SURVIVORS SPEAK
FOR JEAN Giscombe and Irvin Campbell, the events of September 1, 1957 were no laughing matter at all. Aged 10 and 16, respectively, they were on the train bound for a church excursion that never happened, but today, they consider themselves lucky to be alive.
Giscombe’s friends on the church trip that Sunday numbered 10, six of whom died in the crash. “I am lucky to be alive,” Giscombe said as she recounted how she started out in one of the front coaches.
“The crash happened in the night during the return journey. My grandfather had told us not to sit in the front coach, and four of us obeyed him, but, ironically, he left us in the back and went to have a drink up front with his friends. We never saw him again,” Giscombe said.
It seems like the gods were on Giscombe’s side that night. Having gone to one of the rear coaches, she occupied a window seat, but the woman beside her requested the seat. She, too, perished.
Giscombe slept through the ordeal, so she did not hear a thing. She only awoke to realise that she was outside. Confused, she thought she was back at home in Kingston, but she saw people on the ground and heard crying. She decided to search for her grandpa, but only saw her grandma with some men around her.
“She was wearing white and it was bloody and dirty. I also saw a cousin of mine named Pepsi. He said he had escaped after several objects had fallen on top of him. My grandma lost an ear and got a cut on her head, but I was unscathed,” Giscombe said.
Six of Giscombe’s family members went over the precipice in the coach and their bodies have never been recovered. The memory of the crash is the only one she has retained from her 10th year, but, thankfully, Giscombe has not been plagued by nightmares. She is only scared to travel far distances and has never been back on a passenger train since that day.
With no cell phones or electric light in 1957, they got light from vehicles that came and from the crowd that brought torches. Giscombe and other survivors returned to Kingston the following Tuesday via a banana train. Many survivors were taken to Spaldings and Mandeville hospitals.
“I would like to see a permanent memorial erected at the crash site. I only went there once when they marked the 50th anniversary of the crash,” she said.