In the decade 1912-1923, continuous waves of events impacted Irish society, including the 1913 Lockout, the First World War, the 1916 Easter Rising, the Spanish flu, the War of Independence, Anglo-Irish treaty, partition, Civil War and finally the…

After the end of ship building in Pembroke Dock in 1926, the RAF set up an air base for flying boats in the disused dockyard in 1930. In 1938, they introduced the famous Sunderland flying boats to the fleet. During the Second World War, Pembroke…

The St. Patrick was the only ferry still sailing between Ireland and Wales during World War Two. The others, the St. David and the St. Andrew, had been requisitioned as hospital ships serving the European front. The St. Patrick made a regular daily…

There are a number of memorial plaques on view at the museum. These were made of bronze and issued to the next of kin in remembrance of those lost during the Great War of 1914-18. Each one is inscribed with the name of the person who died. Over one…

The British Admiralty had several factors to consider when they thought about escorting the mail and rail steamers. For example, the steamers were capable of 21 knots, which was fast, and they could maintain a reasonable speed even in bad weather.…

Prime Minister David Lloyd George was aware that Britain’s manpower resources were dwindling. He had prioritised shipbuilding, tanks and aircraft production before army demands. The army wanted 1.25 million new entrants. Lloyd George was only…

Throughout the First World War, the UK imported significant amounts of food from the United States, Canada and through Gibraltar. The German naval command calculated that they could starve Britain into surrender and win the war with a five-month…

The London North Western Railway Company (LNWR) maintained their Holyhead to Dublin express service by switching the two Greenore ships to the Dublin service. An older ship was on standby. The potential of U-boats to destroy shipping had hardly…

By October 1918, it had become apparent that the First World War was slowly drawing to a close. It was not yet foreseeable whether it would be over by Christmas, a hope annually revived since 1914, but an end to the fighting lay in the near future.…

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), the provincial whaling town of Monkshaven (based on Whitby in the north of England) is thrown into a state of excitement by the return of a Greenland ship, and a crowd immediately gathers around…