Prince Charles Lockerbie to attend equivalent Iolaire service
It has been announced that Prince Charles and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will join the descendants of those who died in the Western Isles’ Iolaire maritime disaster of 1919 at the national commemorative service scheduled for New Year’s Day to mark 100 years since the tragedy.
More than 200 men returning home after the end of the First World War, many of them from Lewis and Harris, drowned when the naval yacht sank.
HMY Iolaire hit a reef in bad weather near to Stornoway harbour on Lewis.
The commemoration event will see wreaths laid by Scotland’s most senior naval officer Rear Admiral John Weale and Norman Macdonald, convener of Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.
The service will be held at Stornoway’s Iolaire Memorial, which overlooks the scene of the sinking and will be conducted by The Very Reverend Dr Angus Morrison.
At the same time as the service on land, Rev James Maciver of Stornoway Free Church will conduct a similar service aboard Caledonian MacBrayne’s ferry MV Loch Seaforth.
The vessel will be lying near where the Iolaire hit the Beasts of Holm rocks on New Year’s Day in 1919.
More than 500 people will be on board the ferry, including schoolchildren from the Western Isles, who will throw 201 red carnations into the sea in remembrance of those who died. The bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie 30 years ago tomorrow (Friday) is the closest modern equivalent in terms of impact on a community to that suffered by the people of Lewis and Harris by the sinking of the Iolaire a century ago.
So said Sandy Matheson, honorary president of Stornoway Historical Society, at this month’s formal opening of the official Iolaire exhibition in Sandwick Hall.
In an evening of thoughts, prayers, poetry and music, Mr Matheson and the Reverend William Heenan, of St Columba’s Old Parish Church, were the main speakers at the event.
The exhibition is in the upstairs rooms of the Sandwick Hall – the public space nearest the Beasts of Holm where the yacht was lost on January 1, 1919, along with 201 lives – and is open until February.
Rev Heenan said: ‘These last four years of rolling commemorations for the First World War and the various major battles fought during it, have in some respect helped to prepare us for this the hardest and final of these commemorations – the loss of the Iolaire.
‘However, the silent grief, borne by the people of Lewis and Harris; the excruciating pain of the sorrow which has permeated every fibre in the warp and weft of the fabric of this society; and the lack of both information and answers as to why and how