Iolaire Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 47 - Iolaire
MICHAEL PARK: It is 8th October 1906. You’re standing in the dock at Stornoway Sheriff Court and you’re hitting a riddy. That is to say you’re more than a little embarrassed.
It all happened just over a week ago. Some drink had been taken. John MacKenzie, Roddy McLeod and you had been having a few wee snifters when MacKenzie started giving out about the schoolteacher.
Clemenson was his name - everyone knew him.
Everyone knew everyone.
Anyway. MacKenzie was on the school board and had taken issue with Clemenson not supporting him at the election. He had told you what their problem was but the drink made your memory foggy.
So there you are at half past two in the morning, banging on the teacher’s door, pulling up his vegetable patch, his flowerbeds, flinging peat at his roof.
Your mother’s sitting somewhere behind you with her head in her hands. You’re not the only one who’s embarrassed.
No-one could identify MacLeod for sure so he ended up getting off with it. Not proven - a quirk of Scots Law that means a jury can think you may well be guilty but there’s not enough evidence to prove it.
As for you and MacKenzie? You’re not getting off with anything. Twenty days in the jail or a fine of three guineas: each.
You’ll both pay the fine - the equivalent of about £250 in today’s money - the jail time wasn’t worth it.
This is Scotland, a podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is July 1914 and you step off the boat in Stornoway. It’s been days since you left the farm in Punta Arenas in the very south of Chile.
There’s a boom in sheep farming out there, a roaring trade in wool and meat which is frozen and sent all around the world. You live among a load of other Scots who are using their experiences on the crofts and the farms of their homeland, and profiting from working as shepherds. The demand has never been higher.
And the weather’s a wee bit better than your father’s croft at 21 Balallan.
But here you are now, reading the newspaper. They’re still talking about that Austro-Hungarian Duke that got assassinated in Sarajevo. It had been almost a month since it happened but they were talking about it leading to war.
Your summer holiday on Lewis wasn’t going to be interrupted by any war between two countries you’d never visited and you helped your dad out on the croft during the day and whiled away the evenings drinking with your old friends.
The court case and the injured pride of the school teacher were by-gones, for the most part. People still seemed to whisper about you when you turned your back.
Malcolm Martin. The one that ran off to Patagonia for chucking peat at a schoolhouse.
It is March 1916. You’ve been stuck at home, on a windswept isle, helping your father tend sheep for more than a year. The outbreak of a war between two countries you’d never heard of has escalated quickly.
The world seems to be on fire and reports that you read from the fronts make the war sound like an unappealing prospect indeed. But a prospect it is.
Your conscription papers have come through. You weren’t one of the Lewis an Harris men who ran out to sign up when Britain declared war on Germany on 4th August 1914. You had sheep to get back to in Punta Arenas.
When war broke out, you couldn’t return to your adopted home in South America since Chile and Argentina were hot-beds of diplomatic and naval intrigue. The Panama Canal had been closed to shipping and therefore there was no choice but to sail round the southern tip of the continent - prime territory for German U-boats.
Your papers arrive when conscription is introduced in 1916. You are desperate to get back to Punta Arenas, or at least get out of the firing line. Who can blame you? The stories from the front are horrifying and screeds of casualties are in every newspaper you pick up.
The Military Service Act states that if you were over 18 or under 41 on August 15th 1915 then you were automatically enlisted for the period of the war. There were exceptions though, illness, conscientious objection, war-vital employment… things like that.
But there was also an exemption for hardship that might arise from being in active military service. Things like ‘exceptional financial or business obligations’.
You submit your appeal on 25th February… the Chairman of the local Military Service Appeal Tribunal board’s handwriting is neat, considered, matter-of-fact in his report.
CHRIS MORIARTY: “This appellant is a shepherd who came to Lewis on a visit shortly before the outbreak of the present war. He was not therefore ‘ordinarily resident’ in Great Britain on August 15 last and the Military Service Act does not apply to him. Further, he was engaged in his occupation as a Shepherd at Punta Arenas, South America and when making said visit to Lewis his intention was and is to return to Punta Arenas where he has a troop of horses and other property – all his property and interests are situated there and Some are now requiring Appellants personal attention.”
MICHAEL PARK: Your appeal is denied on 31st March 1916. Suffice to say that exceptional financial or business obligations isn’t designed for men with a few horses and property in Chile.
The same is true for many men from the island had crofts to look after and also applied for exemptions for military service. Most were denied.
Your brother Finlay is the first Lewisman to join the Royal Flying Corps. He’ll be injured at the Somme and invalided home within the year.
You find yourself in the Royal Naval Reserve. Compared to being up to your knees in mud and rats on the Western Front, it’s a pretty cushy number but your life in Chile weighs heavily on you, under the sun, with your sheep, and your horses. Hard, honest work that you loved.
Malcolm Martin. Wrong place at the wrong time, getting drunk with MacKenzie and McLeod in 1906. Wrong place at the wrong time visiting your parents and your brothers and sisters in 1914.
You’re assigned to HMS Pembroke, a shore station with a number of auxiliary vessels that you shunt between, working as a deckhand. Keeping out of trouble.
Sometimes you go out with the fishermen. These fishermen don’t catch fish. It’s a naval euphemism for the crews of the minesweepers who go out to try and clear German mines.
It was just like catching fish. You used wires instead of nets to drag submerged mines to the surface and then, instead of hauling them in, you used ship mounted guns to detonate them.
It’s dangerous as all hell, but it’s one of the more interesting assignments.
Still it’s a fair bit safer to see out the war scrubbing decks and maintaining ship exteriors at Pembroke.
And that’s what you do. November 11th 1918 rolls around and passes and the war comes to an end with an armistice. It’s not as simple as everyone throwing down their guns - or in your case your mop - and heading for home.
It takes a bit of time for discharge papers to come through, some of those in service are retained, but for hundreds of men from Lewis an’ Harris, in one form or another, it’s time to go home.
It is Hogmanay, 1918. You’re standing on the dock at Kyle of Lochalsh among sailors and soldiers. Hundreds of you, all delighted to have made it home. A few of you have taken a drink.
Okay, more than a few of you have taken a drink. There are almost 1,000 men from the island who aren’t there - they’ll never make it home.
There’s a ferry in the harbour, loading soldiers aboard. The Sheila. The Naval officer is pretty sure that she’ll end up overloaded in time for sailing so a call is made to send another ship from Stornoway to carry the sailors home.
Two more trains arrive as you stand on the harbour, watching the converted yacht pull into the harbour. The Iolaire (eel-aw-ruh), or the Iolaire (aye-oh-lair) as it was often referred to as, is loaded up quickly with sailors who are keen to be the first foot of their loved ones on New Year’s Day.
She sets sail in high winds, 283 people packed on board.
The winds continue to howl and the weather gets steadily worse and worse until the Iolaire is just a mile or so from Stornoway harbour. It’s almost 2am and the sailors aboard can see the lights of home.
All the Captain of the ship has to do now is guide her through the dangerous rocks known as the Beasts of Holm and then bring her in, letting the triumphant men go home. She turns away from the wind....
...a second too late.
There’s a horrible, crunching, grinding noise as the Iolaire makes contact with the rocks.
At full speed.
It doesn’t take long for the Iolaire to sink. Seven Harrismen, one hundred and seventy four Lewismen and twenty crew members will lose their lives in the icy waters.
Seventy nine will survive, some clinging to the mast all night.
You are not one of them.
Malcolm Martin. 38 years old. Wrong place at the wrong time, getting drunk with MacKenzie and McLeod in 1906. Wrong place at the wrong time visiting your parents in 1914. In the wrong place at the wrong time, along with 205 of your brothers on New Year’s Day 1919.
LEANNE MILNE:
No one now alive in Lewis can ever forget the 1st January 1919, and future generations will speak of it as the blackest day in the history of the island, for on it 200 of our bravest and best perished on the very threshold of their homes under the most tragic circumstances.
The terrible disaster at Holm on New Year’s morning has plunged every house and every heart in Lewis into grief unutterable.
Language cannot express the anguish, the desolation, the despair which this awful catastrophe has inflicted.
One thinks of the wide circle of blood relations affected by the loss of even one of the gallant lads, and imagination sees those circles multiplied by the number of the dead, overlapping and overlapping each other till the whole island – every hearth and home it is shrouded in deepest gloom.
The Stornoway Gazette, 5th January 1919
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