Kate Tyrrell was the second of four daughters born to Edward and Elizabeth Tyrrell of Arklow, County Wicklow. Edward was the owner of a small shipping company and captain of his own schooners. The whole family was steeped in the backbreaking life that was nineteenth-century shipping, from the hard manual labour of dealing with the sails, repairs and so on to the uncertain fortunes and prolonged absences of deep-sea fishing. The bread-and-butter work was import-export coastal runs between Ireland and Wales.
Slim, waspish and energetic, Kate was just like her father and in many ways she took the place of the son he never had. From early childhood she hung around the shipyard, at first getting in her father’s way but gradually becoming indispensable to him; from the time she was twelve he trusted her to fill in shipping journals. As time went on, Kate became the obvious choice to succeed her father, and he promised her that, one day, she would be the owner of her own ship.
In spring 1882, Kate lost one of her younger sisters to the White Plague, as tuberculosis (TB) was then known. Her mother subsequently sank into depression and illness. Her condition became so debilitating that, at the age of nineteen, Kate had to take control of the bookkeeping side of the business and run the household at the same time. Late in 1882, Mrs Tyrrell died of the same disease that had killed her daughter. Kate now had her hands full helping her surviving sisters, doing the books for the business and managing domestic affairs, but occasionally she still had time to go sailing with her dad.
In 1885, Mr Tyrrell bought a Welsh schooner named the Denbighshire Lass. Although all three sisters had equal shares in it, the ship was registered in Kate’s name, and it was Kate who sailed the sixty-two-tonne vessel home from Wales. The Denbighshire Lass was the best ship the Tyrrells had in their small fleet. Its cargoes typically included coal, iron ore and textiles, and more fragile goods, such as bricks and tiles.
The Denbighshire Lass sailed the rest of 1885 and into 1886, but in the July of that year, while on a trip to Wales, Kate’s beloved father died on board of a heart attack. Kate now took over the family business fully, sold the other ships and became the sole owner of the schooner.
Although Kate was the owner, she could not have her name on any of the ship’s documentation, according to the dictates of the maritime authorities, because she was a woman. Instead, a trusted employee called Brennan was named as the ‘master’ on all documents pertaining to the ship. But it was Kate who ran the business as her father had done before her, sending the Denbighshire Lass to Liverpool, Swansea, Cardiff, Bristol, Cork, Dungarvan, New Ross, Wexford, Belfast and Dublin, and it was Kate who inspected it for repairs and retained total financial control over everything. As a manager, Kate was known as a disciplinarian, for example, she was totally intolerant of the grog traditionally so beloved of sailors, and anyone found drunk on board was immediately dismissed.
In 1888 Kate lost another younger sister, aged only twenty, to TB. Now it was just Kate and her older sister left in the family home. Her sister kept house while Kate supported them both. A workaholic and a hands-on boss, Kate didn’t need to go on many trips with the schooner, but she went anyway: she loved life on the sea and enjoyed captaining the ship herself. She became adept at the more difficult aspects of sailing, such as familiarity with shipping regulations and navigation.
Inspired by the women’s suffrage movement, which was gaining ground in the 1890s, she continued her battle to have her own name instead of Brennan’s on all documents relating to the Denbighshire Lass. Her perseverance finally paid off in 1899, the year she was officially recognised as the owner – fourteen years after she became the skipper.
In 1896 Kate married John Fitzpatrick, a nephew of Brennan’s and a friend since childhood. He had been working as mate and occasionally as master on the Denbighshire Lass since her father’s death. John and Kate complemented each other perfectly: he was easygoing where she was fiery. In 1900 a son, James, was born to Kate and John, followed in 1905 by a daughter, Elizabeth. But this last pregnancy nearly killed the forty-two-year-old Kate, whose health was never the same afterwards. The once-agile sailor now experienced difficulty moving and started to stay at home more and more until eventually she was completely housebound.
Meanwhile, the Denbighshire Lass sailed on. It sailed the landmined Irish Sea right through World War I (without insurance), and had the distinction of being the first ship to fly the Irish tricolour in a foreign port. Partly because of competition and partly because of age, the ship’s sailing life came to an end just four years after Kate’s own death in 1921.