The Iolaire disaster: heartbreak too close to home on Lewis

Some 205 men, almost all from the Long Island of Lewis and Harris, died when the Iolaire went down in the early hours of Ne’erday, 1919. They were all Royal Navy or Royal Navy Reserve men returning from their service in World War One. Most were reservists – with little protected employment on the islands, the Hebrides had Britain’s largest concentration of naval reservists per head of population and comprised a fifth of all who served in the Royal Navy Reserve from 1914 to 1918. Of the crew, 20 men died, none of them islanders.

The Western Isles surrendered far too many of its men to the bloodshed of the war that didn’t end all wars – some 367 men from North and South Uist and Benbecula were killed in the opening days of the Battle of Loos in 1915 alone. No other area of the UK lost such a large percentage of its male population, but the Iolaire sinking was classed as a peacetime disaster as the Armistice had taken effect seven weeks beforehand.

About a fifth of the 6500 men from Lewis who took part in the war died during it and immediately afterwards on the Iolaire, with people of both genders also succumbing to the Spanish Flu pandemic. After the war and the Iolaire sinking, emigration became common among families, and especially young people, across the Long Island. Lewis had a population of 30,000 in 1911 and by 1931 it was down to 25,000. Now it is only around 20,000.

Had 17-year-old Mary Anne MacLeod been able to marry – men were in chronic shortage – and settle down on a croft around her home hamlet of Tong or nearby Stornoway, she might well have stayed on Lewis and not boarded the SS Transylvania for New York to join her sisters in domestic service in 1930.

She arrived on the day after her 18th birthday with $50 in her pocket, having confirmed her intention to become a US citizen. She later married Fred Trump.

It is stretching it, perhaps, to say that the Iolaire’s sinking caused her to emigrate, but many accounts of the time say the disaster on top of the war losses affected the islanders’ mood for years afterwards and made many of them seek a new life abroad. I suspect The National is not top of the president’s morning reading list, but perhaps the commemoration of the centenary could be brought to his attention and elicit a tweet of sympathy for his mother’s island, for maybe, just maybe, it was the loss of the Iolaire that made emigration from Lewis to America seem a better option.

There have been books, songs, documentaries and poems about the sinking of the Iolaire, and all testify to the shattering nature of the catastrophe. The number drowned was more than 1% of the male population of Lewis, equivalent to, say, 3000 men dying in a single incident in Glasgow today.

In terms of the number killed, it remains the worst British peacetime disaster in home waters in the 20th century, with only the sinking of the SS Norge off Rockall in 1904 killing more – but none of the 635 lost at sea then were from the UK. No wonder the Iolaire had such an effect.

Lewis bore the brunt of the losses. Scarcely any of the small scattered communities on the northern part of the Long Island were untouched by the disaster. The homes of the 20 dead crewmen ranged from Penzance in Cornwall to Aberdeen. There were five fatalities from Harris and two from Berneray but the remainder of the dead men were all from Lewis.

For a comprehensive account of the catastrophe and its aftermath you could read John MacLeod’s magisterial and passionate When I Heard The Bell, or the recently published and very detailed The Darkest Dawn: The Story of the Iolaire Tragedy, by Malcolm Macdonald and the late Donald John Macleod, which has many new insights into the sinking and what happened to Lewis and Harris afterwards.

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BUT I am going to concentrate on what happened on that dreadful night, and I will lay the blame at one door – as they mostly do on the island to this day.

Though the war was not fully over – the Navy maintained a presence in the Baltic and the Royal Scots and Highland Light Infantry, for example, continued to fight against the Bolsheviks in Russia – the Admiralty decreed that the Reservists and Royal Naval personnel could go home to the Hebrides. Some had been fully demobbed, others were given shore leave for New Year.

The dash for home can be easily imagined. The chance to bring in the New Year at your own fireside surrounded by your family and friends was a huge pull, and hundreds of men freed from wartime duties crowded onto trains that took them north to Kyle of Lochalsh, the end of the line and the embarkation point for the ships that would take them home on Hogmanay.

Two ships were in the harbour. One was a Royal Mail steamer, the Sheila, heading on its regular route for Portree on Skye and then Tarbert on Harris. Most of the men from Harris went on that ship which got them home safely.

The Lewis men then crowded aboard the Iolaire, the Gaelic word for Eagle. She had previously been named Iolanthe, Mione and the Almathea. She was launched as a luxury private yacht at Ramage & Ferguson’s shipyard in Leith in 1881 and had been commandeered by the Admiralty as a transport and reconnaissance vessel, being renamed the Iolaire when she was sent to the naval base at Stornoway late in 1918.

Her capacity was no more than 100 – the number who could be accommodated on her two lifeboats – but somehow 284 passengers and crew got aboard. There were just 80 lifebelts and many of these were ignored. The junior officers and ratings ranged in age from 17 to 51, with a surprising number in their 40s – they were mostly Reservists, don’t forget, who had been called up to full active service.

The Iolaire’s captain Richard Gordon William Mason was a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve. The ship was largely crewed by men of the Mercantile Marine, and they would have been aware of the overcrowding. They had confidence, however, in both commander Mason and his navigating officer, lieutenant Edmund Cotter, and surviving crew members testified that both men were sober – some disagree and say they had imbibed on board.

The official Admiralty report recorded that “in view of the fact that the ratings were looking forward to spending the New Year at home with such eagerness, it was natural for commander Mason to take such a large number, although there were not sufficient boats or lifeboats to meet such an emergency”.

The officers were, however, both new to the route from Kyle of Lochalsh to Stornoway, and that may have been the biggest factor in what happened. As they crossed the Minch all seemed calm aboard the Iolaire, even if the weather was getting rougher the further west they travelled.

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OF all the explanations of what happened, the simplest and most obvious is likely to have been the truth. Between them, Mason and Cotter made a terrible error – and we do not know which of them was most responsible as both died that night.

Suffice to say that as it approached Stornoway Harbour, the Iolaire was seen by a local fisherman to be off the usual inbound course. The yacht duly struck a well-known hazard – the rocks known as the Beasts of Holm. A few yards either way and the Iolaire could probably have kept going, but at 1.55am on January 1, she hit the rocks head on and began to sink.

Her officers and crew did everything they could to keep her afloat and allow men to escape. The appalling events that then took place are particularly heart-breaking because the Iolaire began to founder just yards from the shore. Men rushed into the lifeboats but too many jumped in them and they both capsized, throwing the occupants into the freezing water.

Those who could swim tried to make it ashore, and one hero was John Finlay MacLeod of Ness who made it to land with a rope that he was able to secure with difficulty, allowing 40 men to haul themselves ashore.

In all, some 79 men survived, including 20 crew members. The last to be plucked to safety was Donald Morrison of Knockaird, who was rescued at dawn after clinging to the exposed mast for hours. His brother Angus drowned.

Stories of heroism and sacrifice abounded. Donald Macleod of North Tolsta got ashore but could not find his brother Malcolm and swam out to try and rescue him, only for both brothers to drown.

Donald MacAskill of Shulishader gave his lifebelt to his brother Duncan who survived. Donald was a good swimmer but he was swept away by the stormy sea and his body was never found.

The call to abandon ship had been made as the yacht sank ever lower in the water. At about 3.25am on that Ne’erday morning, Iolaire slipped under the waves with only the top of her masts showing.

It was their nearness to safety and home which compounded the tragedy. According to the author Malcolm Macdonald, the body of 23-year-old John Macaskill was washed up in the bay at North Sandwick, just yards from home.

MacDonald, who chairs Stornoway Historical Society, also quotes eyewitness Katie Watt who was six at the time. “My goodness, that sight, it never went out of my memory,” she said.

“From the shore at the battery all the way over to Sandwick was black with bodies, and the waves that were coming in, they were throwing the bodies up onto the shore on top of all of these bodies.”

From all over the island, families rushed to the scene, but most were diverted to the makeshift morgue in the naval base where the recovered bodies were laid out. Papers and letters salvaged from the sea were kept separately to help with identification.

The bodies of a third of those lost were never found. The widows and orphans created by the disaster lived on, their grief often inconsolable.

Author John MacLeod tracked down the last remaining orphan, Mor MacLeod, who died in 2012 at the age of 97. She told him that she and her mother never discussed the loss of her father, and there are many similar accounts of families so devastated by the Iolaire tragedies that it was unmentionable – as if the whole island retreated into itself.

The Scotsman reported the tragedy on January 6: “The villages of Lewis are like places of the dead. The homes of the island are full of lamentation – grief that cannot be comforted. Scarcely a family has escaped the loss of a near blood relative. Many have had sorrow heaped upon sorrow.”

The Admiralty quickly found that nobody was to blame for the sinking and they caused outrage by trying to sell the wreck just days after the Iolaire went down. But a public inquiry found that the commanding officers had committed the navigational error. That has to be the verdict still.