Page 83 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 8

the sea – so the “Evening Mail” described the Chief Secretary
as between the Devil and the Deep Sea.‘

The exchange of words which followed, although it involved
no violence, heralded an increasingly militant campaign by the
more radical wing of the suffrage movement, which involved
attacks on property, disruption of meetings and hunger-strikes.

Facing the harbour, roughly on the site of Wavecrest, was
‘the long cottage’, owned by a local woman, Dame Doyle. Here,
in the 1830s Rev William Urwick (1791-1868), a Congregational
minister, took summer lodgings for his family. Later the Urwicks
would rent another cottage, formerly occupied by the coastguard
officer and situated ‘at the extreme point by the flagstaff looking
northwards’. Here they returned for many years, enjoying
rambles along the shore and long walks in the surrounding
countryside.

To the left of Wavecrest as you stand with your back to the
Harbour was a coal-yard, with beside it a post-office and pub
and, on the corner overlooking the Harbour, Rockport, rented as
a holiday residence by Mr and Mrs William Beckett, parents of
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). While William Beckett spent his
working week at home in Foxrock, travelling into his office in town
daily and only joining his family at the weekend, Mrs Beckett, the
children and a maid lived in Greystones throughout the summer.
These months made an indelible impression on young Sam:
according to James Knowlson, his biographer:

‘The Beckett … children used to play on the stony beach with
its large grey and pink pebbles or run along the harbour wall
to watch the masted schooners unloading their cargo of
Welsh coal to be carted away by heavy work horses to Arthur
Evans’s Coal Depository by the harbour. On the beach, local
fishermen sat mending their whelk pots and repairing their
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