Nostalgia: The Brixham to Dublin fishing story

Part One – The Call of the Russet Sails

The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a restless time along the shores of Torbay. Brixham, that rugged little port with its narrow lanes running down to the water’s edge, had always lived from the sea. But now, something new was stirring. It was not just the tide that was turning; it was the future of fishing itself.

Until then, the men of Devon had relied on smaller craft, hook-and-line fishing, or inshore netting, methods that brought enough for a family’s bread but little more. Then came the invention of the beam trawl – a wide, heavy net dragged across the seabed, carried on a sturdy oak beam. It was a revolution in canvas and rope. For the first time, the deeper grounds could be swept, and whole shoals of flatfish, sole and plaice, could be brought to market in quantities never seen before.

And it was in Brixham that this revolution found its heart. The town was alive with the cry of gulls and the clatter of caulking hammers on wooden hulls. Nets, newly tarred, were spread across the cobbled quays to dry. Fishermen – men hardened by salt and storm – looked on these new trawlers with equal measures of pride and suspicion. They were larger, stronger, built to withstand the open sea. They carried russet sails, dyed red with oak bark, a colour that soon became the unmistakable mark of the Brixham fleet.

From the surrounding villages they came – Newton Abbot, Stoke Gabriel, Dartmouth – drawn by the chance of fortune. Among them was Prince Symes, a young fisherman with ambition in his eye. He had married Elizabeth Upham, daughter of a Brixham family steeped in the sea and the craft of shipbuilding. Elizabeth was practical, spirited, and carried with her something that would outlast storms and voyages: a sampler she had stitched in her girlhood. On it she embroidered not only the names and birth dates of her family, but verses that revealed the temper of the times:

“Whatever brawls disturb the street,

there should be peace at home.

Where sisters dwell and brothers meet,

quarrels should never come.”

It was a message stitched in thread and memory, a quiet plea for harmony in a town that was loud with quarrels, drinking, and the rough manners of fishermen flush with new money. Elizabeth’s sampler survived well into the twentieth century, a relic of a girl’s hand and a woman’s strength, before time and chance carried it away.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the russet sails of Brixham could be seen far beyond Torbay. They worked the Yorkshire coast, sailed west into the Bristol Channel, and even made landings at Newlyn, Tenby, and the Isle of Man. Inevitably, their eyes turned east across the Irish Sea, to the broad sweep of Dublin Bay. It was a rich ground, less worked than the Devon coast, and the city beyond was hungry for fish. Sole, plaice, turbot – all fetched high prices in Dublin’s markets.

But venturing to Ireland was not without peril. In 1818, a Brixham trawler named the Transit, owned by a Mr. Mortimer, was the first English smack to fish Dublin waters. At first, she prospered, her holds filled, her sales brisk. But her success roused resentment. Local fishermen, working the inshore wherries – small, open boats ill-suited to the deep-sea grounds – feared for their livelihoods. One night, as Transit lay at anchor, they came upon her in numbers. With axes they cut her rigging, slashed her sails, and tore away her gear, leaving her a crippled hulk. She limped back to harbour, refitted, and then left Dublin, never to return. Three men were later jailed for the outrage, but the warning was clear: Dublin Bay would not welcome strangers easily.

Yet opportunity is a strong current. In 1818, a group of Dublin gentlemen, convinced of the profits to be made, formed the Dublin Fishery Company. They resolved to bring the Brixham expertise – the boats, the men, the very craft of trawling – across to Ireland. To do so, they appointed Captain James Steward, superintendent of the Pigeon House Dock at Ringsend, to travel to England, buy smacks, and recruit crews. He left Dublin on 30th December that year, crossing a wintry sea, and made straight for Brixham.

What he found there impressed him deeply. The smacks of Torbay were “fine cutter-rigged vessels,” forty to forty-five tons, built as strong as wood and iron could make them. They were seaworthy, fast to market, and fitted with innovations unknown in Ireland – including a patented winch that allowed a boy to haul what once took ten men. Steward travelled the coast from Brixham to Plymouth, then as far as London, but he returned convinced that the best came from Torbay. In five weeks, he purchased seven smacks, most of them Brixham-built, and signed their skippers and crews.

On 14th January 1819, the first of these vessels arrived in Dublin. Among them were the Armada (41 tons), Rosebank (36 tons), Frederick (39 tons), and Mariner (39 tons). With them came men whose names would echo down Dublin’s fishing history: the Bartlett brothers, Thomas, and Samuel; James Pile; William Bond; John Voisey; Joseph Gray; John Snell; Samuel Winsor; and George Elliot. With them also came the Symes family – Elizabeth, Prince, and their children – carrying their Devon ways into the lanes of Ringsend.

One of the apprentices was a boy of thirteen, Charles Burnham, who would, forty-five years later, sit before the Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries in Ringsend and explain it plainly: “The Dublin gentlemen bought boats in Brixham, and the men followed the boats. They did not all come together, but by degrees.”

The degrees became a tide. Families that had weathered generations in Brixham – Bartletts, Symes, Pullens, Blackmores – began to take root in Dublin. At first, they clung to Devon ties, baptising children late in case they returned home, giving their addresses as “Brixham” long after they had settled in Ringsend. But slowly the bonds deepened. Marriages were made with Irish families, houses rented in Cambridge Street and Whiskey Row, boats laid up in the Dodder. The russet sails no longer marked strangers; they became part of Dublin’s own horizon.

Yet hostility had not fully ebbed. In July 1819, only months after their arrival, three of the Company’s smacks were pursued off Howth by eighteen wherries. The local men shouted threats, showed their hatchets, promised to cut throats and sink vessels. Only the speed of the Brixham smacks saved them. For four weeks the newcomers were kept from sea, until Government protection was ordered: revenue cutters stationed in Dublin Bay, armed escorts to see the trawlers to their grounds. It was a strange beginning – Devon seamanship guarded by the King’s Navy, against Irishmen who felt betrayed on their own waters.

But the Brixham men stayed. They endured the threats, weathered the suspicion, and little by little proved their worth. For all their quarrels, Irish and Devon fishermen learned from one another. As one Dublin trawler owner would later say, “For the last twenty years, the greatest good feeling has existed between the hookers and trawlers.” Out of conflict came respect. Out of rivalry came community.

And so, the russet sails of Brixham took root in Dublin Bay.

The Brixham to Dublin Fishing Story

Part Two – Ringsend and the Making of a Colony

The first months in Dublin were not easy. The Devon men, used to the steep red cliffs of Torbay and the snug, crowded quays of Brixham, found themselves in a village that was both familiar and foreign. Ringsend, lying at the mouth of the Liffey, had long been a fishing settlement, but by 1819 it was little more than a scatter of cottages along muddy lanes, with the great city of Dublin looming to the west.

The Torbay men had not come as strangers entirely – they carried with them their boats, their wives, their children, their dialect, and their ways. But they soon discovered that being different in Dublin brought dangers as well as opportunities. The resentment of the local wherryman still lingered. Their boats were smaller, their gear older, their earnings meaner. To see the sturdy Brixham smacks, forty-tonners built to withstand any gale, must have been like staring at a future in which they themselves had no place.

Elizabeth and Prince Symes did their best to settle their family in these uncertain surroundings. They had brought their children with them – John, twelve; Elizabeth, eight; Prince, six; and little Anna Maria, just a toddler. In Ringsend, two more were born – James in 1821 and Samuel in 1822. And yet, curiously, they delayed baptism for the last two until 1829, at St. Mary’s, Donnybrook. Some said it was because they were uncertain whether to remain in Ireland or return to Brixham. Others believed they hesitated to cut that final cord with Devon. For even as they laid anchor in Dublin, their eyes still looked back across the Irish Sea.

They were not alone in their uncertainty. The Snell’s, another Torbay family, brought their son Richard to be baptised at St. Matthew’s in 1827 – but the father still gave his address as “Brixham.” These families straddled two worlds. They were pioneers, but reluctant ones, never entirely sure if Dublin was to be home or merely a sojourn.

And yet, slowly, Ringsend absorbed them. The names of Bartlett, Pile, Bond, Gray, Winsor, Elliot, and Symes began to appear in the parish registers, in the Griffith Valuation surveys, in the ledgers of fish landed at market. The streets of Ringsend – Cambridge Street, Bridgefoot Row, Whiskey Row – filled with Devon voices. They lodged where they could, rented small cottages, and rebuilt the rhythms of life they had known in Torbay.

The Test of Fire – The Transit Affair Remembered

The tale of the Transit, savaged by Irish fishermen in 1818, was still spoken of in Ringsend. It was a reminder of how fine the line was between prosperity and peril. The outrage had not deterred the Devon men, but it had marked them. Every time a wherry slipped close to a trawler on the bay, there was a tightening of hands around the tiller, a half-glance toward the hatchet.

But time, as ever, worked its change. The Brixham smacks showed their worth. They landed catches the like of which Dublin had never seen – sole, turbot, brill, plaice, drawn from deep waters where no wherry could dare to go. At first, the sight of such abundance only deepened the envy. But as Dublin’s appetite grew, it became clear there was enough to sustain both hooker and trawler. By the 1840s, men spoke less of quarrels and more of cooperation.

A Sea of Russet Sails

One Dublin gentleman, writing in 1848, described the Brixham boats with admiration:

“They are fine, cutter-rigged vessels, forty to forty-five tons each, most perfectly found, built as strong as wood and iron can make them. They are the finest boats and can beat up to their markets in all weathers.”

They were not only fishing boats – they were lifelines. In storm and squall, the trawlers often went where no steam vessel or pilot boat dared. More than once, Dubliners owed their lives to the courage of these Devon men.

The Burning of the 

Granuaile

Perhaps the most famous of these rescues took place at dawn on 13th April 1847, off Lambay Island. It was a dark year for Ireland – the Famine was at its worst, and a cargo of grain was making its way from Liverpool to Drogheda aboard the paddle steamer Granuaile. On board were also ninety passengers, many of them desperate emigrants who had failed to find passage to America.

Fire broke out in the coal bunkers. Within minutes smoke poured from the decks, panic spread, and the lifeboats were swamped. All who crowded into them were drowned.

Out on the grounds that morning was the trawler Bessy, skippered by William Pullen, himself a Devon man who had made Ringsend his home. With him were his mate John Parker, a young fisherman George Upham – kin to Elizabeth Upham Symes – and a boy apprentice, William Symes, just twelve years old. The Bessy drew alongside the burning paddle steamer, her men hauling terrified passengers from the flames and the water. In all, sixty-nine souls were saved.

Captain Bowden of the Granuaile was among the dead, but his passengers lived because a Brixham smack, manned by Brixham blood, was there to answer the call.

That rescue bound the Devon and Irish families closer than any baptism or marriage could. For on board the Bessy that day were not only crewmates, but kin: Uphams, Symes, Pullens – names woven across two coasts, united in a single act of courage.

The Shadow of Tragedy

Yet the sea gave, and the sea took away. Only a generation later, in January 1883, the cutter Osprey went down off Balbriggan after a collision. Four men were lost: her master, John Bissett; two crewmen named Thornton and Reilly; and a boy called Connor. The Freeman’s Journal mourned her as “one of the finest of her class in the Bay.”

Bissett’s family had known tragedy before; another of his kin had drowned eight years earlier. It was a cruel reminder that even the best-built smack, even the stoutest crew, was never safe from the caprice of the Irish Sea.

By the 1840s the migration from Torbay was steady, though never in a flood. They came by degrees, as Charles Burnham had said. One apprentice followed another, one family brought out cousins, one marriage drew more kin across.

In 1837, a young man named Alexander Blackmore, born into another fishing family of Brixham, arrived in Dublin as an apprentice. By the 1870s he would lie buried in St. Matthew’s graveyard, his headstone erected by his grieving hand for his wife Martha. The Blackmores, like the Symes and Pullens, became part of the very fabric of Ringsend.

The lanes of the village, once muttering against strangers, now rang with the laughter of Devon grandchildren playing at the water’s edge. The russet sails of Brixham had found their mirror in Dublin Bay, and a new colony had taken root.

To be continued…