Seán McGrail, Master Mariner and Ship Archaeologist, May 1928–June 2021
With an Irish heritage, Seán McGrail was brought up in Leeds, from where, as the first grammar school boy to gain entry to Dartmouth Naval College, he went on to distinguish himself in two careers. He served in the air arm of the Royal Navy for twenty years, after which he returned to study in Bristol and London to become a world authority on Viking Age ship archaeology, eventually retiring as professor of ship archaeology at the University of Oxford(1986–93). He played a notable part in my excavations at Wood Quay (1974–81) in a co-operation between the National Museum of Ireland and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where he became Chief Archaeologist.
McGrail made a pioneering and enduring contribution to Irish archaeology with his recording of the extensive remains of ships’ planks and other timbers which were preserved at Wood Quay, where he recognised the dismembered hulks of a pair of large, double-ended, later twelfth-century ships. Unlike the mid-eleventh-century warship from Roskilde, Denmark, which was built in Dublin, these originated elsewhere. Seán’s great legacy inIreland is his publication (1993) of the Dublin discoveries (he also published the Waterford timbers) and the terminology he left behind.
No succeeding urban archaeologist would go into the field without knowing what mykes, mast-steps, parrells, keelsons, framing timbers, stealers, bulkheads and knees were. They would also realise that with discoveries of ships’ planks you might expect to find scarfs, oarports, patches and caulking, as well as roves or clenched nails. McGrail recognised that one of the late Viking Age timber groups at Wood Quay represented planks from the starboard side of an ocean-going trading ship. A separate Fishamble Street group contained the floors of both large and small eleventh-century ships.
Going back to his recognition and reporting from the air of different farm features in his flying days over Korea, Seán McGrail’ s hallmark gift was the clarity of his reported observations. This was evident in his public lectures, the timber-working and ship timber conferences (1981) that he organised and edited, and in the field. He produced the enduring Ancient boats in NW Europe (1987) textbook for Longman and the magisterial Boats of the world (2001) for Oxford. The latter included summaries of his observations on ethnographic boats (notably from Bangladesh), which consumed a proportion of his later career.
Seán retained the dapper, well-trimmed disposition of his navy days. Reserved and formal, he loved socialising in Ireland in his civilised way. Above all, it is the innate clarity of his mind that is the most enduring memory. It was a privilege to know and work with such a colleague, proud of his roots and his Catholicism. Sincere sympathy to Anne, his wife of 66 years, whom he met thanks to what Seán called a duff weather report when she worked as a meteorologist. Besides Anne, Seán McGrail has left four children, eleven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In his flying days McGrail clocked up 3,000 hours flying rotary and fixed-wing aircraft with dangerous deck landings, day and night. He commanded 849 Airbourne Squadron.
Seán had a family funeral at the Church of the Sacred Heart, Tisbury, Wiltshire, last July and was honoured at a memorial in the nearby English neoclassical masterpiece, All Saints Chapel, Wardour, in October. It was an honour to be there and at the convivial gathering in the local hall, so English, so dignified and yet so non-establishment.
Pat Wallace