Qualla: Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster

Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. The names sit in the records like an invitation to mourning. Alexander Williams, the coxswain, aged thirty-five, married with six children. His father Henry Williams, sixty, a former coxswain who came back out of retirement that day, married with three sons including Alexander. John Baker, thirty-three, three children. John Bartley, forty-five, two children. Patrick Power, twenty-two, single. Francis McDonald, whose son would be born to his widow early in 1896 and never know him. Fifteen volunteer lifeboatmen of Kingstown - now Dun Laoghaire, on the south shore of Dublin Bay - rowed out into a Christmas Eve storm in 1895 to save a Finnish barque called the Palme, and not one of them came back.

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Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster: The Palme

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

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Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster: The Civil Service Number One

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 h...

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Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster: Three More Boats

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

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Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster: St Stephen's Day Rescue

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

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Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster: The Largest Funeral Dun Laoghaire Had Ever Seen

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 - betwe...

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