#demob

Tragedy struck when the naval yacht Iolaire struck a reef on approaching Stornoway Harbour in the early hours of New Years Day 1919.

It has been described as the blackest day in the history of the Western Isles when more than 200 servicemen returning from the First World War died as their ship went down in sight of Stornoway harbour. Despite being Britain’s worst maritime disaster since the Titanic, the loss of the Iolaire remains little known beyond the isles.

The disaster occurred at 1.55am on 1st January 1919, when 205 Lewis and Harris men drowned as the HMY Iolaire sank in heavy seas. They had survived the war and were returning home for the New Year celebrations when the ship struck the rocks at Holm, 20 yards from the shore.

A report in the Stornoway Gazette recorded the impact of the tragedy:

No one now alive in Lewis can ever forget the 1st January 1919, and future generations will speak of it as the blackest day in the history of the island, for on it 200 of our bravest and best perished on the very threshold of their homes under the most tragic circumstances.  The terrible disaster at Holm on New Year’s morning has plunged every house and every heart in Lewis into grief unutterable.  Language cannot express the anguish, the desolation, the despair which this awful catastrophe has inflicted.  One thinks of the wide circle of blood relations affected by the loss of even one of the gallant lads, and imagination sees those circles multiplied by the number of the dead, overlapping and overlapping each other till the whole island – every hearth and home it is shrouded in deepest gloom.

Messages of sympathy were received from far and wide, including from the King and Queen and from Lord Leverhulme, who had purchased the island of Lewis the previous year. He also led calls for a disaster fund to be set up and fund raising events were initiated.   The Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Associations of Edinburgh and Glasgow arranged to take collections in all picture houses under their control for a week. A fundraising concert was arranged in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on 14 February 1919, at which Scott Skinner, the acclaimed  fiddler and composer and many others performed.

A naval inquiry held at the time was not made public until 1970. It had concluded that no blame could be attributed to anybody as the ship’s log had been lost and all of the officers had perished.

The subject of my previous post, Iain Crichton Smith’s penned a poignant poem The Iolaire, about the tragedy, Peter May touched upon the tragedy in hius novel, The Chessmen, part of the Lewis Trilogy.

No other area of the country saw such a high percentage of its young, male, fight and die in the war.

Local man John Finlay Macleod’s actions were crucial in saving 40 lives. Macleod saw the crash from the shore, grabbed a rope, and jumped in the water to set up a rescue line. The other 39 survivors either swam to shore or were rescued from the wreck, meaning that the rescue line was responsible for more than half of the rescues that night.

Track of the Day; 30/12/17

Anti-Police - Demob, 1981