Cobh

Today we spent the day in Cobh, Ireland. It is the primary shipping center for southern Ireland and the departure point for every Irish immigrant headed to American including my great grandfather and great-grandmother, Patrick Maloney and Catherine Hession.

We started with a short walk around the pier near the heritage museum (and train station).

We thought this looked like a jail, but as we learned on our walking tour it’s the main base for the Irish navy, and it was originally built by prisoners waiting to be exiled to Australia. According to our guide “Yup, we have 8 ships and that’ll do us just fine.” (By comparison the U.S. navy has 280 ships).

This statue is of 15 year old Annie Moore and her two brothers. She arrived in New York from Cobh (then Queenstown) on January 1 1892 and was the first immigrant to be processed through Ellis Island. Clearly Laura and I would have done just fine as immigrants.

The heritage museum is housed in the railway station building from where passengers (and mail and luggage) were loaded onto waiting tenders and taken out to Titanic which was anchored in the outer harbor. We entered and paid €6 for the privilege of walking through an exhibit entitled “The Queenstown Story.”

It wasn’t much worth the expense. The ‘exhibit’ amounted to a parade of signs about people leaving Ireland, how they left, the kinds of boats they took, and how tough the journey was interspersed with dramatically over-acted video re-creations, and artifacts that looked like the things the emigrants may have had. I was interested to notice how much easier (relatively) the 3^rd/steerage class emigrants in the early 1900s had it compared to just 40 years earlier. The journey was 5 days instead of 10, and the quarters were Spartan but adequate, compared with the cramped cargo holds filled with cots of 50years earlier. The display actually had a statue of a guy bent over a pail vomiting but I’ll spare you that photo.

They also had a service where you give them the family name and city (and 30 euro) and later on they mail you a report that’s “very general” and “doesn’t have the ships lading or anything” and I imagine is less complete than my dad’s St. Patrick’s Day genealogy report. (and as it turns out I was right, this morning I got up and found in my inbox an email from my dad with a copy of the ship’s manifest attached).

We finished the tour and made our way through the city up to the St. Colman’s Cathedral where a baptism ceremony was in progress.

What. A. Building. It’s hard to imagine words or photos that would do it justice. Construction started in 1880 and it took over 40 years to build. The bell tower is 30 feet high, the inside in filled with exquisite stained glass and statues, and of course the priest has an Irish brogue. The cathedral sits at the top of the hill lording over the rest of the town like an ever-present watchful eye. Hopefully photos begin to do it justice.

This is just a row of condensed and identical houses we though was interesting.

We had planned to take a walking tour around the town. After the cathedral it began to rain so we headed to the hotel where the walking tour met but decided we’d pass. Just as we went to leave we saw the sun had returned and a kindly old Irish guy asked if we were there for the tour. He was there with just one other couple so with the small group and the interesting tour guide we changed our minds on the fly and signed up for the tour. What a great decision. We walked through the town and eventually (back) up to the cathedral but with the tour guide around to point things out we saw so much more. He showed us the actual pier (still sort of standing) where the tenders left to ferry passengers and luggage out to the Titanic.

He also showed us precisely where the titanic docked and how plainly visible it would have been from the shore.

The titanic docked behind the island behind and to the left of the white sailboat.

We saw the statue built in dedication to the victims who died in the sinking of the Lusitania.

She’s standing on the broadsword because she’s is supposed to be stamping out war.

And we learned that the citizens of Cobh (Queenstown at the time) who saw the sinking off in the distance jumped en masse into ships, sailboats, rowboats, and anything that would float, and rushed into the harbor and to rescue the living and recover the dead.

Lastly when I told him that my relatives left on the Lusitania roughly 100 years ago he took us to the exact moor and building from which they left. The building still stands (as a bank) and pieces of the moor still remain in the water. I stood and took photos on the same spot my great-grandparents stood before they departed for American nearly 100 years ago.

After the trip down ancestral lane we were famished. We found quite possibly the only cheap place to eat in all of south Ireland and had a mediocre cheeseburger and excellent (and huge) fish and chips.

The Wimbledon final was on and we stepped into the pub (at the beginning of the 4^th set to have a Murphy’s and watch the rest of the match.

Andy Roddick won the fourth set and of course the 5^th set wasn’t over for 30 games. We made friends with a couple, Billy and Vicky (from Cobh and Sydney, Australia respectively) and passed an enjoyable afternoon watching tennis, drinking beer, watching more tennis, missing our train, watching more tennis, and drinking more beer. Finally the match ended, our friends had bought us one round too many, and we slowly made our way back to the train station for the ride (it was a lovely ride along the river, including a number of castles and a rainbow) back home to Cork.