A forgotten piece of Cork naval history

100 years ago this week, just before shipping was made safer by the entry of the United States into World War I, a number of Cork vessels were sunk by German U-boats and mines. Patrick G O’Shea recalls one of the lost ships, on which a relative was killed.

When I was a child my maternal grandmother “Babs” (Scriven) Watkins often spoke of the death of her brother Richard Scriven in the sinking of the SS Lismore by a German U-boat as it was “going out of the harbour”.

The assumption was that she was talking about Cork Harbour. I often wondered why the sinking of a Cork ship with a Cork crew, near Cork Harbour, had not received any publicity.