Crash Curse - Frank McNally on the still-disputed fate of the HMS Wasp

Hardly was I back from a trip to Tory Island for this newspaper recently (report August 12th) than a novel entitled The Cursing Stone turned up in my inbox.

Published in 2021, it’s by the unusually named Tom Sigafoos, an American writer now living in Donegal. And although I haven’t had time to read much of it yet, I’m unusually well-versed in the real-life backstory.

While on Tory, I visited the grave whose inscription Sigafoos quotes as a preface: “Within this enclosure are buried eight bodies recovered from HMS Wasp which ship was wrecked near this island 22nd Sept. 1884″.

Elsewhere, in a local art and crafts gallery, I also saw the bell from that doomed vessel. Unlike other souvenirs, needless to say, it was not for sale.

A city where peace comes dropping slow – Frank McNally on a visit to The Hague

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Clues of destiny – Alison Healy on the Crossword Panic of 1944

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Animal cracker – Frank McNally on “Humanity Dick” Martin and 200 years of the SPCA

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Balkan diplomacy – Frank McNally on hosting a Bulgarian journalist for election weekend

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Officially, the fate of the Wasp is that it hit rocks and sank in the early hours of a September morning due to “navigational error”.

But as the English anthropologist Robin Fox, who wrote a book about Tory in the 1960s, commented drily, the islanders “know better” than the British admiralty’s investigators:

“They know that [Paddy] Heggerty the King called them to the cliff where the cursing stone is buried, put them in a circle around the stone, and chanted the spell for its turning – a spell contained in its runic writings; and that the stone turned, the cliff shook, the seas rose, and the miserable little gunboat was smashed on the rocks . . . "

The Wasp had been in the service of one Benjamin St John Baptist Joule (1817–1895), a Manchester brewing magnate who owned parts of Donegal (including Tory) as investment properties but was struggling to make them pay.

Sailing from Westport, the ship was in fact headed for another Donegal island, Inishtrahull, to evict tenants there. This involved negotiating the treacherous waters around Tory, however, and perhaps the presumption of the local population that they were the immediate targets. In any case, with or without supernatural assistance, the boat went down along with 52 sailors, mostly English.

An imaginative account of the circumstances that combined in the Wasp’s doom, Sigafoos’s novel includes an actual report from the Derry Journal of September 24th, 1884, which struck an elegiac note:

“The long and sad story of evictions in Donegal has received yet another shade of sorrow [...] Usually the eviction scene affects but so many poor Irish peasants, who are to the manner born, and know how to endure greatly. Today the grief is carried into many an English home, to shadow the happiness and embitter the lives of parents, wife and mother...”

But the Journal had a political point too: “These poor fellows never entered the British service to do the work of the agent and bailiff. The impulse that stirred them to brave the dangers of the deep, and of battle if necessary, was a higher one than a desire to form part of a sheriff’s escort.

“This consideration makes the occurrence all the more melancholy. We can anticipate the indignation that will arise in England over the sacrifice of these lives, and we mistake greatly if the occurrence be without its influence in hastening legislation.”

The occurrence was certainly not to without influence on Joule – whose surname led to him then and later being known on Tory as “the Jew man”, even though he was a Protestant.

Having failed to extract money from the island since 1872, according to Fox, he now made no further attempts. Tory was eventually bought by the Congested Districts Board in 1903.

A common feature of Ireland once, cursing stones typically comprised large flat stone discs, with indentations in which smaller stones were placed. These worked a bit like the dials on safes and could be used for wishes as well as curses. When wishing, you turned to the stones to the right. When cursing, to the left.

Like most of the others, the one on Tory has long disappeared. According to some accounts it was thrown in the sea by an angry priest. An alternative theory is that it was buried on the island, in a place since forgotten.

There is no shortage of stones in the part of Tory where the Wasp crew members were buried. Squeezed between the lighthouse and sea, the walled “Foreigners’ Graveyard” is a lonely sight, with only two graves left today.

There used to be more, as a sign for the “Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery” suggests. Now, aside from the Wasp’s communal one, the sole remaining headstone is for a William Fullerton, a 26-year-old Scottish sapper whose ship was sunk by U-boats in August 1940.

His body was found and buried by Tory islanders a few days later and soon forgotten, except by locals. Fullerton was long believed by his family to have been lost at sea until a story by the journalist Henry McDonald led to relatives visiting the cemetery, over 60 years later, in 2001.