The Royal Irish Yacht Club is building up to the beginning of its many and varied 195th Anniversary events in a week’s time, celebrating life afloat and ashore with Winifred Kelliher as the club’s first woman Commodore. Further along the Dun Laoghaire waterfront, there’s much festivity at the National Yacht Club today for the Women At The Helm series incorporated in the Club’s annual regatta where Rosemary Cadogan haas been elected Commodore.

Commodore Winifred Kelliher of the Royal Irish YC. Her family’s involvement in sailing takes in many areas of interest, and includes Olympic participation. Photo: RIYC

On Wednesday Alison Hackett (left) of the Water Wag Swallow receives the National Yacht Club Regatta first prize, a Galileo thermometer, from newly elected National Yacht Club Commodore Rosemary Cadogan

And with the biennial Round Ireland Race from Wicklow getting under way on June 20th with an excellent international fleet of 60 boats, the Dublin Bay scene is further enlivened today with the arrival of French-based ex-Pat sailor Pamela Lee of Greystones Sailing Club.

“TAKING SILK”

She’s fresh from registering 9th overall in the keenly-contested Normandy Channel Race in which she survived “taking Silk” with only some sail damage, whereas another Class40 wrecked the entire rig. The Round Ireland entrant arrives into Dun Laoghaire from her home club with her Class40 #Empowher, and they become the centre of attention at a reception this (Saturday) evening at Dun Laoghaire Motor Yacht Club on the inner harbour.

“Taking silk”. The BH41 Silk (Jocelyn Waller, Lough Derg YC) runs out of forward buoyancy in the Solent with Gordon Maguire at the helm. In the recent Normandy Channel Race, Pamela Lee’s Class40 #Empowher (Greystones SC) survived this manoeuvre with some sail damage, but a similarly afflicted sister-ship was totally dismasted.

DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE HARBOUR SHAPE

Seen from above, the way that Dun Laoghaire harbour’s straightforward harbour shape is so neatly attached at right angles to the south shore of Dublin Bay is a snare and delusion for simple folk. We have become accustomed to the more homely among us referring to this most artificial of structures as being “a wonderful natural feature of the coastline”. As it’s made of splendid granite from just up the road in Dalkey, it certainly could be argued that it is indeed natural, being no more than a usefully re-arranged chunk of Killiney Hill.

The simple outline of Dun Laoghaire Harbour disguises the complexity of the maritime community within it.

Either way, do not let that apparent overall simplicity delude you. A simple harbour plan or aerial photo will not reveal the inter-connectors, the ley lines, that run hither and yon through the multi-layered maritime community enclosed deceptively neatly within those harbour walls.

Thus in sailing in particular, the intriguing question of how and when women achieved their rightful place is just as complex as you might wish it to be. After all, the 1887-founded Water Wag One Designs – which now race in a 1900-designed sailing dinghy designed by Maimie Doyle – have always been noted as much for their successful successful women sailors as they do for having a woman designer for their beloved boats.

Women sailors, woman boat designer – the Water Wags in close in-harbour action at Dun Laoghaire’s West Pier. Photo: W M Nixon

WOMAN OWNER-SKIPPER INSPIRES THE FIRST SUPERYACHT REVIEW

But of course, when we make something of this, our friends in the west will tell us that the great Grace O’Malley was really the true founding Commodore of Mayo Sailing Club on Clew Bay around 1580. So then we’ll respond that it’s neither here nor there, as it was Cleopatra herself who led the way in sailing women’s style, ensuring that her exotic barge with “the poop beaten gold, purple the sails” inspired the first Superyacht review.

In fact, the arrival of Cleopatra’s barge, sailing into the River Cydnus, was a total Women At The Helm Event, as the entire afterguard was female, “her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them appareled like the nymphs Nereides…and like the Graces, some steering the helm, and others tending at the tackle and ropes of the barge”.

Women at the Helm. Cleopatra’s Barge, complete with midships palm tree, appears in this photo to be in Dublin Bay, with the Hill of Howth beyond.

WARMER WEATHER NEEDED

We certainly wouldn’t recommend any participant in the National YC’s Woman At The Helm event today to go forth appareled like the nymphs Nereides, even if it is entertaining to wonder how you would go about ordering such kit from Musto or Helly Hansen.

But the reality is that gender stereotypes are so deeply set into the sailing psyche that it seems we regularly have to point out – virtually on an annual basis – that some admittedly special Irish women have been active sailors and major sailing administrators in their own right from way back.

On 8th December 1934, the Annual Dinner of the 1929-founded Irish Cruising Club was held in Dublin with an attendance of 92, and the fourth yearly presentation of what is now the club’s premier trophy, the Faulkner Cup, was made to Elizabeth Crimmins of East Ferry on Cork Harbour for a competent and properly-logged cruise with her 9-ton gaff yawl Nirvana.

Nirvana of Arklow. In 1934, sailed by owner-skipper Elizabeth Crimmins of East Ferry in Cork Harbour, she was awarded the Irish Cruising Club’s Faulkner Cup.

The next woman awardee of this trophy was Daphne French of Dunmore East in 1939, who sailed her ketch Embla to the Aland Islands in the Baltic to meet again with the Erikson Tall Ship sailors with whom she’d rounded Cap Horn in 1935.

PRESIDENT OF IRISH POLAR INSTITUTE

Cape Horn figured again, this time more directly, in the 2004 Faulkner Cup award to the Maire Breathnach of Dungarvan for her co-skipper role in a circuit of South America. Since then Maire has done so much serious voyaging, not to mention much background shoreside work for the voyaging and high latitude sailing community, that she is first President of the Irish Polar Institute.

In Dublin Port, the Erikson Tall Ship Pamir in which Daphne French rounded Cape Horn.

This all seems reasonably normal nowadays, yet it isn’t so long since Avril Harris became Ireland’s first female Commodore – in this case of the Dun Laoghaire Motor Yacht Club – in 1980. The National YC’s Ida Kiernan became another pioneering woman Commodore in 2000, while Breda Dillon was first in the role in Howth YC in 2012.

Then in January 2024, the earth shook as Annamarie Fegan became the first woman Admiral of the Royal Cork YC in its colourful 303 years history. Barely two years later, with her successful role in the top office successfully concluded, it all seems so utterly normal that we wonder what all the fuss was about, but at the time it was thought so ground-breaking that she almost automatically became 2024’s Cork Person of the Year.

Annamarie Fegan, first woman Admiral of the Royal Cork YC, and Cork “Person of the Year 2024”.

ROYAL IRISH YC’S UNIQUE LINKS

Yet there is still something so special in the Royal Irish Yacht Club electing its first woman Commodore that it is entirely appropriate that the club and its members should be making something very festive out of its 195th Anniversary, even if a wait of just five years would allow them to have a very major Bicentennial Celebration.

It’s party time right now – the RIYC Bicentennial may be just five years away, but now is the time to party.

For a theme of all the other clubs is that they allowed an escape through sailing and its socializing from the business and busyness of everyday life at all levels of society. Casual historians may assume that the Royal Cork’s location in Cork Harbour means that it has an inbuilt naval connection. But in fact when the original Water Club came into being in 1720, it was very much doing its own thing in an escape of sorts from the stringencies of naval rules, as the naval base was in Kinsale at the time of the Water Club’s formation, and was not completely moved to Cork Harbour until 1820, when the Water Club’s re-titling as the Royal Cork did have a naval input.

Equally in Dublin Bay, when the yacht club that was soon to become the Royal St George Yacht Club was setting the pace in the 1840s, its membership included so many titled Protestant descendants of Cromwellian land-grabbers that they had total confidence in their underlying power, and frowned most severely on any in-club discussion of politics and its associated activities.

ONE-LEGGED VETERAN OF WATERLOO

But the Royal Irish Yacht Club came into being through the direct inspiration of the Viceroy, the Marquis of Anglesey, the famously one-legged veteran of Waterloo and a hugely successful owner-skipper in campaigning his cutter Pearl, while leading a life which reflected that he was in in his prime during the boisterously hedonistic Regency era of 1795-1837, rather than the much more prim Victoria period which dominated the remainder of the 1800s.

The Man Who Was Everywhere. Henry Paget, First Marquess of Anglesey, lost a leg at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, became founding Commodore of the Royal Irish YC in 1831, and in 1848 he donated a silver trophy to revive racing in the Royal Yacht Squadron, and it became the America’s Cup in 1851.

Having been the prime mover for the first regatta at the new harbour in 1828, he became the RIYC’s first Commodore in 1831. This meant that though organisations like the Water Club - re-born as the Royal Cork on Cork Harbour in 1825 - and the 1828-founded Royal Western of Ireland at Kilrush and Tralee may have pre-dated the new Dublin club, the RIYC’s highfalutin associations at the centres of power meant that it became Ireland’s premier yacht club in the same way that the 1815-founded Royal Yacht Squadron in England emerged above more senior clubs like the 1775-founded Royal Thames YC.

Aboard John Madden’s Ganymede in 1828. Already a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, he joined the Royal Irish YC in the 1830s.

EARLY ROUND IRELAND RACE PROPOSAL

Admittedly the RIYC was seriously in decline by 1840, with Anglesey gone from Ireland, and giving his sailing attention to the Royal Yacht Squadron, to which - in 1848 - he presented a racing trophy that became the America’s Cup in 1851. Nevertheless during the 1830s his Irish club was a pace-setter in sailing development, and one of the members, John Madden of the stately pile that is Hilton Park in County Monaghan, was mad for racing in his big cutter Ganymede, and may well have put up a trophy to stimulate interest in a Round Ireland Race.

Hilton Park in County Monaghan. Until the 1950s, the house’s silverware collection included a large tureen from the 1830s that had been intended as the prize for a Round Ireland race to be staged by the Royal Irish YC. Photo: W M Nixon

This is of particular interest with the latest Round Ireland Race in just a week’s time. But it doesn’t seem to have become a reality, despite the fact that the current Johnny Madden of Hilton Park can remember a large tureen clearly inscribed with “Royal Irish Yacht Club - Round Ireland Race” being sold in a hurried fund-raising sale of some of the family’s Dublin silverware in the 1950s.

Historic club adapts to modern life – the IMOCA60 Hugo Boss berthed at the RIYC pontoon as the Water Wags re brought ashore after their mid-week evening race. Photo: W M Nixon

History and power politics were centre stage on 4th July 1846 when the RIYC was revived at a meeting in Dublin by a group which was much more broadly representative of Irish society, including as it did Daniel O’Connell the Liberator and several of his fellow-sailing sons, together with energetic members of Dublin’s Quaker community.

A PROPER CLUBHOUSE

But where the club in its original incarnation had relied on rented rooms in a waterfront-adjacent Kingstown hotel to provide it with a shore base, the new committee was determined to have a proper clubhouse, and they’d the good fortune to get architect John Skipton Mulvany – at the height of his creative powers – to create a neo-classical pavilion-plus on the waterfront that has stood the test of time.

Building for the future – Optimist championship hosted by the RIYC

There’s a complete discussion of the building’s design in the RIYC’s excellent history White Sails Crowding, first published in 1994 by longtime member Henry Boylan, and massively up-dated in 2024 by his son Peter Boylan and daughter Jane Mahony. All we need to say here is that the elegantly symmetrical exterior houses an interior of great ingenuity which continues to make this, the world’s oldest purpose-built complete yacht club building, as relevant as ever to the needs of sailing.

A rough day in Dublin Bay – the RIYC regatta of 1873 as portrayed by Richard Bridges Beechey, and used as the jacket illustration for Henry Boylan’s first 1994 edition of White Sails Crowding.

LIVING HISTORY

But with living history very much in evidence wherever you turn in Dun Laoghaire ashore and afloat, the 195 celebrations need something special to get going, and the evening of next Friday (June 19th) sees the countdown well under way for the RIYC’s Classic Boat Regatta on June 20th & 21st, sponsored by Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin, with a very varied fleet including vintage cruisers, the Hal Sisk & Fionan de Barra-revived Dublin Bay 21 class, Glen ODs, Howth 17s, Mermaids, Water Wags and IDRA 14s racing spectator-friendly courses.

Of course we wouldn’t be doing our duty here if we didn’t stir the pot, and while we note that Dun Laoghaire and Shannon sailor Margaret Delany is ensuring that at least one Shannon One Design is taking part, perhaps a gentle reminder that the SODs took the bulk of the Gold Medals at the sailing events on Dublin Bay of the Tailteann Games in 1924 might stimulate some of her fellow Sodders to travel east.

Shannon One Designs at speed in a one-reef breeze on Lough Derg. In 1924, the class used the RIYC as their base for the sailing in the Tailteann Games on Dublin Bay, and returned home with several Gold Medals.

ANY NEWS FROM CORK?

Then too, the immaculately-restored 1896-designed (by Fife) Cork Harbour One Design Jap lurks in Crosshaven at the Royal Cork YC. When the late great Clayton Love Jnr was campaigning her as the last project in his long and wonderful sailing life, road-trailing to significant international classic events was part of the programme. Is nobody in Crosser feeling that urge to travel?

The restored 1896-designed Cork Harbour OD Jap travelled to many classic regattas under the very successful ownership of the late Clayton Love Jnr (inset).

ENTRIES FOR RIYC CLASSIC REGATTA AS AT 12-06-26