued from exile in the Falklands - dear me, what terrible lives ships can lead - and is being restored with the assistance of the Hunt Museum in Limerick. Gradually, the legacy of maritime achievements of the great and largely forgotten Conor O'Brien is being restored to its proper place in the larger Irish memory. Long overdue, no doubt, but that it is happening at all should once again be reason for some pleasure and not a little pride.