Looking back on the season of 2022, it has to be said that the East Coast keelboats had the edge on the Cork Harbour fleet in terms of national overall success in the majors, what with taking the best place in the Round Ireland Race and winning the ICRA “Boat of the Year” award - both achieved by the Evans brothers’ J/99 Snapshot – while also having a third share of the “Boat of the Week” trophy in Cork Week in the form of Ross McDonald’s successful helming of Atara to be tops in the big fleet 1720 Class.
But Cork sailors can draw hope of future success from other outstanding achievements, and over Christmas we had news from New Zealand of a Cork cruiser-racer coming to Dublin Bay and wiping the floor against a crack fleet, despite all her competitors being bigger boats.
Admittedly, it all happened 186 years ago. But success at this level endures forever, provided the engraved trophy somehow survives. Silverware is for keeps, but the maintaining of paper records from a busy regatta can sometimes become haphazard - particularly on a wet and windy day - while club minute books are only legally obliged to record the deliberations of the General Committee, but not those of the Sailing Committee.
LEAKING ROOFS AND THE PRICE OF POTATOES
This means that sailing historians, far from being able to access precise information on the winners of the annual regatta and how they won from formal club records, instead find themselves ploughing through distracting discussions about how best to stop the clubhouse roof from leaking, the adverse way the price of potatoes is affecting the finances of the dining room, and how to cope with the latest episode of difficult in-house behaviour by the club’s inevitable Awkward Squad, of whom the undisputed national all-time champion was the Royal Cork’s 19th Century member John Newman Beamish, who would have a row with himself when no-one else was available
When completed in 1854, what is now the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh was the new purpose-designed clubhouse of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, where the committee occasionally found they’d to resolve intense disagreements among a very characterful membership.
But as for sailing, there are times when you’d think this had nothing to do with the club at all. And if you turn to the contemporary newspapers or periodicals, should an account of the event appear, you’ll find that it only goes big if any celebs of the day are involved, while the reporter will inevitably also focus on the largest boats involved.
So when Royal Cork Yacht Club member Nicholas Parker (1795-1863) of Bellevue at Passage West above Monkstown on Cork Harbour took his little 10-ton cutter Gem to Dublin Bay in 1837 and won a regatta of the Royal Irish Yacht Club, it scarcely registered at all on the publicity barometer. In fact, though Parker and Gem apparently were hotshot performers for more than twenty years, the Royal Cork’s monumental history – published 2005 - only mentions Gem twice.
Once was in 1835, when she won a rough weather race boat-for-boat out round the Daunt Rock lightship and back when other larger craft were more fancied, with her owner merely being named as “Parker”. And then on 10th September 1857, she was one of 21 yachts taking part in a Royal Cork YC exercise in Admiral Sailing under the leadership of Captain Henry O’Bryen.
THE PIONEERING “OCEAN RACE”
Three years later, O’Bryen was to achieve sailing immortality through being the winning skipper in 1860’s pioneering Dublin Bay to Cork Harbour “ocean race” – the winner of its re-staging last year was the Murphy family’s Grand Soleil 40 Nieulargo from Crosshaven. But back in Cork Harbour in 1857, the little Gem was last in the list of boats in his Admirals Sailing fleet – presumably through being the smallest – and her owner’s name wasn’t mentioned at all.
It would be pleasant to think that the Royal Cork’s introduction in 1845 of a 21-gun salute for members’ yachts returning from conspicuous success elsewhere had been partly inspired by Gem’s outstanding success in Dublin Bay in 1837. But in an age when might was right, the sheer smallness of Gem probably meant that her remarkable win in Dublin Bay in 1837 scarcely registered around Cork Harbour at all.
“Ideal for displaying Aunty Keitha’s bouquet of plastic flowers….” – the priceless trophy from 1837 had been re-purposed when discovered by relatives during a house clearance in Auckland
Thus we’ve a fairly clear indication that Nicholas Skottow Parker (Heaven alone knows where the exotic middle name came from) was indulging himself in that Irish speciality of the caring professions, the Nursing Of A Grievance. For the cup he won from the Royal Irish Yacht Club has been inscribed in a particular way which suggests he commissioned the inscription himself, just to make it clear to posterity that his little Gem had beaten the tar out of some hot bigger craft on a boat-for-boat basis. And on Dublin Bay, too.
The detail on the 1837 RIYC Regatta Cup suggests that winning owner-skipper Nicholas Parker of Cork personally commissioned the inscription
That would have made it a very big deal indeed in Bellevue in Passage West, where Nicholas would have become a household name in his own household. And we still know about it, for miraculously the cup - complete with its very telling inscription - has survived. But it’s far from Passage West now, and far from Ireland too. It’s in Rangiora, a suburb of Canterbury in New Zealand’s South Island.
THE WANDERINGS OF GEM’S CUP
Although many Irish families emigrated to New Zealand in the latter half of the 19th Century and subsequently, with the more affluent taking various goods and chattels with them including any handy family silver, most will have gone fairly direct. But the wandering of Gem’s Cup has been remarkable, and it has been traced by Wayne Boreham of Rangiroa, a descendant of Nicholas Parker and the current custodian of this very tangible piece of family and sailing history.
Nicholas Parker’s daughter Anne Dorcas Stevelly Parker married a John Waring, and the Parker silverware, jewellery, plates and cutlery apparently passed down Anne’s line to find their final home in Ireland in the Waring family’s Pottlerath House in Kilmanagh, Co Kilkenny. The collection passed to John and Anne’s sons William and Thomas, and Thomas emigrated from Kilmanagh to Auckland, New Zealand, but finally settled permanently in Fiji with his family, with the cup, goods and chattels going to the Pacific islands with them.
In Fiji, one Henry Harding Waring eventually emerged as the caretaker of the Cup, and it went with him when he made a new home in Auckland with a family of three daughters. In due course the Cup passed to the youngest daughter Keitha (now there’s a classic Kiwi feminization of a male name for you) who seems to have lived alone at the end, for when she died her nephew Wayne Boreham had to travel up from Canterbury and join with two of Keitha’s nieces in the melancholy but fascinating business of clearing her house, which proved to be a treasure trove of family history with many documents and heirlooms.
PRIZE SILVERWARE BELOW THE PLASTIC FLOWERS
However, such tasks can become overpowering, and when the cousins found themselves faced with a pile of apparent rubbish in the lounge with a bunch of plastic flowers sticking out of the top, one of the nieces simply grabbed the lot and heaved it into the bin. But it made an interesting “clunk” when landing, and a quick investigation revealed that the plastic flowers had been on display in the Royal Irish Yacht Club silver cup of 1837.
Wayne Boreham politely refrains from any comments about eccentric Aunty Keitha using the historic family silver to display plastic flowers to best effect. But as soon as possible back in Canterbury, he got the cup cleaned up, and set about looking up old newspaper and periodical records online to see was any information available about that regatta, while also contacting the Royal Irish YC. And then records of The Pilot, a maritime weekly of that era, came up with some information in its edition of Friday June 23rd 1837.
The report in The Pilot for the first day of the RIYC regatta of 1837 concentrated on the big class……..
…..but on the second day the reporter had to make do with Gem’s win in the small class, and threw in a hint of organisational criticism for good measure
In those more leisurely times for those who had the ways and means to enjoy it, the two-day RIYC regatta was staged mid-week on Tuesday June 19th and Wednesday June 20th 1837. Founded in 1831, the Royal Irish YC in its initial form was a fading force by then, but it was to be revived with fresh vigour by Daniel O’Connell the Liberator and various sailing friends on 4th July 1846, with the date of American Independence day being very deliberately chosen.
But back in 1837, it was on its last legs, and though the three big class boats racing on the Tuesday got detailed coverage, the second day when Gem shone received only the barest mention, as the impending death of King William IV dominated events, and meant that only the small class raced in a regatta in which the club appeared to lack sailing administrators.
However, the bare bones report in The Pilot showed the order in which they had finished with Gem triumphantly ahead. But in the somewhat chaotic atmosphere, it is highly likely that Nicholas Parker was simply presented with the cup inscribed only with the name of the regatta, and given perfunctory best wishes for a safe voyage back to Passage West
So after it had been sailed back to Cork Harbour securely stowed in Gem’s safest locker, he had complete freedom to get a Cork silversmith to inscribe the cup exactly as he wished. Has anyone ever - before or since - seen a winner’s silver cup inscribed with such loving details of every boat beaten, starting with the fact that the ten tonner from Cork had beaten a 17 ton cutter from Dublin Bay back into second place by all of 23 minutes?
THE PERILS OF GLASSWARE
Yet given such a chance, who could resist? More than thirty years ago, we raced our Contessa 35 in the then-big-fleet Scottish Series when she’d been re-furbished and given new sails, and was going good. The prize-giving started on the Tuesday evening at Tarbert almost immediately after the last race, and though there was time for an on-site inscriber to fill in precise details of the overall winner on the main trophy, those of us who had scooped some wins and podium places further down the line were simply given a choice selection of rather lovely Caithness glass inscribed only with the Clyde Cruising Club logo.
Scotland’s Caithness Glass provides an exquisite selection of drinking vessels ready for inscription as you wish, but it won’t survive violent contact with flagstone kitchen floors with the same style as old Irish silverware
There isn’t a country in the world that can match the Scots for the invention of differing shapes and forms of glassware vessels exclusively for the conveyance of alcohol from bottle to consumer. Thus we arrived back in Dublin with all this various and lovely virgin glassware just waiting to be embellished with whatever inscription we could think of that stayed within the limits of what the boat had achieved yet all put in the best possible light, and Blackrock Crystal did a fine job for us.
But in those days we tended to celebrate to excess, and at least one of the syndicate had a stone-flagged kitchen floor which was instant nemesis for a dropped Caithness Glass quaich of even the most elegant design. Within a dozen years, there wasn’t any tangible evidence whatever left of that rather successful pot-hunting expedition to Loch Fyne.
Yet 186 years later, thanks to the enduring qualities of Irish silver, we are now more aware than ever that Nicholas Parker’s little Gem from Passage West on Cork Harbour won a mighty regatta victory on Dublin Bay on June 20th 1837. And we are aware of it despite the trophy having to survive travels from Cork to Kilkenny to New Zealand and on to the Pacific Islands, and then back to New Zealand and through a period of being used to display plastic flowers to best effect.
Silver can take it. Forget glass, forget wood, forget marble – silver is your only man. And if anyone out there knows more of Nicholas Parker of Passage West and his family and his wonder-boat Gem, there are folk in New Zealand who’d like to hear about it.
