Co Down’s lifeline to an important island market (1981)

The News Letter reported that once a week in winter, a small coasting vessel was arriving in the small Co Down fishing harbour of Portavogie, regular as clockwork.

At other times, the Thomas B Grant might have been seen in other tiny Northern Ireland fishing ports, drying out along the quay at Ardglass or tied up in similar tidal harbours, loading anything from limestone chips to peat, ham, bacon, eggs or butter.

An ex-Admiralty tender, the squat, bluff-bowed little craft is no beauty, but a tough, seaworthy little tramp, ideally suited to the job she had to do, plying in and out of harbours where the bottom dried out, and loading a multitude of cargoes which would be impossible for a larger vessel.

Her skipper and part-owner, Captain Alastair Brown, was a former deep-sea Master, who “just couldn't take to retirement on dry land”, especially on a small island mid-way between Northern Ireland and the mainland.

“I had to get back to sea... there it was on my doorstep all the time and there was I, just looking at it,” he explained.

The Thomas Grant was a new purchase and the culmination of a search that took Captain Brown and his son, Derek, into corners and docks of harbours along the western seaboard of Europe.

Yet the Grant was literally under their noses in the Cornish port of Truro, bereft of much of her original equipment after passing through two owners in succession.

The story had begun when a small shipping company was formed by Isle of Man food importers to bring products from the province - mainly bacon, was proving cheaper to buy chickens and eggs – into Peel, to satisfy the expanding market on the holiday island, where the major industry had been catering.

Shippers (Isle of Man) was an attempt to counteract the high freight charges of trans-shipping to the island via Liverpool.

“But bread alone was not enough . . . it needed other cargoes and a lot of faith to make it pay,” said Captain Brown.

The existing vessel – an old wooden trawler, the Star of Jerusalem – was unsuitable for the job, but it was all the company had and Brown, with his seagoing experience, reckoned it could be made to pave the way for a firmer base.

“The island needs many more products from Northern Ireland, but without a direct service it was proving cheaper to buy English and European products,” he recalled.

“It was a challenge, particularly since many skippers would not trust the old wooden Star,” he added.

But the Star of Jerusalem became a familiar sight in many a Northern Ireland port, as the Browns struggled to make the service pay its way, maintaining a weekly regular Peel to Portavogie run carrying anything else that was offered between times.

And for two years the search for a suitable replacement capable of expanding the service went on, with Captain Brown or his son Derek taking turns to investigate suitable craft.

Finally, the little 313 ton Thomas Grant, which was capable of carrying 240 tons of cargo, was located, assessed and bought. The began a race against time and the winter gales to make her fit to start the promised regular cargo service by the end of January 1981.

“We had to find and fit a crane, because the ports we use just don't have them,” explained Captain Brown phlegmatically, eyeing the new acquisition at work loading a cargo of bacon after a passage from Peel in a Force 9 gale.

The nonchalance belied the arduous job of refitting the ship, much of which was still being done between ports in 1981.

“The Grant can carry the sort of cargoes we wanted. . . it can be up to as many as 80 items on a single manifest and, better still, it is possible to separate foodstuffs from cargoes like fertilisers or peat,” he explained.

Aboard the Grant was “as raffish-looking a crew as anyone can imagine”, noted the News Letter, one regular hand was, in winter, the landlord of a popular quayside pub in Peel, another the son of a top Belfast civil servant, yet another was an ex-longshoreman from Peel.

With her powerful ex-Navy specification twin diesels and generating capacity enough to light a small town (“a hangover from her time as an, anti-mine ship”), the Browns' next plan was to installa separate freezer capacity aboard.

“In all, it's Northern Ireland food that is still our main cargo, although we now carry steel, building and agricultural products and many different cargoes as well.

“A likely load in summer would be as much as 25 tons of bacon, 5,000 frozen chickens and enough of other foodstuffs to feed tens of thousands of holiday visitors to the island.”

The strain of building up the unique service had taken its toll of the captain; the week before he spoke to the News Letter he had suffered mild heart attack and had to stay quiet and watch while his 20-year-old son shouldered the load, as acting skipper.

“But it was to build a future for him that I really took on the job,” he said. “There were so many people in the shipping business who warned me that any service between Northern Ireland and the island was doomed - there just wasn't enough cargo, they said.

“But I was certain there was, if not enough for the big companies, then enough for a small ship, provided I could find the right omen.”

Such was the success of the run, maintained against the odds with the old wooden trawler, that wider offers, among them an invitation to ship regular cargoes from Eire, had poured in.

“But I have a commitment to this run and anyway, the ship is too small. Running costs for that sort of work would almost be as much as for a ship twice as large.

“It's really, a matter of doing the job you set out to do and sticking with it,” he declared.

So, while shipping concerns get bigger and bigger, the small one-man and a boy business plied the 27-mile run from Portavogie to Peel regularly, confounding the experts and keeping a valuable market open for Northern Ireland products, “a market that might well have been lost through high trans-shipping costs if the stubborn Scot, in love with the sea, had not refused to give up”, said the News Letter.

Indeed, for many workers and small businessmen in Northern Ireland, the Thomas Grant, although they might never actually see her, she was another lifeline for the province's vital export trade, helping to keep the spectre of unemployment at bay, even in a small way.