'We've been building boats here for 110 years now, and before that we were sailors and fishermen. Always in Arklow.

It was a very small town devoted, at that time, solely to seafaring. Nothing else.

Fishing mainly, and then, as the years went by and the harbour developed, trading first under sail and in later years in full powered motor coasters of increasing size. . ..' Thus a lifetime's vista of the eastern seaboard of the Republic of Ireland was opened up by John Tyrrell—known as Jack—boatbuilder, naval architect, chairman of the Arklow Harbour Commissioners, and, for the past quarter of a century, honorary secretary of Arklow lifeboat station.

A world of ships and boats of all descriptions was the inheritance which Jack Tyrrell received from his grandfather and father, and which he in turn is passing on to his sons; Michael and Jimmy work in the family shipbuilding business with their father, while John is at sea, and the name John Tyrrell and Sons is synonymous with sturdy fishing and pilot boats, and motor cruisers built on workboat lines. Although in recent years Tyrrells have been set up to build in steel as well, their boats are mostly of wood, and in the yard lie trunks of Irish oak, seasoning ready to provide the grown timbers of traditional boatbuilding.

For the Tyrrell family the sea was, and is, their life: and lifeboats have always been an integral part of that life.

"The lifeboat service was always here, right from the start. We had a station in Arklow in 1826. Of course, it was essential to have a lifeboat in this particular place because eight or nine miles off the coast we have an extremely dangerous bank extending for about 15 miles. In the days of sailing ships there were wrecks on it quite frequently. They were great tragedies; many people were lost on Arklow Bank.

'My grandfather was a member of the local lifeboat committee and he took a tremendous interest in the service. All my family were members of the committee.

We grew into it as we grew older, my father and myself, and now my sons and myself. 1 have been secretary since early 1951 and Jimmy, my second son, has been deputy launching authority for the past four years; he is as keen as anybody ever was on it.' At Arklow there is no shortage of men to form the lifeboat crew; there are as many as 60 names on the crew list, and nobody goes on that list unless he is a competent seaman: a fisherman or in the merchant service. They are picked in rotation for exercise, but when it comes to a service it is the coxswain's prerogative to choose his crew. The boat has slipped her moorings in as little as nine minutes from the first notification over the telephone; 15 minutes is reckoned a long time in Arklow.

And the secretary's part ? ' You are on the alert from the time the boat leaves until she comes back. But you don't notice the time. You've got messages coming through, assessments to make and there will probably be further information to pass to the boat. You are on the job the whole time the boat is out.

You must be, because the shore people have to ensure that up-to-date information is passed to the coxswain.' The first decision to be made, of course, is should the boat be launched ? 'There was a rather humorous occasion about a year ago. On a fine summer evening a lady rang up and said she was talking from Ballymoney, which is roughly ten miles south of Arklow.

Would we get the lifeboat out at once because there were three people in a capsized dinghy and they were waving their arms and they were continually going under water. She had looked at them through binoculars and they were waving and in great danger. I had heard a few yarns of this sort before, so I asked for confirmation. There was a man standing beside her. He came on at once and said, " Will you for God's sake get the lifeboat out before these people are drowned!" So that was good enough. We got the boat away quickly, but she found no dinghy, no people, only a log with three seagulls standing on it. This is completely frustrating.

'Now, a similar thing happened last summer, about three or four miles north of Arklow. We got an urgent message that a frogman was in difficulties well out to sea. I asked, "Are you sure it's a frogman?" and the man said, "Yes." "Are there two of them ?" I asked, because normally their clubs insist on them going out in pairs. "No", he said, "there's only one. I can see the helmet and the bottle on his back, and he's waving his arms." So I let the lifeboat go on that information, and it was another log, with a little branch sticking up, rolling in the water. These people, I am sure, called us with the best of intentions, but their imaginations ran away with them.' Then there are emergencies. Jack Tyrrell remembered the service when Coxswain Michael O'Brien took the Arklow 42' Watson lifeboat William Taylor of Oldham out to Jadestar Glory on January 16, 1974 (see the winter 1974/75 issue of THE LIFEBOAT).

'That was an excellent service.

Jadestar Glory had gone on the rocks at Cahore Point. The crew took to two rafts, three men in each. Our coxswain did a wonderful piece of navigation; he had sized up the weather and allowed for the currents and wind and he landed right between the two rafts. He made a very clean job of it; he was only at sea for about four hours on that occasion.

' We did have the longest winter service in the Institution one year, back in 1955, for which the crew received a case of rum from the Sugar Manufacturers' Association of Jamaica. The extraordinary coincidence was that the winter before Rosslare Harbour got it, so there was plenty of rum in this corner of Ireland in those years.

'But the best launch I ever remember was one more than 20 years ago which turned out to be an abortive trip. It wasDecember and there was a very heavy easterly gale. We had a report of a Swedish ship drifting on to the north end of Arklow Bank. The weather was so bad that the piers were completely overwhelmed; you just couldn't see them or any part of the outer harbour. I put it up to the coxswain, Peter Kenny, and he said, " We'll get another position"—we weren't quite sure of the first one—and as soon as we got confirmation he said, "Right, away we go". Getting that boat out over the bar and away in those conditions was one of the best pieces of seamanship that was ever carried out here. We kept in touch with her by radio. The sea was enormous as she went out towards the bank, but before she got there, with a veer in the wind, the ship drifted clear of the bank and got her engines going again. The sea was so bad that I ordered them away to Wicklow; they didn't come back till the next day.' For fund raising in Arklow the Tyrrells have the help of the Kearons, another old seafaring family. Flag days are mainly the responsibility of Mrs Aileen Tyrrell and Mrs Molly Kearon, and it is they who enlist flag sellers.

'When I took over as honorary secretary my good friend Roy Kearon, Molly's late husband, took over as treasurer. Roy was a tremendous worker and he just wouldn't take no for an answer when it came to fund raising. The result was that from year to year, every year, we have increased the total collection.' The total for the 1975 flag day was the best yet, £712. Both Mrs Tyrrell and Mrs Kearon are keen members of the local Soroptimists Club, which runs a function each year for the RNLI. For several years this has taken the form of 'feasting' with an entertainment and an auction during the evening.

' We have one delightful man who is a local seaman: Dan Kearon, the head chef in a Shell tanker. He spends a great deal of time away at sea, but he comes home, usually in the autumn time, and puts on the food for the Soroptimist evening— fish and salad, or curry. He is really very good at it and it brings in quite a bit.

£240 in 1974.

'We make a local appeal every year and we get in subscriptions from all the firms and a great many private people in the area. We find that people are very good, and they increase their subscriptions more or less parallel with inflation. Our own staff in the shipyard here have an annual party at which they raise money for the RNLI, and the Round Table has been very helpful to us.' Tyrrells have never built a lifeboat but Irish lifeboats have been repaired and overhauled in their yard since the turn of the century. As Jack Tyrrell looked with justifiable pride and pleasure at the glistening new paintwork and trim fittings of relief lifeboat St Andrew (Civil Service No. 10) (a 41' Watson built in 1952), waiting in the yard to be launched, he spoke of the great satisfaction of this work. Alterations, he said, added tremendously to the interest: re-engining from petrol to diesel, for instance, or installing air bags; or getting in the first of a new type of lifeboat so that a revision of the work to be done in the overhaul has to be made. Then there is the pleasure of meeting lifeboatmen from other stations.

'Old Pat Sliney, former coxswain at Ballycotton—he was a wonderful character. I knew him for many years. He must have been Hearing 90 when he died about four years ago. He was one of the most gentle and unassuming people I have ever known. Right up to the end he had a great interest in all sorts of craft.

He loved sailing boats of all kinds and was very well versed in them. We used to have many yarns about modern yachts— not always complimentary!' Jack Tyrrell is the designer of one of the Institution's largest lifeboats: 70-002, Grace Paterson Ritchie, the Clyde class boat stationed at Kirkwall.

'That was a very interesting exercise.

The terms of reference set out by the Institution were definite and prettycomprehensive, too. They wanted a boat which could travel much longer distances, a boat with a bigger radius of action, and we had to see whether we could give her rather more speed. We thought 12 knots was a high speed at that time—and think it still is for boats that go such distances in severe and extreme weather.

She had to have reasonable open deck space to operate with helicopters. She had, of course, to have all the subdivisions that a lifeboat normally has.

Anyway, we put in a design and it was one of the ones chosen.

' We based this design on the knowledge we had accumulated of fishing and pilot boats. She has certain fishing boat characteristics but is rather more on pilot boat lines because, as I see it, pilot boats have to do all the things that a lifeboat has to do. They have to go alongside ships in bad weather; they have got to put pilots on board and take pilots off, which is roughly what a lifeboat has to do. But while a lifeboat is to a degree expendable, because her purpose is to save lives, a pilot boat has to do her work without damaging herself because the pilots cannot afford damages to their boats. So that in itself has developed a very sturdy seaworthy type. We have pilot boats in every port in Ireland and quite a number in the Bristol Channel and other West of England ports. We have even sent designs to Melbourne and Montevideo.' Grace Paterson Ritchie recently made the voyage to the Faroe Islands. Her visit is described on page 88.

Now, with his two sons carrying the main burden of the yard, Jack Tyrrell can spend most of the day at his drawing board. One of the designs he is working on at present is for a sail training ship, a brigantine, square rigged on the foremast. She is an echo of the days of his boyhood, when Arklow was one of the last strongholds in these islands of trade under sail and when the harbour would be crowded with just such brigantines, immaculately fitted out but stripped of everything that was not essential to their working. A lifetime's love of sail warms Jack Tyrrell's voice as he describes these old friends, the ships which sailed out of Arklow to ports all over northern Europe, to Spain, occasionally across the Atlantic to St Johns and, in the early years, doing quite a bit of Mediterranean trading.

'They had been in the salt fish trade, like a lot of Welsh vessels: coals from Cardiff to Cadiz, salt from Cadiz to St Johns, salt fish from St Johns to the Mediterranean and dried fruit home. Two rounds in a year. . . ' In those early years was fostered knowledge of the sea, an abiding respect for seamanship and a great love of boats. In the years that followed, Jack Tyrrell's long experience and boundless enthusiasm for all things maritime have contributed much to the seafaring world, and by no means least to the RNLI..