Long before Rodney Street got its name, Royal Navy warships anchoring off the Skerry Roads were a regular, genuinely popular summer tourist draw for Portrush — arranged, in effect, as a civic attraction in their own right.
A Prime Minister plays golf
In June 1910, HMS Enchantress anchored in West Bay carrying Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and First Lord of the Admiralty Reginald McKenna, who played a round at Royal Portrush Golf Club during the visit. The Enchantress herself went on to serve as the Admiralty’s own vessel for Winston Churchill the following year, when he became First Lord of the Admiralty.
HMS Drake’s crowd-pleasing visit — and its wartime end
The best-documented of these courtesy calls is HMS Drake’s July 1907 visit. Naval visits were council-arranged summer entertainment, “bringing joy, and a good deal of money, to many people in the town,” in one contemporary account. A flotilla of small boats and the paddle steamer Royal Norman ferried sightseers out to the ship from Portandhu harbour — a welcome income boost for local fishermen — where crew described in the period press as “models of civility and courtesy” gave tours, showing off the ship’s guns and the logistics of housing a crew of 900 men and their hammocks. One reporter even confessed, in print, to breaking his own Sabbath observance just to see her.
It’s a genuinely poignant story once you know what came next. HMS Drake, in Royal Navy service since 1902, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the north-west tip of Rathlin Island on the morning of 2 October 1917, killing 19 crew members. The crippled ship was escorted into Church Bay before later capsizing and sinking in 18 metres of water — a decade after Portrush had turned her arrival into a day out for the whole town.