The National Yacht Club, handsomely sited in the southeast corner of Dun Laoghaire Harbour, was certainly looking its part as the current MG Motor “Sailing Cub of the Year” last Saturday morning. The sun shone, and in the crisp onshore breeze the regatta bunting fluttered in colourful array from the flagstaff while friendly and efficient club staff steadily increased the in-house pace with rapid serving of the renowned NYC brunch, thereby sending forth the members in fine form for the first Saturday race of the new season.
A couple of samplings of that brunch per week would probably meet most shore-dwellers’ calorie requirements for the entire seven days. But the regular and frequent inhalation of sea air puts Dublin Bay sailors into a rate of ultra-metabolism. As you might say, Dublin Bay folk are metabolics in a league of their own.
The dress flags are up so frequently at the National YC that it’s almost the club’s default mode. Photo: NYC
SENSORY OVERLOAD
Be that as it may, your columnist eventually came away from the National’s hospitable embrace in a state of sensory overload which verged towards its pathological variant of Stendhal’s Syndrome. For although the vibrant scene of a great club accelerating the pace in a day of sunlit promise is more than enough to be going along with, the club’s Frank Burgess had brought together what amounted to an informal Transatlantic seminar about the great John B Kearney (1870-1968), whose inventive career in Dublin Port was such that - notwithstanding his lack of a professional qualification - he was the de facto Harbour Engineer for many years.
Yet despite being so revered in Irish harbour-building circles that he preferred to go cruising in Scotland because it meant he didn’t have to talk shop with Harbour Masters in every port he visited, his real ambition in life since childhood in Ringsend had been to be a yacht designer. And thus his headstone in Glasnevin Cemetry shows he is simply remembered as John Breslin Kearney 1870-1968, Yacht Designer.
And he was good at it too. His 1925 creation Mavis was so swift in distance races in the Irish Sea that after she’d comfortably won the Irish Cruising Club’s stormy 1934 Howth-Isle of Man Race with her owner-skipper-designer-builder in comfortable command, another competitor – future Ocean Cruising Cub founding Commodore Humphrey Barton - was positively gushing in his praise for boat and skipper in an article in Yachting World.
Busy to the end. John B Kearney at work in the office in his Monkstown home on his last major design, the 54ft Helen of Howth for Perry Greer, which he completed in 1963, aged 83. Following that, he was frequently consulted on technical matters for many boats, and was still creating drawings for solutions at the time of his death on New year’s Day 1968
MERMAID DESIGNER AND SAILING MESSIAH
As a yacht designer he used to be best remembered around Dublin Bay for his design in 1932 of the universally-popular 17ft clinker-built Mermaid Sailing Dinghy. But as newer classes and fiberglass construction inevitably spread, the prominence of the Mermaid has receded in its birthplace, even though it continues to be actively worshipped at some centres where news boats are still built.
Mermaids racing with the Royal Cork Yacht Club for their annual championship. Although the class is not normally found at Crosshaven, their time-honoured Championship Week is a moveable feast, with the main fleet out-turn coming from the strong groups at Skerries on the East Coast and Foynes on the West. Photo: Robert Bateman
And the use of “worshipped” is not over-stating it, for as he steadily designed and built a succession of able cruising yachts in his spare time, he acquired a sort of nautical messiah status, and there gathered around him an increasing circle of discliples whose dearest wish was to own their own John B Kearney-designed cruiser.
Typical of them were brothers Pierce and Denis Purcell of Dun Laoghaire, who sailed in style on the rather leaky and high-maintenance Dublin Bay 25 Acushla, which had originally been built for international tenor John McCormack. They were friends and admirers of John Kearney and hoped to own one of his boats. So when the 8-ton yawl Sonia – built in 1929 in Ringsend by the designer with the help of the owner, a one-legged railway engineer called William Blood-Smyth - became an executors’ sale in 1938, John Kearney ensured that she went to the Purcell brothers.
The highly-regarded Harry Kernoff RHA woodcut of Murphy’s Boatyard in Ringsend in the 1920s. It was here on the River Dodder waterfront, backing on to Thorncastle Street, that John Kearney built many of his boats with minimal assistance and no electric power. While picturesque, it was a far from healthy place, and in 1954 Dublin Corporation swept it all away to re-house the people in new apartment blocks which were built to such a high quality that in recent years it has been economically practical to upgrade rather than replace them
GOOD WORK BY STEALTH
This was so typical of the good work by stealth done by John Kearney across a broad spectrum of the sailing world that when Pierce Purcell became National YC Commodore in 1948, his members were very supportive when he expressed a wish to have John Kearney permanently in place as either the Vice or Rear Commodore of the NYC. And it was on returning home after being in his accustomed place as a Flag Officer to greet members as usual in the Club on New Year’s Day 1968 that the great man suddenly died while still in full possession of all his faculties.
John Kearney boats are now found worldwide. Here, Sonia of 1929 vintage, and owned from 1938 by future NYC Commodore Pierce Purcell and his brother Denis, is seen in Vancouver in Canada. To mention just a few, other boats went Transatlantic such as the 16-ton Dawn Star of 1945, the 14-ton Ann Gail of 1950, and the 54ft Helen of Howth of 1963, while the 6-ton Evora of 1936 was last reported in Darwin, Australia
RESTORER OF KEARNEY FLAGSHIP MAVIS
The continuing sense of Kearney admiration and respect was palpable a week ago. The purpose of the gathering was to welcome Ron Hawkins from Maine, restorer of Mavis, to the club where the designer and builder of Mavis had been - and still is - so rightly revered that the centrepiece of the gathering was to be an exchange of burgees with the NYC’s Commodore Peter Sherry.
You could have run the lights off the goodwill being generated – NYC Commodore Peter Sherry with Mavis-restorer Ron Hawkins. Photo: W M Nixon
But with this grouping of senior sailors – some very senior – submerged memories of John B Kearney began to bubble to the surface. And with people like former Dublin Bay SC Hon. Sec. and National YC and DBSC historian Donal O’Sullivan, together with former NYC Commodore Martin McCarthy and anther ex-Commodore, former Mermaid racer Ronan Beirne, together with DBSC Officer and multiple Mermaid Champion Jonathan O’Rourke – whose was also on the helm when the 1912 Kearney 9-ton yawl became the first winner of the DBOGA’s Leinster Plate in 2013 – you’re getting memories that are better than gold.
Former NYC Commodore Martin McCarthy and longtime DBSC Honorary Secretary Donal O’Sullivan (historian of both DBSC and the NYC), considering a new snippet of J B Kearney information. Photo: Frank Burgess
Former NYC Commodore Ronan Beirne with the now-famous photo of Mavis winning Skerries Regattta 1928 that he discovered in an antiques shop, with Commodore Peter Sherry and Ron Hawkins in the midst of burgee exchanges. Photo: W M Nixon
For also present was sailing polymath Hal Sisk, whose current project with Fionan de Barra of restoring the Dublin Bay 21 class of 1903 has moved along so well that next year three boats are going to be shipped to America to take part in the classic events working towards the Maine coast.
Hal is no stranger to this, as seventeen years ago he took his superb restoration of the 1894 Hilditch of Carrickfergus-built Watson-designed cutter Peggy Bawn to the American East Coast Classics, and she entered immortality through being photographed by the great Ben Mendlowitz in his own special style.
It’s official. The classic Ben Mendlowitz photo of Hal Sisk’s Peggy Bawn on the cover of WoodenBoat in 2008
THE MENDLOWITZ APPROVAL
And that distinction is shared by Ron Hawkins with Mavis. So much so, in fact, that Mavis became the cover girl on the 2023 Mendlowitz Calendar. This is an honour so special that when Ron’s partner Denise tried to send the calendar to me despite the best efforts of the US Mail and An Post in hindering its Transatlantic crossing, it finally arrived with a tell-tale stain which showed that almost every mail-shipping container in the world has a pool of water at the bottom, so that stain is now retained as an honourable battle scar.
And this is official too. The restored Mavs is cover girl on Ben Mendlowitz’s 2023 Calendar. The stain at top left is retained as an honourable battle scar of the struggle to get any slightly unusual object through the Transatlantic mail and the Irish customs
LONG SAGA OF MAVIS RESTORATION
Longtime readers of Afloat.ie will be aware of Ron Hawkins and his marathon task of restoring the 1925-built Mavis, but for those who are new on board, he’s of a renowned New England maritime family where the patriarch is the magnificently-named Captain Havilah Hawkins.
We’d first hear of Mavis’s survival in America was back in the years of print when she had an early restoration by Ronald van Heeswijk, a New York veterinary surgeon. But we began to get nearer the action about ten year ago when our own Tim Magennis – the only man in Ireland to have sailed round the world under gaff rig – was on boat tour in Maine and came upon a young Ron Hawkins facing into the realities of the Mavis restoration.
The trouble with big restorations is that you have to go backwards quite a long way before you can start to go forwards, and Ron had all the look of a man who was in that bourne from which no man returns, so we expected to meet a rather haggard figure.
“What have I taken on?” Ron Hawkins in some exhaustion many years ago, when the Mavis restoration in Maine was reaching a critical stage. Photo: Tim Magennis
COOL AND CALM
Not a bit of it. He was sleek, cool, calm, collected and perhaps quietly amused by the increasingly frenetic atmosphere in the National on a sailing Saturday morning as noon approaches. The secret to this is Denise, whom he met at some stage of the restoration process. She is muy sympatico, with such a special empathy for boat nuts that it’s as well there aren’t too many like her, otherwise the world would be full of classic boatmen main-lining on one restoration project after another, to the detriment of everything else.
In harmony. A relaxed Ron Hawkins and Denise of the Mavis Team enjoying Hal Sisk’s thoughts on the classic boat world. Photo: W M Nixon
But in the case of Mavis, Denise has been a very good thing indeed, as she and Ron turned up in command of the situation despite only having had 40 minutes for themselves since getting off the early morning jetliner from America. Thus they’d all of the Mavis material arranged in a way that makes my workroom look like the rat’s nest that it actually is.
Included in their collection was another mind-blowing experience. They had brought a rare edition of a book I wrote nearly fifty years ago called “To Sail The Crested Sea”. It was to mark the Golden Jubilee of the Irish Cruising Club in 1979, taking its title from within a seafaring poem by St Columba in the 6th Century. Nowadays it’s as rare as hen’s teeth, but the Mavis people in Maine knew that had to get a copy as it contains much of the information about their boat, and the internet eventually obliged.
INTERNATIONAL BOOK LINKS
The copy they had found still contained the business card inscribed to a friend by the first owner, who had bought several when the book was still hot off the press a long time ago. In what seemed like a nano-second I realized, in an increasingly gobsmacked state, that the book had – over the years – reached Maine from Howth by way of Cornwall, Paris, Arizona, and cyberspace.
So as it was right there, it was a good time to brush up on the one occasion that Mavis had been awarded the ICC’s premier trophy, the Faulkner Cup for 1952, when she’d entered the ownership of Paddy O’Keeffe of Bantry after J B Kearney had finally sold her in 1951, following 26 years of active ownership.
When Mavis was finally launched after the completion of Ron Hawkins’ restoration, the first hand on the tiller was that of Don O’Keeffe, a nephew of 1951-1956 owner Paddy O’Keeffe of Bantry. Now based on the American Great Lakes and a designer of large motor cruisers, Don retains strong childhood memories of sailing on Mavis.
MAVIS AWARDED IRISH CRUISING CLUB’S PREMIER TROPHY
Paddy O’Keeffe received the award for a cruise with Mavis from Bantry to Northwest Spain and back, setting out crewed by two sailing friends, Alex Sullivan and Michael Donnelly, and in Coruna meeting up convivially with the likes of Peter & Anne Pye bound for Tahiti with their famous 10-ton gaff cutter Moonraker on a two year cruise, and Ann Davison in an early stage of the eventually successful venture to be the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic with her pint size 23ft 3-ton sloop Felicity Ann.
Mavis crossed paths with Peter and Anne Pye’s multi-voyaging Moonraker in Spain in 1952
She was eventually successful in this, but in Coruna - with it all still ahead of her - it was a daunting prospect. So the crew of Mavis took her for a cheerful meal in a mountain-top restaurant. It was heroic on Paddy O’Keeffe’s part, as he’d been ill on the way down over an unexpectedly long and tough passage. And although now in port and outwardly cheerful, he was failing to improve or respond to treatment, and in time he was diagnosed with acute jaundice and had to be invalided home, travelling with Michael Donnelly whose holiday time had long run out.
Paddy O’Keeffe thought he had left things sorted, as his business contacts with the Spanish trawlers which called regularly at Bantry enabled him to sign on two Spanish fishermen who could crew for Alex Sullivan on the voyage back to Bantry, should he so wish. But he didn’t. Sullivan decided to do it on his own, perhaps inspired by Ann Davison, and his final human contact before reaching Bantry ten days later, after consuming his last food stores while at the Bull Rock entering Bantry Bay, was with the young crewman from Moonraker, who came over to help raise Mavis’s anchor and get him on his way. The return voyage was made virtually engine-less, as the auxiliary was one very temperamental beast, and only Paddy O’Keeffe could understand its workings.
Done it! Ann Davison with her 23ft Felicity Ann coming in to New York after becoming the first woman to cross the Atlantic solo
WHO WAS ALEX SULLIVAN?
So who was this Alex Sullivan, who played the key role in getting Mavis the prized Faulkner Cup for cruising to add to her very many racing trophies? All I could learn back in the1970s was that he was known as Sergeant Sullivan, not for being in the Garda Siochana or the army, but because it was an ancient title for a special lawyer in the old Kingdom of Ireland. It had been revived around 1910 to give added dignity to m’learned friends in Dublin, but as it turned out, Alexander M Sullivan (1871-1959) was the third and last Serjeant-at-Law in the new setup, as it had been all swept away by the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922.
He was one of those exceptional talents that came out of Bantry in the late 19th Century, people like William Martin Murphy and John Sisk along with an absolute raft of brilliant lawyers. And nearly all of them sailed. On the political front meanwhile, Alex Sullivan was a constitional nationalist and known to Harry Donegan of Cork both from his sailing and his politics, as Donegan was the Chairman in Cork of the Redmondite Party, the successors to the constitutional Parnellites.
Harry Donegan of Cork, co-founder of the Irish Cruising Club in 1929, had close contacts with Alex Sullivan through the law, politics and sailing
Thus in 1930 when the first full list of members of the new Irish Cruising Club was published, Donegan ensured that Sullivan was on it although Paddy O’Keeffe had to wait some years before joining, even if by then Sullivan was London-based after some major experiences had happened to him since he’d first known Donegan in the early 1900s.
ROGER CASEMENT’S LAWYER
Not least was the fact that he was prepared to be the lead counsel for the defence in Sir Roger Casement’s trial for treason in London in 1916. The fact that this connection emerged from this recent gathering in the National Yacht Club, with the very relatable statue of Roger Casement nearby on the other side of the East Pier pointing towards his 1864 birthplace of Sandycove, was something that put the Mavis meeting into somewhere approaching the supranational. And it also means that if you seek an image of this tough amateur sailor who brought Mavis home single-handed to enduring cruising success, you may find you’re looking at the extraordinary John Lavery painting of the Casement trial, if indeed we have the right generation of Sullivans.
Roger Casement stands proud above his birthplace on Dublin Bay. The statue, erected in September 2021, commemorates Casement who was born in Sandycove in 1864 Photo: Peter Kavansgh/DLRCoCo
THE LAVERY PAINTING “HIGH TREASON”
We’re getting into very rarefied territory here, so the significance of this panting is best explained by citing the Royal Irish Academy’s discusson document on something rather monumental, yet still part – albeit very tangentially - of the Mavis story
RIA Comment on Lavery painting:
The painter was a rather unlikely presence: Sir John Lavery, born into a Catholic family in Belfast, was renowned for his portraits of English high society, and his studio had been visited by royalty. He had been invited to record the appeal trial by the presiding judge, Sir Charles Darling, a former client of his. Yet, as Casement noted, the painter “came perilously near aiding and comforting” the prisoner in the way he “eyed Mr Justice Darling’s delivery” of the verdict confirming the death sentence. Casement also noted that Lavery’s wife, Hazel, looked “very sad” at the same moment. The uneasy relationship between Lavery’s position as part of the imperial artistic establishment and his growing sympathies with Irish nationalism would produce a painting at once monumental and hard to place.
“At once monumental and hard to place” – Sir John Lavery’s painting of the Casement trial with defending barrister Alex Sullivan the focus of attention
Lavery’s record of this moment in history is literally the work of an insider: it is possible only because Lavery was respectable enough to be given privileged access to the trial. Lavery later claimed that Darling had commissioned the work. Yet the result is not the grand image of imperial justice that might have been intended. The conventions of the genre are honoured in the large scale – three metres wide and two metres high – and the meticulous portraits of dozens of individuals. A sense of dramatic moment is created by the slanting light and by the clock that approaches the fatal hour of 12.
But the judges are almost statuesque. All the animation is given to Casement’s defence counsel Serjeant Sullivan. And the centre of the picture is occupied by Casement himself, who seems simple and human amid the pomp. He looks not at his judges but at the viewer. This is to be the judgment not of a mere court but of history.
Serjeant Sullivan in action. If this is indeed Mavis’s crewman and not his father, it is surely the first time that an awardee of the Irish Cruising Club’s historic Faulkner Cup has been portrayed by Sir John Lavery
This ambivalence marked the fate of the painting itself. Lavery did not complete it until the 1930s. If Darling commissioned it he did not pay for it: it remained in Lavery’s studio until his death, in 1941. The painter left it in his will to the National Portrait Gallery, in London, and the Royal Courts of Justice, but neither institution especially wanted it. After years in storage at the NPG it was hung in the office of the senior clerk of the court of criminal appeal in London, removed from the public gaze, for fear of arousing the wrong kind of attention from “people who considered Casement a martyr”.
The painting was then lent to the Honorable Society of King’s Inns, in Dublin, in 1951. The message from the Lord Chancellor’s office accompanying the loan said, “We can adopt the suggestion of lending it to the King’s Inns on indefinite loan, which means that we can forget to ask for its return.”
Yet Lavery surely knew what he was doing when he left High Treason to British institutions in his will. For what he had produced was not an Irish painting or a British one, but an image of two histories intertwined and at odds.
ALEX SULLIVAN’S CRUISING
Before the emergence of the Free State in 1922, Alex Sullivan had been active on the Munster Circuit, though with lucrative briefs in London. But despite his Casement connections and support of Home Rule, he was resolutely and volubly against the more extreme elements in Sinn Fein, and in time this meant he was in real danger. There was an attempt on his life in 1920, and in 1921 Derry House in Rosscarbery in West Cork, which he’d bought two years earlier, was burnt to the ground. So he and his family relocated to London where he continued in the law, but maintained close links to Ireland which were reinforced as the situation settled down, such that by 1950 he moved back to make his home at Templeogue in Dublin, but with West Cork and sailing still there, very much on the agenda.
Alex Sullivan’s 14-ton 1910-built yawl Ailsa, as sketched by Billy McBride of the ICC and the Harry Clarke Studios
Before going to London he was a member of the Royal Munster Yacht Club, and he kept that up through the 1930s, and maintained his ICC membership - contributing at least one log to the Annual – into the 1940s, after which, with Harry Donegan having died in 1940, he was less involved until Paddy O’Keeffe hauled him back in again in 1950.
DOUBTS ABOUT WHICH SULLIVAN DID IT
While in England, he had acquired a 14-ton 1910-built clipper-bowed yawl called Ailsa, which achieved ICC recognition on an Irish visit through being sketched by Honorary Treasurer Billy McBride, whose day job was as an artist in the Harry Clarke Stained Glass Studio. But by the time he returned permanently to Ireland, Ailsa was sold and he was well advanced in years, so it has occurred to me that perhaps the Alex Sullivan who sailed Mavis home from Spain to Bantry was his son. Yet back in the 1970s when I was writing the ICC History, the Corkmen had no doubt that it was Serjeant Sullivan who brought Mavis home.
CORRECTION WELCOMED
Nevertheless we are very much open for correction on which Sullivan was on that 1952 cruise. Meanwhile, back in the 1950s, John Kearney’s determination to be a full-time yacht designer after his retirement from Dublin Port was such that in 1951 he’d made the Mavis sale to Paddy O’Keeffe, as his yacht design clients expected him to sail part of each season in their new Kearney-designed boats, and Mavis wasn’t getting the use she deserved.
But following the Spanish venture in 1952, Paddy O’Keeffe’s health slowly declined, and Mavis returned briefly to Dublin Bay in 1956 in the ownership of Desmond Slevin, a ship’s doctor who was given a lucrative posting in the US, so he had Mavis shipped across the Atlantic, and she has been New England-based in various states of seaworthiness ever since.
NEW ENGLAND BOUND
And most appropriately, it was towards the classic circuit in New England that thoughts were turned as this extraordinary gathering drew to a close. After Hal Sisk – yet another link to Bantry – had taken his farewells of Ron and Denise with the hope that he would next see them in Maine with his trio of Dublin Bay 21s, he hauled on his high vis cycling jacket, which was complete with an advertising space. He never misses a trick. There’s surely not a cyclist or pedestrian or motorist or indeed street corner loiterer in Dun Laoghaire who hasn’t become aware of the new life for the Dublin Bay 21s.
It always pays to advertise. Hal Sisk’s cycling jacket has a message for you. Photo: W M Nixon
