Page 7 - COBH EDITION 18th JANUARY DIGITAL VERSION

For more than 60 years, until 1853, almost 40,000 people departed from either Cobh or
Dublin for Australia. In time, the British government subsidised the emigration of free
(and exceedingly impoverished) Irish citizens, concentrating on the residents of female
orphanages and workhouses as a source of brides for antipodean settlements where
there were eight men to every woman.

There is a busy pilgrimage trail for the descendants of them all and an annual Blessing of
the Bonnets ceremony, initiated by the Australian artist Christina Henri, to commemorate
the 25,566 women forced to leave their homes for the absolute unknown that was the
lower continent.

But the elaborate exhibits, as well as the monuments in the town, focus mostly on the
two big-ticket items that elicit an almost morbid fascination – the Lusitania and the Ti-
tanic, which met their famous fates within three years of each other, either approaching
or having departed Cobh.

Standing by the replica of the White Star Line office at quayside I listened intently to the
personable local historian, author and television presenter Michael Martin as he told, as
part of his droll walking tour, of the Titanic’s final embarkation, it having made its way
from Southampton in England and Cherbourg in France on a much-touted inaugural voy-
age in April 1912.
I heard about the 123 passengers eager to board and, for the first time, of just seven
who disembarked – surely qualifying as some of history’s most fortunate figures.

One of the seven was Father Francis Browne, who in his single day aboard had taken 79
photographs – a final documentation of the imposing craft and its passengers (many of
his photos are on display in the museum).
Browne was standing there, no doubt with some regret, to wave it away from Queen-
stown (as Cobh was then known, having been the first place Queen Victoria had set foot
on Irish soil, in 1849) as its anchors were weighed and it moved from the harbour into
the Atlantic just after lunch on a Sunday.
The citizens of Cobh would barely recall that departure (though they would readily reap
the tourism rewards of the film-driven Titanic cult) but would be traumatised for a gen-
eration by the sinking of the luxury liner RMS Lusitania. The ship that had carried thou-
sands of passengers across the Atlantic on a regular express service took almost 1200
of them to the bottom when it connected with a torpedo from a Nazi U-boat at about
2.30pm on May 7, 1915, less than 20 kilometres off the coast of nearby Kinsale.
Everything floatable was mobilised by everybody able in a frantic day-and-night rescue
effort, with every building ashore housing survivors (761 of them). Some 148 of 289 re-
covered corpses were buried in Cobh’s cemetery, while about 885 passengers were never
located. Almost 100 children died.

Just a little bit further and the ship would have been safely inside the harbour.
The world was so outraged by the atrocity that sentiment turned harshly against Germa-
ny from one side to the other and it effectively brought an isolationist US into World War
I. You can’t plant lines of white crosses on the ocean; if you could, the waters off Cobh
would resemble one of those green fields of France that are forever England or forever
Australia.