St Clare John Byrne

St Clare John Byrne (1831-1915) was a British naval architect, who specialized in the design of luxury yachts during the late Victorian and early Edwardian period.

His father, Charles Holtzendorf Byrne (1781-1853), was an Irish ship owner who in 1812 married Scottish Susanna Ewing (1789–1868). They had 8 children, 4 of whom were born in Renfrew Scotland and the remainder in Liverpool, including St Clare Byrne.

By the age of 20 Byrne was a merchant’s clerk, living with his parents in Birkenhead, an area associated with shipbuilding.

In 1867 he married Kate Chatteris, they had 3 children: Henry, Arthur and Lionel. Byrne's granddaughter was Muriel St. Clare Byrne (1894-1983), historian and author. She and her mother lived with Byrne after her father died in 1905; she would later say of him that he was a genius.

Byrne's elder brother, shipping merchant Andrew Ewing Byrne (1818-1908), was a keen yachtsman. Byrne followed his interest, but designed and built his own yacht. In 1856 he was elected a member of the Royal Mersey Yacht Club.

By the mid 1850s he was designing larger vessels constructed in iron for the shipyard Brassey, Peto and Betts of Canada Works at Birkenhead. These included the paddle steamer Elizabeth Jackson (143 ft), Edith Byrne (729 tons) for his brother Andrew, and the yacht Albatross (110 tons) for Thomas Brassey, son of a proprietor of the Canada Works.

In 1865 he was Superintendent Shipbuilder in the Humber Iron Works and later a partner in shipbuilding company called Byrne, Humphreys & Co. of Hull; the partnership was dissolved in 1867. In the early 1870s he was designing merchant ships and private yachts often constructed as composite, where the frame was made of iron but planked in wood. He delivered a paper on this subject to the Institute of Naval Architects in 1878.

Byrne designed a steam auxiliary barquetine yacht for Thomas Brassey of composite construction named Sunbeam. It was 532 tons, 159 ft in length, built by Bowdler and Chaffer’s in Seacombe and launched in 1874 . Sunbeam would become one of the most famous private yachts of the period. Brassey took the yacht on a world cruise with his wife Anna (Allnutt) Brassey (1839-1887) and their children. Anna wrote a book describing their travels and this became a best seller, reprinted many times and translated into many languages. In 1915 Brassey sailed Sunbeam to Mudros Bay to act as a hospital ship during the Gallipoli campaign.

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