To be honest I found this to be more interesting than the Titanic.
HMS Caroline is a decommissioned C-class light cruiser of the Royal Navy that saw combat service in the First World War and served as an administrative centre in the Second World War. Caroline was launched and commissioned in 1914. At the time of her decommissioning in 2011 she was the second-oldest ship in Royal Navy service, after HMS Victory. She served as a static headquarters and training ship for the Royal Naval Reserve, based in Alexandra Dock, Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the later stages of her career. She was converted into a museum ship. From October 2016 she underwent inspection and repairs to her hull at Harland and Wolff and opened to the public on 1 July 2017 at Alexandra Dock in the Titanic Quarter in Belfast.
Caroline was the last remaining British First World War light cruiser in service, and she is the last survivor of the Battle of Jutland still afloat. She is also one of only three surviving Royal Navy warships of the First World War, along with the 1915 monitor HMS M33 (in Portsmouth dockyard), and the Flower-class sloop HMS President, (formerly HMS Saxifrage) usually moored on the Thames at Blackfriars but as from February 2016, in Number 3 Basin, Chatham.
Caroline is listed as part of the National Historic Fleet. On her decommissioning, she was placed into the care of the National Museum of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, though remaining moored in her position in Alexandra Dock in Belfast. Although no longer capable of making way under her own power, Caroline remains afloat and in excellent condition. Buffeting from waves and high winds have caused the ship to almost come away from her moorings several times. In 2005, during a storm, she ripped several huge bollards out of the jetty concrete, but failed to break free entirely. She was not normally open to tourists, although entrance was gained during the annual RMS Titanic celebrations.
Upon Caroline’s decommissioning in 2011, her future was uncertain. Proposals were made to return the ship to her First World War appearance, which among other things would have involved sourcing and installing 6-inch (152.4 mm) and 4-inch (102 mm) guns of that era and removing the large deckhouse from her midships deck. One proposal considered was to remain in Belfast as a museum ship within the Titanic Quarter development alongside SS Nomadic. Another was a move to Portsmouth, with many of her original fittings restored to return her as much as possible to her First World War appearance.
In June 2012 plans to move Caroline to Portsmouth were announced, subject to the availability of funding. However, in October 2012 the Northern Ireland government announced that the ship would remain in Belfast and that the National Heritage Memorial Fund had pledged £1,000,000 to help to restore her. In May 2013 the Heritage Lottery Fund announced an £845,600 grant to support conversion work as a museum.
In October 2014, the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a £12 million lottery funding boost to enable the National Museum of the Royal Navy to turn Caroline into a visitor attraction in time for centenary commemorations of the 1916 Battle of Jutland. Caroline remains moored in the Alexandra Dock in the Titanic Quarter in Belfast.
In June 2016, HMS Caroline was opened to the public as a museum ship and forms part of the National Museum of the Royal Navy
On Tuesday I travelled by bus from Limerick University Campus to Mount St Lawrence Cemetery but the bus was diverted because of a very large funeral which could be described as “traditional” and I decided that it would better to return the next day. The weather forecast for Wednesday was not good, with rain predicted, but when I awakened early in the morning the weather was beautiful so I decided to walk to the cemetery and to bring a 15mm manual Voigtlander lens which explains why some of the images are distorted. As a matter of interest I use a Zeiss Batis 25mm lens when I visited in 2019 and I think that the images were slightly better.
As of August 20th 2013, Mayor of Limerick Kathleen Leddin launched an online database which holds information on the 70,000 buried in the graveyard, dating from 1855 to 2008. This database will contain information such as the names, addresses, times of death, position of graves, ages and dates of deaths of those buried in Mount St. Lawrence. This will contribute greatly to the city and surrounding areas. The city can use the information on the records to give accurate figures on the mortality rate, for example. It will also help to discover what the problems were in the hospitals of Limerick back in those times and why the death rate was so high.
Cemeteries in Limerick began to fall under immense pressure due to cholera epidemics in the 1830’s and the Great Famine in the 1840’s. This led to the founding of Mount St. Lawrence cemetery. Originally it formed part of the larger medieval parish of St. Lawrence in Limerick. This parish also contained a leper hospital, granted by King John, which was later returned to Limerick Corporation. They then leased some of the land to the Limerick Diocese for use as burials grounds. Mount St. Lawrence was officially opened on March 29th 1849 in a ceremony presided over by Dr John Ryan, Bishop of Limerick at this time.
The Neo-Gothic Church was designed as a mortuary chapel by architects M & S Hennessy, who also designed the tall spire of St. John’s Cathedral, which is now a notable point in Limerick City. It was designed in Celtic and Gothic Revival styles with an Arts and Crafts influenced interior. Mount St Lawrence graveyard was the primary place of burial in Limerick City for all members and classes of society, from the wealthy and powerful to those poverty stricken.
Mount Saint Lawrence has always contained plots reserved for certain groups, for example, religious graves, diocesan graves and a Republican plot.
On the 29 March 1849 Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery was opened on an 18 acres site on Mulgrave Street to alleviate the overcrowded city graveyards. From 1849 until 1979 the cemetery was run by the Catholic Church and in 1979 it was taken over by Limerick City Council and the day to day running of the Cemetery is by the Environment Department.
Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery was the primary place of burial in Limerick for all strata of society, from the wealthy to those who died in the Lunatic Asylum and Workhouses. The more prominent families tended to be buried along the central path close to the chapel. The ‘Poor Squares’ were located at the top of the cemetery at the left hand corner and in the bottom right corner.
Burial Records date from March, 1855 and the Burial Register records that over 70,000 individuals have been interred in Mount Saint Lawrence, up to 2009. The oldest individual recorded in the register is Mary Keane of Thomondgate, buried on 24th January, 1880 at the age of 110.
It was raining very heavy while I was waiting for the bus. When I got up from my seat to alight from the bus the lens detached from the body (I do not know how this could have happened as the lens had been on the body for three days and it was in constant use) I was lucky that the lens fell on to the seat so it was not damaged however a lot of dust managed to attach itself to the sensor. I had forgotten to attach the emergency strap to the lens.
St Finbarr’s Cemetery, which opened in 1868, is the largest cemetery in Ireland outside of Dublin. The keeper’s house (office) is inside the gate to the left. Inside the graveyard there are two small churches (Catholic and Protestant) that were built when the cemetery was first opened and were used for funeral services for a time.
Unlike older cemeteries, St. Finbarr’s was professionally laid out with numbered pathways and wide tree-lined avenues.
Among those buried at St. Finbarr’s Cemetery are hurler and Taoiseach Jack Lynch; the sculptor Seamus Murphy, the antiquarian Richard Rolt Brash who was among the first to decipher writing in the ancient Ogham writing style; the English composer Arnold Bax; and Cork’s first Lord Mayor Daniel Hegarty.
St. Finbarr’s contains one of the largest burial plots of Irish Republicans who died during the 1920s. There are also more recent burials of members of the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA. This is known as the Cork Republican Plot, and among those buried there are former Lords Mayor of Cork Terence McSwiney and Tomás Mac Curtain, hunger striker Joseph Murphy. In the early hours of 17 March 1963, in protest at the unveiling later that day of a monument in the Republican Plot by President De Valera, IRA volunteers Desmond Swanton and Jeremiah Madden attempted to blow up the monument. However, during this attempt there was an explosion which killed Swanton and severely injured Madden (who lost an eye and a leg).
Other republicans who are buried at St. Finbarr’s, but not in the Republican Plot, include Flying Column leader Tom Barry, government minister J. J. Walsh and Dan “Sandow” O’Donovan. Commemorations of the 1916 Rising are held annually at the Republican Plot on Easter Sunday by various groups including Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, the Workers’ Party of Ireland and Republican Sinn Féin.
The “musicians’ corner” contains the graves of Aloys Fleischmann (Senior) and Aloys Fleischmann, and the composer Arnold Bax.
It also contains a mass grave containing the remains of 72 women who died at St. Vincent’s Magdalene Laundry on Peacock Lane in Cork.
I decided to visit St. Finbarr’s Cemetery while in Cork.
I was advised by a bus driver that I should get the 216 bus but went to the wrong stop and ended up in Passage West where I was planning to visit the following day and while passing through Douglas village on my return journey I noticed an interesting old church and graveyard so I got off the bus in order to explore the graveyard and nearby.
Initially I thought the graveyard occupied both sides of the road but there was a big difference and it soon was apparent that the section near the church was Church Of Ireland while the other section was Catholic. The Church Of Ireland section featured many broken columns (rare in Catholic cemeteries) as representations of lives cut short. The Virgin Mary was confined to the Catholic section and there were many examples to be seen. Both sections were maintained but the CofI section was way more attractive.
This graveyard is an important part of the history of Cork city, with many well-known Cork figures buried here. Next to the spire is a monument to John Arnott, (1814-98) who founded Arnotts in Dublin. Businessman, philanthropist and former Lord Mayor of Cork (1859-61), he worked throughout his life to develop the industry and resources of Ireland. In the last 30 years of his life, he gave an average of £1,500 per year to public charity.
Another resident of the graveyard is Richard Caulfield, antiquarian and librarian, whose local history publications are still valued. One of the older graves belongs to the Besnards, a prominent Huguenot business family. By 1783, Julius Besnard owned the flax mills in Douglas. Besnard also helped to build the church that stood on this site from 1785 to 1874. 2 The first Rector of the new Douglas parish, Canon Samuel Hayman, (a noted antiquarian) is also buried here.
The great and the good were not the only ones to be buried here. Following the closure by Cork Corporation of graveyards within the city boundaries in 1870, city residents had to bury their dead in the suburbs. By the nineteenth century, urban graveyards were dangerously overcrowded, and ‘garden cemeteries’ began to be built outside many European cities. These burial grounds were not attached to a parish church and the graves were part of a landscaped park, with trees and pathways. In Cork, Fr Mathew had led the way, founding St Joseph’s Cemetery in the former Botanic Gardens in the 1830s. Interestingly, the planting and regular arrangement of St Luke’s graveyard is more like a garden cemetery than a parish burial ground. Its orderly layout dates from the 1870s, when the graveyard was remodelled at the same time as the new church was built.
The new church building, like the old, was built on an east-west orientation, with the chancel at the eastern end, so that the congregation could face towards the east. This was a typical orientation for a Christian sacred building. Maps from before the before the 1870s show that the graveyard once extended out from the eastern and western ends of the building. However, the bulk of the eastern end of the graveyard was divided from the church by a road, now called Churchyard Lane. In this eastern end was a watch-house, built to house a man who would guard the graves from robbers or, even worse, resurrectionists, who sold corpses to medical schools for dissection. The location of this watch house suggests that the majority of burials were in the eastern end of the cemetery. We can surmise that there were burials along the longitudinal sides also because a contemporary illustration of the eighteenth-century church shows a monument alongside it. But the construction of the new church saw a radical shift in the layout of the graveyard.
There are four World War I casualties buried here, and one from World War II. The contribution of women to the war can be seen in the Humby grave, where Private J. Humby is buried alongside Miss F. Humby, who worked for the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a nursing division.
The lodge house by the gate was built for the sexton, who was employed as a caretaker to the church and gravedigger for the graveyard. The house was built for Mr Thomas Morris, who was sexton from 1879 to 1912. His terms of employment were 14 shillings a week, with residence, and 2 tons of coal.
Here is an interesting inscription: “Erected to the memory of John Haltigan by the Nationalists of Kilkenny 94 who have known him to make a lifelong struggle for Ireland’s freedom for which crime British law, aided by the Informer, Nagle, consigned him to a living tomb where the fiendish torture of years shattered his vigorous form but failed to subdue his noble spirit. May his unselfish patriotism be imitated until Ireland is once again a Nation. He died 10th July, 1884 aged 66 years. Also his wife, Catherine Haltigan, died 19th January, 1899 aged 83 years.”
A picturesque graveyard containing a collection of markers of artistic design significance exhibiting high quality stone masonry. A number of markers dating to the late seventeenth century represent an important element of the archaeological heritage of Kilkenny while serving as a reminder of the mass house, later a Catholic chapel that existed on site until the late eighteenth century.
I came across this by accident and unfortunately I only had a very small camera [Sony RX0] which meant that it was not really possible to capture any inscriptions. I will revisit the next time I am in Kilkenny.
The cemetery is on the South side of the town. There are 4 Commonwealth burials of the 1914-1918 war here.
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