The Palme was a 1,114-ton barque owned by the Eriksson family of Mariehamn in Finland - then part of the Russian Empire - and she flew the Russian merchant flag of horizontal white, blue, and red. On 18 December 1895 she had sailed from Liverpool bound for South America to load a cargo of hardwood. Captain Wiren commanded her, and unusually he had brought his wife and their child along for the voyage. Of his seventeen-man crew, only three spoke English. As the Palme worked her way down the Irish Sea a storm began to build - one that contemporaries called the most severe of the century. Cold, dark, mid-December weather; waves climbing high enough to crash clean over the lighthouse at the end of Dun Laoghaire's East Pier. The Palme tried to seek shelter inside Dublin Bay, was driven southeast across it, and on Tuesday 24 December she was seen off Merrion Strand dragging her anchor and firing distress rockets, in danger of being smashed on the rocks.

A new lifeboat had only recently been delivered to Kingstown. She was called Civil Service Number Seven, funded by donations from civil servants across the United Kingdom, and her coxswain that Christmas Eve was Alexander Williams. There was no engine. The crew rowed and sailed her out into the bay, and as she came up on the Palme the men lowered the sails to row in close. What happened next happened in full view of crowds on the Dun Laoghaire shore: a mighty wave lifted the lifeboat clear out of the water and rolled her completely over. Some of the lifeboat crew managed to climb onto the upturned hull. The Palme's crew, seeing their rescuers in mortal trouble, tried to launch their own longboat to go back the other way. The longboat was smashed to splinters in the seas. The men on the hull of the Civil Service Number One were swept away one by one as the day darkened.

The older Kingstown lifeboat, the Hannah Pickard under Coxswain Horner, then put out. She was rolled over too, but she was a self-righting design and she came back upright with her crew still on board, before being driven ashore at Vance's Harbour, Blackrock. The Poolbeg lifeboat, across the bay on the north shore, came out under Captain Dalton and found conditions impossible - she could not get near the Palme and had to turn back. Two steam tugs, the Flying Sprite and the Flying Swallow, also tried and failed. By darkness on Christmas Eve, all hope of reaching the stranded barque had been abandoned. On Christmas Day, while families across Ireland sat down to dinner, crowds gathered on the seafront at Kingstown and watched the Palme being slowly broken by the gales, knowing that Captain Wiren, his wife, his child, and twenty crew were still on board and unreachable. The newspapers, the country, prayed.

On Saint Stephen's Day, 26 December, the wind dropped just enough. The Irish Lights steamer Tearaght, under Captain McCombie, managed at last to come alongside the Palme and take off everyone aboard - all twenty crew including the captain's wife and child, and the ship's cat. The rescue was hailed across Europe. But by then the eight bodies of lifeboatmen that the sea was going to give back early had already been recovered. The remaining seven came ashore in the days and weeks that followed. All fifteen were eventually found. The Palme herself was salvaged later and continued in service for several more years.

The men were buried together in a single grave at Deans Grange Cemetery. The funeral was the largest the town had ever seen, the procession stretching for miles. Flags were lowered at half-mast in ports across Europe. A relief fund raised money for the widows and children - between them the fifteen had left forty-five orphaned children and many wives without breadwinners - and contributions arrived from the Eriksson family in Finland and, the records say, from "the people of Russia." A granite memorial stands by the harbour. A plaque marks the wall of the old lifeboat station. Every Christmas Eve at noon, regardless of weather, a piper leads a procession along the East Pier to the memorial. A short service is held. The names are read. Alexander Williams. Henry Williams. John Baker. John Bartley. Edward Crowe. Thomas Dunphy. William Dunphy. Francis McDonald. Edward Murphy. Patrick Power. James Ryan. George Saunders. Francis Saunders. Edward Shannon. Henry Underhill. One hundred and thirty years on, the town still keeps the promise.