On June 10 it was announced that the man who was put ashore on the west
coast of Ireland from a German submarine on April 12, 1918, and who is
now a prisoner in the Tower of London, was Lance Corporal J. Dowling of
the Connaught Rangers. The collapsible boat in which Dowling was landed
was made of canvas with a bottom of twenty-three wooden slats, each
four inches wide, making the boat about eight feet long and two feet
wide. The canvas sides, about twenty inches high, had an inner lining
rubber fabric, to be blown up from a valve at the rear to give the boat
buoyancy. There were loops along the sides in which short wooden braces
or struts kept the boat from collapsing. The whole craft when rolled up
weighed less than forty pounds. When the buoyancy chambers were pumped
full of air the boat would easily support three men.
No effort had been made up to June 20 to put into execution the
conscription law in Ireland, notwithstanding there had been a very
meagre response to the call for volunteer enlistments.