#gretna

$325,000/3 br/2.5 ba

Gretna, LA

With shopping in the area not exactly at its best in the run-up to Christmas — let’s be honest, we’re seriously lacking decent shops in town — I started wondering where else there was to go. That’s when I spotted a McGills advert for mystery trips, starting from £10, promising festive destinations. Curiosity got the better of me and I was booked and ready to go. Unfortunately, my first trip was…

Gretna, LA 8/21

It may be questioned whether in the long and bloodstained history of the Debatable Land where the tragedy took place there is set down anything more startlingly or poignantly tragic than the fate which, in the course of a few minutes of shock and flame, practically wiped out of existence a half battalion of the 7th of Leith Royal Scots.

Of nearly 500 officers and men who were on their way from their homes to fight their country’s battle at the Front little more than 50 answered the roll call – an incident as heartrendingly mournful as any recorded in Border history.

The Scotsman, May 24th, 1915

AS I WALK up a quiet, potholed lane past a chicken ranch there’s nothing in this featureless landscape half a mile north-west of the border to suggest that anything much ever happened here. But what did happen, on May 22nd, 1915, dominated the front pages of most of the western world’s newspapers, and caused widespread grief and mourning. Two hundred and twenty-seven people were killed in a three-train crash aggravated by a fire that engulfed the wreckage. Most of the dead were soldiers on their way to war: from Larbert to Gallipoli via Liverpool. Most of them never left Scottish soil. Several survivors later died on the Turkish peninsula. The inferno at Quintinshill remains Britain’s worst rail disaster and is still marked every year by the laying of wreaths for the dead.

The troop train had been 213 yards long, but it was concertinaed to 67. Doctors crawled below the wreckage to try to save lives, to perform ad hoc amputations. The British Railway Museum has a William the Fourth ‘king’s shilling’ found at the scene: it was badly warped by the heat.

Alexander Sutherland Neill, the future founder of the progressive Summerhill school, was standing in as a teacher in Gretna at the time. The scene had been like a silent film to him, the only sounds being the hissing of the engines and the pops of the cartridges as fire crept along the wreckage. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘Men were lying dead or dying; one soldier, with both legs torn off asked me for a cigarette, and he grinned as I lit it up for him,’ Neill recalled.

‘‘‘May as well lose them here as in France”,’ he said lightly. He died before the cigarette was half-smoked.’ (Neill! Neill! Orange Peel, 1976)

Neill had been one of the rescuers, having cycled to the scene after the postman had rushed through the village telling everybody that a Zeppelin had bombed a troop train. (Rumours of German saboteurs circulated freely, and there were fanciful reports of Zeppelin bases in the Cumberland or Galloway hills, some of them picked up by the local press.)

The local minister, James Stafford, cycled to Quintinshill too on a multi-coloured bike which Neill lampooned in his memoirs. The Rev. Stafford, who was very much an establishment person, often clashed with Neill over his liberal teaching methods. Stafford was Gretna parish minister for 36 years and would probably have served much longer had he not been among the 28 people killed when the Luftwaffe bombed a meeting of Freemasons at Gretna’s Mansfield Hall in April 1941. Stafford’s son Kenneth was 17 at the time of the Quintinshill disaster and it is likely he helped his father at the scene. He became a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, was badly wounded in France, and was awarded the Military Cross. He died of his injuries three days after the war ended.

Coincidentally, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was commissioned to write about Gretna during the First World War, was born on May 22nd (1859); he had a son Kingsley, who never got to hear victory bells, either. He died of pneumonia on October 28th, 1918, after surviving wounds sustained at the Somme.

I recall having read the transcript of the official disaster inquiry, in which an officer with the Royal Scots had stated that his most vivid recollection of the crash had been the subsequent call of a blackbird. Today there’s the beautifully fluty song of a blackbird that chirps and binks from its perch at the edge of Blacksyke wood. I walk away – towards the ‘Marriage Mecca’ past the poultry houses, where 16,000 hens died in a blaze in 2017.

The coastline of the Solway at Gretna would be uninspiring but for Monument number 3378, the Lochmabenstane, an enormous chunk of granite that was probably dropped during the Ice Age and became the location of an altar to the Celtic god Maponus, who was associated with Apollo. It had been part of a stone circle until farmers managed to break up the surrounding menhirs to ‘improve’ their land.

Were the stone able to speak, it might recount spectacles of Nuremberg rally proportions, of truces being pledged, of hostages being exchanged, of war rhetoric being yelled; of a church tumbling into the sea: Redkirk had stood on a receding promontory at Gretna until it subsided in 1675. There are no remains. The megalith might also tell of the unmarked Battle of Lochmabenstane (or Sark), which was fought in 1448. There is no trace of the battle, although it was the first Scottish field battle to be won against the English since the Battle of Otterburn in 1388. As I traverse this characterless land that is scarred by high-voltage power pylons and features a sewerage works and a refuse collection centre, it is difficult to visualise a theatre of war where as many as 3,000 English soldiers and 600 Scots met their maker.

I watch a dark line of geese drill into the clouds towards the Solway Moss, a peat bog out near Longtown, where in 1542, an estimated 17,000 Scots were massacred by English forces (or drowned as they retreated). James V had a breakdown because of it and died shortly afterwards – days after the birth of his daughter, the future Mary, Queen of Scots.

If the Lochmabenstane could speak, it might also tell us of the very well-publicised runaway weddings for which Gretna Green has long been famous. Or it might reveal the location of the lost bells of Bowness-on-Solway across the water in England. For whatever reason raiders from the village of Dornock (between Gretna and Annan) made off with Bowness’s church bells in 1626. But they ditched them to lighten the weight on their boat during the chase. In retaliation Bowness pinched the bells of Dornock and those of Middlebie, near Lockerbie; and the English village still has them. For four centuries every time a new minister is inducted in Dornock or Middlebie, he asks for the bells to be returned, and there’s always the same reply: ‘Give us OUR bells back first.’. It’s hardly the Elgin marbles, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Dornock at that time was a huddle of mud huts. A future minister referred to 25 or 26 such houses as ‘exceeding warm and comfortable’ (James Smaill, Old Statistical Account, 1791). The whole neighbourhood assembled, ‘each with a dung fork, a spade, or some such instrument.’ A house was moulded together with straw and clay within a few hours after which there was ‘a good dinner and plenty of drink which is provided for them, where they have music and a dance, with which, and other marks of festivity, they conclude the evening. This is called a daubing and, in this manner, they make a frolic of what would otherwise be a very dirty and disagreeable job.’

One comes away from Moorside marvelling at the adaptability of the nation, at its power of improvisation, at its reserve of brain and energy, and at the promise which all these qualities give for our future place among mankind.

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, Annandale Observer, December 1st, 1916

COME THE WAR to end all wars, the Ministry of Munitions built ‘the largest factory in the world’ on the seaward side of the Debatable Land. Nine miles long, two miles wide, it bestraddled the border, from the newly established Scottish townships of Eastriggs and Gretna, to Longtown in Cumberland. Twenty thousand people, most of them young women, worked there to tackle the shortage of ammunition and, by 1917, they were churning out 800 tons of cordite a week at H.M. Factory, Gretna, which had thirty miles of road; 100 miles of water mains; 125 miles of railway track; thirty-four railway engines; a water treatment plant which processed 10 million gallons a day; a telephone exchange that handled millions of calls; bakeries that made thousands of meals and loaves; and a laundry for 6,000 items a day. The names of the streets were inspired by colonialism (Brisbane Road, Sydney Road, Durban Road, The Rand, Empire Way, and so on).

In 1916 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, then a war propagandist, wrote a syndicated article on Gretna and Eastriggs, in which he called them the ‘Miracle Towns of Moorside’: ‘perhaps the most remarkable place in the world’ and ‘one of the miracles of present-day Britain’. A year previously it had been ‘an inhospitable waste’, ‘a lonely peat bog fringing the sea, with a hinterland of desolate plain, over which the gulls swooped and screamed’.

‘In the centre of the colony is a considerable nucleus of solid brick houses which should be good for a century or more,’ wrote Conan Doyle.

‘Here are the main offices, the telephone stations, the club for the staff, the hospital, the cinema theatre, a row of shops, and a cluster of residential houses. Radiating out from this centre are long lines of wooden erections to hold the workers, cottages for married couples, bungalows for groups of girls, and hostels which hold as many as 70 in each.’

This township, reminiscent of Dawson City in the Klondyke gold rush, was a far cry from what Celia Fiennes had seen in 1698. Fiennes was in the vanguard of a long trail of landed folk, or travel writers with members of the gentry as patrons, who would cross the border to gather information on how to tell England’s elite how coarse we Scots were. When the viscount’s granddaughter crossed the Solway ford and rode across the Scottish moors with her two servants, there was no Gretna, only a small market town called Aitchison’s Bank, which is now a beef farm. Fiennes was not impressed with the Borderers, who seemed to be ‘very poor people, which I impute to their sloth’.

‘I took them for people which were sick, seeing two or three great wenches as tall and big as any women sat hovering between their bed and chimney corner all idle, doing nothing,’ declared the early explorer, for whom the chimneyless houses of Aitchison’s Bank were ‘just like the booths at a fair’.

She recorded in her book Through England [sic] on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary: ‘I saw but one house that look’d like a house about a quarter of a mile, which was some gentleman’s, that was built two or three rooms and some over them of brick and stone; the rest were all like barns or huts for cattle.’

Nor had it changed much by the time the French-American traveller Louis Simond passed through. He wrote in 1811 of ragged children ‘swarming on dunghills’ and living in thatched huts with barrels stuck through in lieu of chimneys: ‘The stable and dwelling are under the same roof; one door serves for both – and the dark runnings from the heap of dung, and the heap of peat, piled up against the house, drain under the floor, and some upon it.’ (Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain).

H.M. Factory, Gretna, was dismantled in the 1920s, and hardly a brick remains of it all now, just bits of foundations. When you wander the Solway coast near Gretna today the chances are you’ll never see another soul: it is a far cry from the metropolis of the war years. In 2021 a planning application was lodged to use the redundant depot at Eastriggs to house rail locomotives, cars and coaches. Two years later the Ministry of Defence announced plans for a storage facility at Longtown, to cost £86 million. It had all been part of the huge first world war factory, that became an ammunition depot during the second.