Grandad Williamson at the Curragh

Just before the 1897 Christmas I came home from Cork to Liverpool by boat with a good passage all the way home but going back we ran into a storm and were thirty hours aboard the ship, no food and dreadfully cold.  Buffeted about by the bucking and rolling ship, I got on one of the gratings down to the engines.  One of the firemen came up to me and asked me - Was I frightened? – I said – No I was cold.

Sometime in the summer of 1898 the battalion moved from Cork to Curragh, Kildare, which had a fairly large British garrison stationed there.  A cold, windy place some miles from Dublin, our barracks were long wooden huts, cheerless places, I bet they were cold in winter.  There I saw lots of soldiers and very few Irishmen.  One thing I remember during my short stay there was being reviewed by the Queen, Victoria.  Our battalion was drawn up in line on one side of the road about fifty yards back from it (so the old girl would not smell us I suppose).  It rained in true Irish fashion and she kept us there between two and three hours.  Then she came down the road in a closed carriage, horses at full trot.  I question whether she saw her (not at the moment) loyal soldiers standing there like drowned rats. 

Later in 1898 I went on draft leave and coming back off it I met three more lads in Nottingham who were going out in the same draft as I was.  They had a Notts footballer with them who had previously played for Derby.  He came with us to Derby where we all detrained and went to Johnny Goodalls pub.  We had plenty of time to catch the train to Crewe and Holyhead so we tried to get drunk and were very successful.  Somewhere before  we got to Crewe, a window mender got in the compartment we were in; he had in his crate - the one they carried on their backs – some glass.  We passed him the bottle and he got drunk too, and madly so, for when he got out at Crewe he had no glass left in his crate; it was broken into fragments and lay about the compartment floor.  We had sobered down a little by the time we reached Holyhead but goodness knows how we got by the Military Police and onto the boat.  I reckon the police knew where we were going and that we were having a last fling.