Nostalgia: When Torbay boats sailed to Dublin

Part Three – The Russet Fleet in Its Prime

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the sight of the russet sails on Dublin Bay was no longer a novelty. The Torbay boats had proved themselves. Their masts rose tall above Ringsend’s modest cottages, their keels sat deep in the muddy waters of the Dodder, and their names filled the fish market ledgers. Dublin had learned to depend on them.

Yet the memory of those first years of hostility lingered. Some of the older wherrymen still muttered that the trawlers had stolen their birthright. They remembered 1819, when eighteen boats had chased the Brixham smacks off Howth, threatening to cut throats and sink masts. But time, which had softened the edges of so many quarrels, had begun to mend even that rift.

John Good, one of Dublin’s leading trawler owners, put it best in 1861:

“The great ill-feeling that once existed between the hookers and trawlers has long passed. For the last twenty years the greatest good feeling has existed between them.”

The reason was plain to see. The Torbay smacks brought a quality of fish to the Dublin market that had been unknown before: deep-water sole, turbot, hake, and brill. They fetched good prices, and they filled bellies in a city that was growing fast. What had once looked like competition had turned into partnership. The wherrymen clung to the inshore grounds, while the trawlers ranged further afield into the Irish Sea. Both had their place.

Boats Built for Storms

The vessels themselves became the pride of Ringsend. Visitors spoke in awe of their strength. Captain Brabazon, writing in 1848, described them as “most perfectly found, built as strong as wood and iron can make them, fine cutter-rigged boats that can beat up to their markets in all weathers.”

And beat up they did. Time and again, when Dublin Bay was lashed by a gale, when pilot boats dared not put out, when steamers lay crippled, it was the Brixham trawlers – now Dublin’s trawlers – that battled their way home. Their red sails, blackened with spray, became a symbol of endurance.

There was talk, too, of their ingenious design. The patented trawl winch allowed a boy to do the work of ten men, a marvel of leverage and iron. The Devon men had brought more than skill; they had brought technology. It gave their boats an edge, and it spread quickly, copied, and adapted, until Dublin trawlers were ranked among the finest in the kingdom.

Heroes of the Bay

The trawlers were not just fishermen; they became rescuers by necessity. Dublin’s coast was treacherous, littered with shoals and rocks. Vessels in distress were a common sight, and the nimble smacks often reached them when no one else could.

The rescue of the Granuaile in 1847 had shown the world their courage. But there were countless smaller acts – a drifting skiff towed to safety, a man plucked from the waves, a cargo saved from ruin. In the great gale that struck Kingstown Harbour – when even the guardship H.M.S. Ajax lost men – one trawler clawed her way up from Bray Head and dropped anchor safely in the harbour, a feat that left sailors shaking their heads in admiration.

These were men who lived every day on the edge of loss. They needed no medals, though some received them. Their reward was to see another dawn, to bring their boat home, to walk the narrow lanes of Ringsend with fish in the hold and life still in their bones.

The Weight of Tragedy

Yet even in their prime, tragedy stalked them. The cutter Osprey, remembered with sorrow in January 1883, was one of the finest vessels in the bay. She had begun her life as a Kingstown pilot boat before turning to trawling, and she was renowned for her seaworthiness. But after a collision off Balbriggan, she went down with all four hands.

The Freeman’s Journal wrote with a heavy heart:

“The master, John Bissett, is the third of his family that has met a watery grave.”

Such was the lot of fishing families. Names that filled baptismal registers in St. Matthew’s Church too often found their way onto gravestones before their time. Every wife who watched her husband haul the russet sail knew it might be the last time she saw him. Every child running barefoot through Whiskey Row carried the shadow of the sea in their blood.

By Degrees

One of the striking things about the Brixham migration was its gradual rhythm. They did not all come at once in a great rush, but in trickles, apprentices and cousins following in the wake of others.

Alexander Blackmore was one such. When asked at the Sea Fisheries Commission whether he had come with Charles Burnham in 1819, he laughed. “I was not born then, I believe.” Burnham had arrived as a boy apprentice; Blackmore followed in 1837, also young, also hopeful. By the time he buried his wife Martha in 1872 and raised a headstone for her in St. Matthew’s graveyard, the Blackmores had become part of Ringsend’s marrow.

It was the same for the Pullens, the Symes, the Bartletts. They came in ones and twos, by degrees, but they stayed in generations.

Ringsend Transformed

The Griffith Valuation of 1847 shows just how deeply the Devon men had settled. Captain Joseph Clements, once a migrant himself, was now a ship owner with houses in Ringsend, let out to other fishermen. Families from Brixham filled whole streets: Cambridge Street, Bridgefoot Row, Red House Road. The air was thick with Devon voices, softened by Irish lilt, a hybrid tongue born of shared labour.

The town itself seemed to change shape around them. Where once there had been little more than a scatter of cottages, now there were shipwrights, sailmakers, rope-makers. The trawlers brought money, and money brought trade. The Dodder quays were lined with smacks, their russet sails drying in the sun, their crews bustling about the decks. To see Ringsend on a Monday morning as the fleet prepared to sail was to see a village reborn.

The Rhythm of the Week

The Devon men brought with them the Brixham pattern of work. They fished from Monday to Saturday, seldom on Sundays unless driven by need. Saturday landings were busy affairs, for fish fetched the best prices on Monday in the markets. The boats worked long grounds: the middle grounds of the Irish Sea, east to the banks off Anglesey, south to the Wexford coast.

Their catches were rich: sole most prized, hake abundant, turbot a delicacy. Dublin had never eaten so well. Housewives and merchants jostled at the stalls, the smell of fresh fish mingling with the cries of vendors. “Dublin gentlemen,” as Burnham had once called them, might have owned the boats, but it was the Devon and Irish fishermen together who filled the baskets.

By the 1860s, the Dublin trawlers were spoken of with respect across the United Kingdom. They were said to be “the best built and equipped dry-bottomed trawlers” in the land. But the world was changing, and a new challenge was already glinting on the horizon – the age of steam.

The Brixham to Dublin Fishing Story

Part Four – Steam, War, and the Fading of the Russet Sails

By the closing years of the nineteenth century, Ringsend had become something remarkable — a Devon village transplanted to Irish soil. The old Brixham names were now Dublin names, inscribed on gravestones in St. Matthew’s churchyard and painted on the sterns of boats moored in the Dodder. Grandchildren who had never seen the red cliffs of Torbay grew up speaking of “home” as both Devon and Dublin.

But the sea is a hard master. Prosperity was never more than a season away from ruin, and even the finest trawlers could not hold back the tide of change.

The Shadow of Steam

The sailing smacks — elegant, cutter-rigged, their russet sails proud against the skyline — had ruled the Irish Sea for half a century. But now a new sound came across Dublin Bay: the deep thrum of steam engines.

The first steam trawlers appeared in the 1860s, iron and steel where once there had been oak and elm. They were ungainly compared to the graceful smacks, but they had one great advantage — they did not wait on the wind. They could steam directly to the grounds, tow heavier nets, and bring back larger catches in less time.

At first, the Ringsend men scoffed. Steam was noisy, clumsy, and costly. A trawler was a living thing: you could feel her heel to the wind, hear her timbers creak, taste the salt on her rigging. Steam robbed the sea of its romance.

But romance does not pay for bread. By the 1880s, steam was cutting into profits. Young men who might once have served their apprenticeships aboard the russet smacks now looked toward the new vessels. Some of the old masters swore they would never set foot on a steamer. Others, reluctantly, began to invest.

The Sea Fisheries Report of 1911 showed the truth: only eighteen sailing trawlers were still working out of Dublin, alongside nine steamers. Six of the sail vessels were over forty years old, still clinging to life but well past their prime. The end of an era was plain for all to see.

Families at the Crossroads

Yet the Torbay families did not simply vanish. They adapted, as fishermen always must.

The Symes, Pullens, Blackmores, and Bartletts still worked the bay, though often now as crewmen aboard steam trawlers rather than masters of their own smacks. Others moved into ship owning, hiring crews instead of hauling nets with their own hands. A few left fishing altogether, turning to shipwrighting, chandlery, or casual work on the Dublin docks.

Still, the old traditions lingered. Boats were still built in Brixham and Galmpton and registered in Dartmouth, even when they worked from Ringsend. It was said there was no finer mark on a Dublin vessel than the stamp of a Devon yard. Families continued to pool their earnings by the “share” system: four shares to the boat, one and a half to the master, one and a half divided among the men, and a half share to the boy.

And the russet sails still set out every Monday, still returned each Saturday, the market still thronged with housewives bargaining for sole and hake. For a while longer, the rhythm held.

The Losses of War

Then came the Great War.

In 1914, Dublin’s trawlermen found themselves pressed into service not only as fishermen but as auxiliary sailors. Smacks were commandeered for patrol work, for mine sweeping, even as decoys for German U-boats. Many never came back. Crews were scattered, families broken.

The Mizpah, built in Galmpton and owned by the Symes family, was wrecked off Kingstown in 1917, a storm tearing her to pieces. The Kincora, another Ringsend trawler, was lost in heavy seas. Each loss was another gravestone in St. Matthew’s, another widow in Whiskey Row, another child learning too soon what the sea demanded.

Some of the younger men turned to the Merchant Navy. Herbert Symes, grandson of Prince and Elizabeth, studied at the Hibernian Marine School, served with the Headline, and fought through the infamous Jervis Bay convoy battle, where a single armed merchant cruiser faced the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer. Herbert survived, returned to Ireland, and later became a captain with Irish Shipping. He died in 1962 at only forty-six, closing a chapter that had begun with his great-grandparents’ voyage from Brixham to Dublin almost a century and a half earlier.

Ringsend Remembered

By the 1920s, the sailing smack was a ghost. A few still clung on, relics of a vanished world, their sails patched and their gear worn thin. But most lay rotting at the quayside or had been broken up for timber. Steam and then motor power ruled the sea.

Yet ask any old Ringsender of the time, and they would tell you the same: the russet sails had been the soul of the village. The sight of them crowding the Dodder, their masts swaying together, their gear clattering, had been Ringsend’s glory. They were more than boats; they were the bond between two coasts, the thread that tied Devon to Dublin.

Even into the mid-20th century, the families kept the memory alive. The Syms, Pullens, Blackmores, and Bartletts still told stories of the first days, of the Transit affair, of the rescue of the Granuaile. In their homes hung faded photographs of smacks heeling to the wind, children standing barefoot on the quays, women with shawls drawn against the spray.

Some said that on quiet mornings, when the tide was low and the mist lay thick on Dublin Bay, you could still see the ghosts of the russet fleet slipping out past the Pigeon House, bound for the deep grounds.

The Legacy

The story of the Brixham to Dublin fishermen is not just a tale of boats and nets. It is a story of endurance, of men and women who carried their lives across the sea, who faced hostility and won respect, who built a new community out of courage and salt water.

It is also a story of change — of how no tradition, however strong, can resist the march of time. The russet sails are gone now, replaced by steel hulls and diesel engines. The lanes of Ringsend echo with different voices. But in the names on the gravestones, in the stories passed down, in the memory of a red-sailed fleet that once brought Dublin its fish, the Devon men live on.

Closing Reflection

In 1819, a boy named Charles Burnham came from Brixham to Dublin as an apprentice. He was thirteen. Forty-five years later, as a seasoned skipper, he explained simply why they had come: “It was in the expectation of making more money. The Dublin gentlemen bought boats in Brixham, and the men followed the boats.”

Simple words, but behind them lies a saga: of storms weathered, rescues made, families raised, tragedies endured, and traditions carried across generations.

The Brixham sails may have faded, but their story has not. They remain stitched into the fabric of Ringsend, as surely as Elizabeth Upham once stitched her sampler in Brixham, with verses that still ring true:

“Whatever brawls disturb the street,

there should be peace at home.

Where sisters dwell and brothers meet,

quarrels should never come.”