John Kearon described in one of several interviews I had with him during the conservation of Asgard at the National Museum how he had “crawled in desperation to the aftermost beams, hoping to find some evidence to prove the beams were original.”
He found them “written on the after face of a beam in faded pencil; there was a signature: “Pall Gunlarson, Lawrvik, 1905”.
The Colin Archer Museum in Larvik could confirm that the writer was a shipwright that worked in the Archer boatyard at the time Asgard was built.
John Kearon, with long experience in marine conservation work at the UK National Maritime Museum in Liverpool, led the restoration of the original Asgard in Dublin.
He had headed conservation work on vessels at the Merseyside museum and brought that experience to bear on Erskine Childers’ famous gun-running yacht and icon of Irish independence.
This Thursday night, December 1, at the Metropole Hotel in Cork, he will deliver an illustrated lecture detailing how the conservation work was carried out.
It will be presented by the Cork Literary & Scientific Society at 8 p.m.
The Society is making the lecture generally open to the public; “Non-members are very welcome to this important maritime occasion,” it says.
