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Mystery of the 106-year-old love letter
What looks like an Edwardian love letter, lost behind a skirting board for more than a century, has been found in a South Shields house.
Little is known of the seaman who poured out his heart, or the lass he sent it to in 1902 - but it has links with one of the world's great maritime landmarks.
How it came to disappear down behind the skirting board, we'll never know
But for more than a century, the small letter with its red penny stamp lay, gathering dust and keeping its secrets. It keeps some still.
Who was the lass, May Ross, who received the letter at her home in South Shields one summer early in the Edwardian era?
And who was the man who, far away aboard ship on the turbulent southern coast of Ireland, poured out his heart to her?
We don't even know his name – it's about the only thing that's indecipherable.
"But we would love to be able to return it to his family, either that, or the family of the lady it was sent to," said Alison Gofton.
Alison, media sales advisor here at the Gazette, was captivated when she and her husband unearthed the letter while renovating the bathroom of their house at Westoe.
"Every time I look at it, it's with absolute awe that it's survived," she said. "It's just so intriguing.
"I would like to think that it was a love letter. We wondered, for instance, if some young girl had hidden it from her mother. But then 'romantic' is my middle name!"
In that respect, the letter, written from a steamer at Rock Island, Skibbereen in County Cork, coyly keeps the modern reader wondering.
But it does suggest that May's correspondent may have been a link with home.
She had asked him to send shamrocks for St Patrick's Day; while he had hoped to see her at the Cork exhibition which, research shows, was held between May and November, 1902, in the city's Fitzgeralds Park, where thousands enjoyed industrial displays, as well as an amusement park containing a switchback railway, skating Rink and shooting gallery, among other attractions. So was she herself Irish?
And while we may know little hitherto about the writer himself – other than that he had been ill, and was down in the dumps – we DO know a great deal about the ship he was writing from.
Her name was a challenge to decipher at first, but she turns out to have been the Irish Lights Vessel, Ierne, which was purpose-built in 1898 at Port Glasgow, Inverclyde, Scotland, for carrying the granite blocks and other materials used in the building of the Fastnet Rock lighthouse.
The Fastnet lighthouse is known as The Teardrop of Ireland, because it was the last sight of Ireland for many of the emigrants who sailed for America during the great famine.
There had been a lighthouse on the site since the 1840s.
Work on a new one, towering nearly 160ft above sea level, was begun in 1896 and completed in 1903.
The steel-built Ierne, 126ft long and with a 23ft beam, was capable of carrying up to 90 tons of materials, and had a complement of 17 officers and men.Sadly, though, the Commissioners of Irish Lights did not keep records of ships' crews.
The entire lighthouse tower was erected in sections in the contractor's yard in Cornwall before being dismantled and transported to Rock Island, where they were inspected before being transported on the Ierne to the Fastnet Rock.
The following is an extract from Beara – Down Memory Lane, by Gerard Harrington, from the website of the Beara Historical Society (www.bhs.ie), to whom we are also indebted for the picture of the Ierne.
"There are still a few people in Beara who remember the old Irish Lights Tender Ierne, which was based in Castletownbere for many years.
"When the building of the Fastnet was completed, the Ierne was based in Castletownbere until 1921, carrying out reliefs and other duties on the south west coast, tending the Fastnet, Roancarrig, Bull Rock, Skelligs and Tearaght Lighthouses.
"While based in Castletownbere, the vessel used to tie up at a buoy in the inner harbour which was known for many years after, as the 'Ierne Buoy' and was manned almost entirely by local men from Castletownbere and Bere Island, whose sons, grandsons and relatives later manned her successors, the Deirdre, the Nabro, the Valonia and then the new Ierne."
She was eventually broken up in 1954.
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Weather for South Shields
Tuesday 07 February 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: -3 C to 6 C
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Wind direction: South west
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