There is so much I should have asked my father Roger about his wartime experience undertaking dangerous voyages to Lisbon on tiny Irish ships. But I know how reluctant he was to talk too much about those occasions when his ship was bombed. As for many people of his generation, these were memories he probably didn't wish to remember aloud.
He also hated fuss and to see those voyages taken out of proportion. Ireland desperately needed to import vital supplies to keep our economy functioning, which meant seamen had to risk their lives. But my father maintained that it was only a job – and for sailors there weren't too many ways to knock out a living. His crew mates were ordinary seafarers: no heroics or histrionics. Just banter and companionship and small-scale smuggling to earn a few bob.
They also knew that shipping companies would stop paying their wages from the minute that a torpedo shattered their ship or a Luftwaffe pilot dropped bombs on Irishmen, bereft of uniforms or weapons, huddled in wheelhouses. If you clambered into a lifeboat, or drowned at sea, you did so on your own time. But in these hard times such risks were compensated for by the Irish government paying war-risk money to supplement the meagre wages that merchant sailors earned.
By the end I couldn’t ask my father about those voyages, because he lived too long. At 92 his heart remained strong but he’d lost his sanity. He didn’t know me but suspected we were related. Nor was he aware of being in hospital. He was convinced he was on a ship stuck in port and, if the skipper didn’t sail soon, determined, despite being unable to rise unaided, to cycle home to his native Wexford.
Stranded sailor on a marooned ship
He never mentioned Finglas, his home for 60 years. For him home was Wexford town again, and he was a stranded sailor on a marooned ship. To pacify him I’d offer to ask the skipper what was happening, using this excuse to speak to his doctors. My father would anxiously call me back to his bed: “Don’t call him skipper or we’ll get fired. Call him captain or master or sir.”
My father, whose name was Roger Bolger, died in 2011, leaving behind a biscuit tin of discharge books, which captains had stamped VG, for very good, every time he signed off a ship during his 44 years as a ship’s cook.
His career started at 16 when a neighbour, a ship's engineer named Michael Tierney, persuaded him to pretend to the Staffords, who owned the Wexford Steamship Company, that he had worked in the kitchens of a local seminary. This got him his first job at sea. His career saw him on a small Welsh ship at Scapa Flow, the Scottish strait where the British navy was based during the second World War, when the battleship the Royal Oak was torpedoed at anchor there in 1939: 834 lives were lost in the conflagration.
It saw him jump from a sinking vessel with a rag doll in his pocket for his daughter, and it meant that he spent a lot of his war years on the Stafford-owned MV Edenvale, being bombed several times by the Luftwaffe en route to Lisbon.
My father rarely mentioned those times, but he once recalled huddling with crew mates in the Edenvale's wheelhouse when a bomb smashed through its funnel and rolled across the deck into the sea, miraculously unexploded, while the Luftwaffe pilot machine-gunned the ship until he was out of ammunition.
Like its sister ship, the MV Kerlogue, the Edenvale wasn't built for long voyages. These coasters were meant to trade up and down the shore. But when the second World War started Ireland had just 56 small ships. This "Lilliputian fleet", as Capt Frank Forde referred to it in The Long Watch, his fine study of these wartime voyages (now sadly out of print), became our link to the outside world, especially for supplies from the US, landed in neutral Lisbon.
While Allied ships sailed in blacked-out convoys, Irish ships sailed alone, unarmed and lit up, hoping that U-boats would respect their neutral markings. But instead Irish ships were attacked on 41 occasions, with 149 crewmen killed and 38 wounded. The Ardmore was lost off the south coast, with 24 crew killed. Eleven crew from the Clonlara died on the treacherous stretch of the Atlantic where 33 souls from the Irish Pine lie. The Kyleclare was sunk with 18 crewmen lost, being so overloaded that a U-boat commander didn't recognise its markings until after he fired a torpedo. During this same time our makeshift fleet saved 521 lives, rescuing British, German, Dutch and American survivors.
After my father's death I thought a lot about those voyages, in which unarmed Irish sailors were pawns in a chess game between Éamon de Valera and Winston Churchill. The British prime minister tried to starve Ireland into joining the war (or at least returning the treaty ports) by constantly restricting what goods we could import and added thousands of kilometres to voyages by insisting that our ships operated under the UK's navicert system.
Ships generally had to dock first in Wales to transport British coal to Lisbon. During the voyage they could be sunk if they strayed into the Allied shoot-on-sight zone. On the way home they needed to divert to a British port to have their cargo inspected by British customs.
De Valera used these ships not just for supplies but as his unarmed front line, publicly displaying Ireland’s neutrality by sailing lit up, protected only by a Tricolour painted across their decks. Ireland’s neutrality cost us during Europe’s rebuilding after 1945, but before that it proved we could act as an independent nation.
Seagoing novel
I doubt if my father read many of my dark early novels. But I wanted to honour his memory, and the men he sailed with, by writing a seagoing novel,
The Lonely Sea and Sky
, that might, with luck, contain the old-fashioned storytelling he enjoyed reading in his cabin at night.
Although elements of his life get woven in, the novel becomes a homage to the real-life crew of the Kerlogue, who were involved in the most amazing sea rescue ever undertaken by an Irish ship.
The Lonely Sea and Sky tells how a Wexford boy lies about his age to embark on his maiden voyage on the 43m (142ft) ship in December 1943. He needs to become the wage-earner after his father is sunk on the Kyleclare on this same Lisbon route. He swaps Wexford's small streets for wartime Lisbon, which was crammed with refugees and spies.
December 29th, 1943, dawned like an ordinary day for the Kerlogue's 10-man crew returning from Lisbon. But by nightfall 168 shipwrecked German sailors would cram every centimetre of their dangerously overloaded ship. The crew had been attacked previously and feared the worst that morning when a German plane circled them. But no bombs came. Instead the pilot signalled SOS. Altering course, they encountered a sea littered with bodies.
The chief officer noted: “As rafts rose into view on the crest of giant waves, we could see men on them and others clinging to the sides. At first we did not know if they were Allied or Axis until someone noticed long ribbons trailing downwards from behind a seaman’s cap which denoted they were German Navy men.”
Working under floodlights, the Irish crew spent 10 hours rescuing every man they could pack on board. A senior German officer asked the Kerlogue to land his men in France. As captain of a neutral ship, Tom Donohue, who had survived being sunk by the Nazis some months previously, refused. Although the Germans aboard could have overpowered his crew, they accepted his decision.
Fourteen of them jammed the wheelhouse, blocking the view of the Irish sailor trying to steer. The engine room was so packed that the chief engineer couldn’t reach machinery and needed to signal to survivors to turn instruments.
Four badly injured Germans died on board. Others had to be left to drown, with no space left on a ship whose deck was now barely above the waves.
The British authorities asked the ship to adhere to its navicert and dock in Wales, where the survivors would become prisoners of war. But, just as he refused to bow to German demands to land in France, the Irish captain ignored British instructions and maintained his neutrality. After several days Capt Donohue nursed his tiny ship to Cobh, where the Germans were treated for injuries before being interned in the Curragh until the war ended.
Save our souls
The
Kerlogue
’s crew obeyed an unwritten code to save any lives they could. In risking themselves they recognised the drowning Germans not as combatants but as fellow sailors and honoured what sailors traditionally believe the initials SOS stand for: save our souls.
Two months later the German navy repaid them by killing another 11 unarmed Irishmen on the Arklow schooner Cymric on this Lisbon route. Six were Wexford men, including Michael Tierney, the neighbour who took my father to sea.
Other neutral nations made considerable efforts to remember the merchant seamen who died while keeping vital supply lines open during that war. A fully rigged model of a ship hangs in St Peter’s Church in Malmo to honour Swedish sailors who died this way.
For years Ireland did little to officially remember Irish seaman. Now an annual mass is held at City Quay parish church in Dublin, after which wreaths are laid at a small memorial nearby to commemorate Irish merchant seamen lost during the second World War. Dún Laoghaire's fine National Maritime Museum of Ireland has a replica of the Kerlogue on display, and last year a memorial inscribed with the names of the Kerlogue's crew was unveiled on the Wexford quays, near where the steamship company's offices once stood.
My fictional Kerlogue crew are phantoms of my imagination. I don't presume to speak for the real crew involved in that rescue or the crew on any ship. I can only salute them and hope that I've paid some small tribute to their everyday bravery in a novel that my father, with luck, might have enjoyed reading during one of his life's many voyages.
The Lonely Sea and Sky, by Dermot Bolger, is published by New Island
