The British and Irish Company, etc.
In 1836 the British and Irish Steam Packet Company was inaugurated. A copy of an old sailing bill of that year makes curious reading. Its reference to the “legal quays” is also interesting as reminding us of a condition of affairs which has now passed away. The “legal quays” were those reserved by the Government for the cross-channel mail steamers, and also those at which special facilities were given to encourage subsidised lines.
This was not, however, by any means the first company to run steamers between Dublin and London, the City of Dublin Company having preceded it by several years, as also did the Cork Steamship Company, and the St. George Company. The first steamers of the British and Irish Company were the City of Limerick, Devonshire, and Shannon, but it would appear from the bill just quoted that the Devonshire and Shannon gave place to, or were supplemented by, the Nottingham and Mermaid.
This bill, according to the company’s handbook, was issued in 1836. The Duke of Cornwall, added to the fleet in 1842, was, like the others, a little wooden paddle-steamer, and schooner-rigged; she was the last of the vessels of this type purchased by the company. Three years later, by which time the superiority of the screw for sea-going steamers had already compelled recognition, the company showed its enterprise by placing two auxiliary screw steamers, the Rose and Shamrock, on its London and Dublin service, each of them proving an unqualified success. That decade will ever be memorable for the introduction of iron vessels with screw propellers. In 1850 the company purchased the Foyle, one of the finest iron steamers in existence at the time, and in the summer of the next year established its regular service between Liverpool and London, with calls both ways at the intermediate south of England ports. It ran for a year a service between London and Limerick with the screw steamer Rose, which was disposed of the next year. Two fine steamers, the Nile and the Lady Eglinton, were secured in 1852, and the chartering of the latter vessel as a troop and storeship by the Government during the Crimean War, and the wreck of the Nile off Cornwall, caused the cessation of the company’s London and Liverpool service.
An interesting connection between the company and the transatlantic service is found in the history of the invariably unsuccessful attempts to inaugurate a service between Galway and America.
The Lady Eglinton made two trips between the Irish port and the St. Lawrence in 1858. This vessel was lengthened in 1865 by 30 feet. One of the company’s boats, a little paddle-steamer named the Mars, which maintained a local service between Dublin and Wexford, was a good sea-boat, and sufficiently speedy for her size to attract the attention of the agents of the Confederate States of America, who purchased her for use as a blockade-runner. In this she was fairly successful for some little time, but accounts differ as to what became of her. It is stated that a blockade-runner of that name was wrecked on one of the keys off Florida in endeavouring to escape from a Federal gunboat. Another version is that the Mars received a hostile shell between wind and water, which exploded inside the ship so that she went down. In 1865 the Lady Wodehouse was built for the company at Dublin by the shipbuilding firm of Walpole, Webb and Bewley, who four years afterwards built the Countess of Dublin. The year 1870 was one of the most important in the history of the company, for it bought the steamers of Messrs. Malcomson’s London and Dublin Line, the Cymba and Avoca, and has since had a monopoly of that service. The Lady Olive, of 1096 tons, acquired in 1879, was the last iron vessel the company had built; all the succeeding vessels have been of steel.
The “Lady Roberts”
(British and Irish Steam Packet Company).
The engines of the earliest boats were of the usual side-lever type. These in time gave place to compound engines, and the modern steel vessels have triple-expansion engines. The present fleet consists of the Lady Olive and the Lady Martin, of 1365 tons gross, the latter, built by Messrs. Workman and Clark at Belfast in 1888, being the company’s first steel ship. The Lady Hudson-Kinahan, of 1375 tons, was built by the Ailsa Shipbuilding Company at Troon in 1891, and this company also constructed in 1897 the Lady Roberts, of 1462 tons gross, while the Lady Wolseley was launched in 1894 by the Naval Construction Company at Barrow.