Page 81 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 8

Elizabeth (Bessie) Grundy, by her disappointed suitor, Thomas
Byrne. While Byrne, a 30-year old house-painter, believed
himself engaged to Bessie, she had different ideas, telling her
sister that she wanted nothing to do with him. On the morning in
question Byrne turned up at the shop, carrying a stolen revolver
and ammunition, and when Bessie was parcelling up the
‘pennyworth of sugar barley’ which he had requested, he fired a
shot, hitting her in the chest. Bessie died the following morning,
having given a statement to the police. When Byrne came up for
trial a few months later the jury found him ‘mentally unable to
plead’, and the trial was postponed, although the prisoner
himself ‘loudly declared his perfect sanity’. ‘If found insane’, he
protested, ‘he would be sent to an asylum for the rest of his life,
and he would rather be dead.’

Passing under the railway bridge, with on the left the narrow
cul-de-sac known as The Bawn, you reach what is now the
Harbour Café, built in around 1820, probably for the
coastguards, as a boathouse. In 1872 it was used to house
Greystones’s first lifeboat, the Sarah Tancred. Launched only
four times in fourteen years, the lifeboat nevertheless saved four
lives. She was replaced in 1886 by a second vessel, the Richard
Brown, which never launched on service. She was withdrawn
and the station closed in 1892. The building itself later became
a garage, and subsequently a café. On the other side of the road
is the Beach House, built in three stages – first the shop, then
the bar and finally the residence - by John Doyle, who was
responsible for a number of other buildings in the town. One of
the owners of the establishment, William Dann, also owned a
schooner, the Joseph Fisher, which in September 1918 was
sunk by a submarine on its passage from Garston, near
Liverpool, to Wicklow. Its crew of four men drifted in an open boat
for sixteen hours before being picked up, and taken to safety in
Peel, on the Isle of Man.

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