Remembering the forgotten sailors of the Isle of Lewis
These sailors’ triumphant return to Lewis after the Armistice ended in tragedy on New Year’s Day 1919, discovers Luke Mintz
It was less than two months after the Armistice, and many of the 283 British servicemen on board HMY Iolaire were determined to get on with their lives after the brutal four-year slog of the First World War. The men were travelling home to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides when, in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1919, tragedy struck. The ship hit the “Beasts of Holm” rocks, just one mile away from Stornoway Harbour and sunk, killing 205 sailors – 181 of whom were from the island – in one of Britain’s worst maritime disasters of the century.
Each November, television crews train their attention on to the Cenotaph as we remember the one million Commonwealth soldiers killed in the First World War. This year’s Centenary saw special commemoration services across the country, with politicians, royals, and schoolchildren lining up to pay their respects. But since 1919, the Iolaire victims have often been forgotten. For many years, devastated residents of Lewis – the northern part of Lewis and Harris, the British Isles’ third largest island – were unsure whether to even include the dead in their official war commemorations; they had lost their lives because of the war, certainly, but their deaths fell outside the neat “1914 to 1918” time frame on war memorials across Britain.
Indeed, 100 years since the Iolaire crashed, the tragedy is barely remembered outside the area it directly affected, according to historian Dr Iain Robertson from the University of the Highlands and the Islands, who has just finished a new study looking at how the Lewis community coped with the aftermath.
Robertson spoke to 30 people across the island, looking at how memory of the tragedy was passed down through generations. He was helped by Dr Iain Donald at Abertay University, who created an app visualising untold stories from the disaster.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the extent of the devastation inflicted on Lewis a century ago. With a disproportionately high enlistment rate (19per cent of the male population), the island had already been ravaged by the First World War. The small township of North Tolsta, in which only 100 homes contained able-bodied men, lost 41 of its residents. It was an added cruelty, then, that the Iolaire victims died on what was supposed to be their triumphant journey home: they were survivors, or should have been. The sailors would have been able to see the lights of Stornoway Harbour as they plunged into the icy North Sea waters. The death toll would have been higher still if one sailor, John Macleod, had not swum ashore with a rope, allowing dozens of men to tug themselves to safety.
But islanders struggled to discuss the tragedy for decades afterwards, according to Dr Robertson, who traipsed across the windswept island this year, speaking to grandchildren of those killed. Survivors buried their traumatic memories deep within them, and children learnt not to ask about their dead fathers. “People by and large mourned deeply, but attempted to carry on with their daily lives and not talk about it, because the general consensus among the island folk was that it was too traumatic and too wounding,” Dr Robertson says.
He thinks many survivors suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but symptoms went ignored. Dr Robertson was particularly moved by the story of one man whose father was killed on the Iolaire, who waited until the end of his life before telling his son and daughter of their grandfather’s fate.
There were some public displays of grief, of course, but they were rare. Before an official memorial was built in 1958, islanders began to form a stone pile, or cairn, near the site of the disaster. Many of the widows left behind also received financial help from their neighbours, in-keeping with the island’s “widow’s share” tradition.
There were also hints of rebellion against the enforced silence. Widows were expected to wear black for the rest of their lives but rarely allowed to talk about their grief, Dr Robertson says. Aggrieved by the double standard, one group of women eventually flouted the rule, returning to the island one summer dressed in colour after working in Dundee. “They were the younger folk wanting to appear more modern. Dundee was at that time really vibrant, with lots of exciting things, and they would undoubtedly have been influenced by that. That would have hastened their decision to move out of the black.”
But for most islanders, the silence remained in force until at least the Sixties, when, tentatively, the children of the dead began to reflect on the disaster. Traditionally, new year was the island’s biggest celebration, but many mothers and grandmothers refused to celebrate it after 1919: the pain of remembering the Iolaire, which sunk on New Year’s Day, was too great.
The only expressions of grief that were allowed generally came through poetry, he says, which is unsurprising given the “highly developed poetic tradition” in Gaellic culture. Of all the stories he collected, Dr Robertson was most touched by many of the verses written in tribute to the Iolaire, and one in particular written by a former soldier who had returned from war, and learned of the deaths of his friends in the disaster.
It’s easy to see the island’s “Keep Calm and Carry On”-style approach as a product of its age. A stoic refusal to dwell on emotions is a far cry from the mood of 2018, when we are urged constantly to discuss our feelings and share every experience
‘People mourned deeply, but tried not to talk about it – it was too traumatic’
on social media. But Robertson thinks the phenomenon might also be explained by the no-nonsense, “Let’s Just Get On With It” approach found in rural communities; he thinks cities generally react differently to tragedies, pointing to the inferno at Grenfell Tower, which swiftly triggered an impressive action campaign from the local community.
The lessons of Iolaire and its aftermath are just as relevant now as they were in 1919, Dr Robertson thinks. “Regretfully, it isn’t as if society is short of collective disasters like this to think of,” he says, with 2017’s terrorist attacks in Manchester and London coming to mind, as well as the disastrous fire at Grenfell, which claimed 72 lives. There are many ways a community can cope with such a tragedy, Dr Robertson thinks, but burying its memory in a mist of silence is probably not the best approach.
“I’m not convinced that silence worked in this instance … it was definitely destructive, as well as constructive. But the community didn’t know how else to deal with it. I think what we have nowadays is actually an improvement.”