In recent years we’ve become accustomed to the handsome blue mini-cruise-liner St Bridget plying her day-excursion trade along the coasts around Dublin Bay between Dublin Port, Howth and Dun Laoghaire. She’s now a welcome and integral part of the summer scene, and appropriately will begin her 2022 service on St Patrick’s Day, March 17th.
This occasion will provide an instant topic of conversation among passengers as to whether St Patrick deserves to be our patron saint, when St Bridget (or more accurately Brigid) has equally strong claims. And if there happen to be Waterford folk on board, they’ll close the discussion by claiming that St Declan of The Decies was there before the lot of them.
The St Bridget from Galway Bay is now a popular part of the Dublin Bay scene
Another possible topic of conversation is the story – which may or may not be true – that we only have St Bridget operating in Dublin Bay because a major re-vamp job on the pier at Doolin in County Clare beside the Cliffs of Moher meant that for at least one trading year, she’d no base in Ireland for her ferry service out to the Aran Islands. There was no way the County Galway-based ferries at Rossaveal were going to welcome a Clare boat like St Bridget onto their pitch, so she went east across Ireland looking for business
Which way will she go? Erin’s King was a matter of continuing debate among Dublin’s quayside pundits. Photo: Courtesy Cormac Lowth
But having come to Dublin for a season in order to get by, St Bridget’s owners found they were doing better than merely breaking even, and now their company Dublin Bay Cruises is well established. Yet they continue with the same rugged vessel, which has acquired the personality of a character ship in contrast to the latest ferries operating on Galway Bay, some of which look more like waterborne space-ships.
Days of wine and roses……a newspaper ad for the Erin’s King activities in her Dublin prime suggests a very busy ship, although the late-night return voyage from Wicklow Regatta might have been a decidedly mixed experience. Image Courtesy Cormac Lowth
And in being a vintage classic, St Bridget is in line with the traditional of Dublin’s coastal cruisers, which have long had the reputation of operating in a precarious market, as coastal railways with excursion trains, and quickly-accessed scenic roads with cars and buses, are always eating into their share of the seaside tourism trade. Thus while I’m more than willing to be corrected, the feeling is that all of Dublin’s coastal cruising vessels have started life as something else – there have been few if any purpose-built for the seemingly tenuous Dublin Bay business.
As ever, it was that one-man maritime museum known as Cormac Lowth who revived this line of thought. By now, Cormac can only be living in his garden shed, as every room in his house must be packed to the ceiling with his maritime memorabilia, with so many ancient photos that from time to time he’s able to test his inner group of aficionados by circulating ancient nautical images as a knowledge test.
Erin’s King at the Customs House – she might not have been the first choice for an excursion steamer to serve the Dublin Bay trade, but she was available at the right price after 25 years hard service in the Mersey. Photo courtesy Cormac Lowth
Thus at the weekend, we found ourselves grappling with some photos of a small passenger paddle steamer obviously operating out of Dublin at a time when smoke emission controls weren’t even thought of. But the point about this mystery ship was that she was very clearly double-ended, bow-shaped at both ends and the steering positions apparently two-faced.
So she was a push-me pull-you, as able in astern as ahead, even if this meant a disconcerting float-free moment as the engines were shifted as quickly as possible into reverse rotation.
In the Liffey and Dublin Bay, the little ship’s name was Erin’s King - though Classicists might have preferred Janus - and she was very much part of Dublin life for the entire 1890s. But before that, she’d been built in 1865 by Vernon’s of Liverpool as the Heather Belle, a Mersey ferry which shuttled back and forth with maximum efficiency between Liverpool and Birkenhead. (She'd been previously mentioned on Afloat here)
Is she coming or going? Dublin in the rare old times, when smoke was good for you, and the Erin’s King looked as though she was coming up-river when she was heading seawards. Photo: Courtesy Cormac Lowth
So by the time she started operating in 1891 as the “Dublin Bay and Environs” excursion steamer Erin’s King, she was well stricken in years. And although the Mersey can be quite rugged going with wind over tide, it must have been interesting to try to run a profitable excursion with the Erin’s King when a real easterly was sweeping into Dublin Bay, as was recorded in one of the recollections in Ulysses:
Leopold Bloom in 1904 in Ulysses recalls an outing some years previously in the Erin’s King
Nevertheless, she became a much-loved and familiar part of Dublin life, her daily routine a matter of general knowledge as this little notice from the Freeman’s Journal suggests, with its hint of the end of an era:
End of the line? There’s a hint of adieu in this Autumn ad for the Erin’s King in the Freeman’s Journal. Courtesy Cormac Lowth
For by 1900, the Erin’s King was literally gasping her last, and she was broken up at the end of that season. Others have followed, after originally serving elsewhere like the Erin’s King as the Heather Belle, and the St Bridget is in that tradition while being an Atlantic-capable vessel. But then, when you’re pushing the envelope a bit by taking tourists to sea in a Dublin Bay easterly, it’s good to have a proper little ship under you, rather than some floating spacecraft.
