The Bald Facts No.44

 

Last week we were at the Claddagh and this week we are at the other side of the Quay Stream as the river is known to locals in this area. By the way it is worth mentioning that the river that flows through our city is the Galway River and not the River Corrib as is often mentioned in tour guides and books. The lake is the Corrib but the river that flows from it to the sea is actually the Galway River.
Today’s picture appears to be of aa man, dressed in his Sunday best, sitting on the quay of the old mud dock, taking in the view and just apparently chilling out. From the look of the grass I would venture to day that it was summer time, and it is within a foot or so of high tide. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that the dock gate is partly open, and it was, and probably still is practice to open the gate every day on the full tide there by keeping the water level in the dock topped up. By the 1960’s the old gates had become so leaky that it was often necessary to open them on three quarter tide. Finally they were removed and the area turned into a causeway, while breaking out the existing causeway between the main dock and the Dun Aengus Dock.
I remember as a kid for my Sunday walk with my grandfather crossing this gate and then walking on to the railway siding which is actually visible in this picture as a single black line behind the white pole in the right foreground. The white pole itself is probably the old leading light. From here we would walk all along the tracks up to a past the Station, as far as Renmore Barracks and back, with his two dogs Sport and Flush, who were cocker spaniels. By the time we got home I would be well knackered although I dare not say so, as my grandfather, having been a regimental sergeant major would have no time for moaning or whinging.
I remember a time a bout 1962 or ‘63 when there was a strike in the docks and the gates stayed closed for several weeks trapping many ships in the dock. I became friendly with a few of the Dutch skippers who used to come to my sessions in the old Enda Hotel Fo’castle ballad club, and a lot of kirsch and plum brandy was drunk afterwards.
To get back to the picture, there appears to be three if not four full Brigantines or Barques probably a couple of schooners, a nobby or two and a few Hookers. the Nobby was a two-masted version similar to the hooker, they were used for sail trawling and inshore cargo boats as were the hookers themselves for deliveries of livestock and turf to Galway and to bring home essentials like flower and other household items necessary to survive.
The larger ships, many of them would have come from Norway carrying timber for the building trade, and in fact in this picture I think I notice a crane unloading planks of timber from the ship nearest the camera on the left. There is a tale I was told by the Late Mike Kavanagh, who was caretaker of the Corrib R and Y Club, of a bet made between my late uncle, another Mike Cavanagh an old Royal Navy man who was deafened at Scapa flow, and the port Pilot Captain Meskell in a dockside bar one night, that the two of them could sail a fully rigged Norwegian barque from her berth in front of Mike’s house, (No 3 Dock Road at the time), out through the gates and into the roads. The bet was taken up by the other denizens of the bar, and they set to it, despite the complaints of the skipper who himself was a little under the weather. They rigged her full with every inch of sail, cut the moorings and duly sailed her around the corner and out the gate without a scratch, much to the relief of the skipper, there by earning themselves a two pound bet. I’m sure you have noticed by now that I come from a pretty unruly bunch of ancestors.
The building just visible over the steps opposite then, I think started life as the harbour office, but in my lifetime it was the headquarters of the brilliant Captain Wooley and his merry bunch of Sea Scouts. Beside it in later years was a large shed which belonged to Geraghty’s Ships Chandlers, who supplied provisions to the ships that called in the docks. This was the father of Sidney Geraghty and his sister Consie, and others, who also had a flour shop in St Augustine a couple of doors from where the G.S.P.C.A. shop is now. Nowadays this part of the dock is filled again with the masts of sailing ships, but none of them are used for trade, only pleasure. Keep on loving old Galway.