Meeting of the Parliament 19 December 2018
The sinking of the Iolaire with its loss of life on that night in 1919 must be one of the cruellest events in Scottish history. I thank the constituency MSP for Lewis and Harris, Alasdair Allan, for giving us a chance to reflect on it today, and to remember the men who survived the horrors of the first world war but never made it home to their families.
Unlike many members who are speaking in today’s debate, I do not have a personal connection to Lewis or to those who were affected by the lolaire tragedy, but it has been emotional listening to members who have such connections—especially Angus MacDonald, who made a powerful speech.
I wanted to speak because I remember hearing of the lolaire when I was at school. I had a very good O grade history teacher, and I remember him going into a lot of detail about the impact that the war had on people at home in Scotland. It was not part of the curriculum, but he added that extra bit to it. He wanted us, as fairly cushioned 15-year-olds in the 1980s, to try to grasp in some small way the devastating legacy that war had had on Scottish society. The lolaire disaster was one of the events that he told us about, as he tried to bring home the myriad of ways in which the war had hollowed out a generation. His telling of the disaster really made an impression on me.
The terrible event is said to have set in train an exodus of young people from the island in years to come—in particular, of young women who had lost their loves. One of the most heartbreaking accounts that I read said that an engagement ring was found in the pocket of one young man who drowned. Even 100 years on it is heartbreakingly difficult to read the accounts of toys being washed up on the beach that had been bought by young fathers as they looked forward to seeing their kids after so much time apart.
The young women of Lewis now lived in a community in which the male population of the island had been decimated. Hopes of future marriages and raising families were lost to a generation of Lewis women. Thoughts of a future raising a new generation of Lewis children were lost to many families. Many families were robbed of their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers in communities that had already lost more than 1,000 young men in battle.
After reading more this week, I was struck by this comment from local Lewis historian Roddy Murray. He said:
“We can speculate on its contribution to the mass emigrations of the twenties, its effect on the Lewis character, the rebirth of an inherent fatalism. Its effect was like the Passover of the Old Testament.”
It is fair to say that the war and the loss of young men possibly set in train mass emigration to Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Australia, as people tried to leave the tragedy behind. We can read accounts of those who were left behind in Lewis, with the shock of the disaster leaving many of them unable ever to speak of what had happened, or to vocalise the unfairness of the hand that the island had been dealt.
As many members have said, the lolaire is second only to the sinking of the Titanic in lives lost through an accident at sea in peacetime. However, there are no Hollywood film epics and no minute-by-minute drama documentaries on repeat on the History Channel about the disaster. Perhaps the reason is that the grief was so concentrated in one community and, therefore, was too painful ever to be dramatised or retold in anything other than a quiet and contemplative way—if at all.
I have tried to compare the sinking with other tragedies that I could relate to. It was similar to the feeling after the Piper Alpha disaster, which many people in my area found hard to speak of. As Alasdair Allan said, the effect of that scale of loss of life on an island community is something that people who do not live in an island community—like me—cannot really get their heads around.
This year, which is the centenary of the first world war’s end, we have rightly talked often of the sacrifice that was made by so many in the war. I thank Alasdair Allan for allowing us, once again, to pay our respects to the returning servicemen of Lewis, their families and the community that was so deeply scarred by that tragic accident.
13:30