Tragedy struck when the naval yacht Iolaire struck a reef on approaching Stornoway Harbour in the early hours of New Years Day 1919.
There are no shortage of tragedies I post about throughout the year, to me this is one of the saddest. The Iolaire were carrying troops home from the horrors of World War One, many on the Yacht would have been looking over to the lights of Stornoway when this cruel twist of fate took the lives over 200 Lewis men and 24 crew, the vessel was only about 20 yards from Stornoway Harbour. Some have labelled it the 'crowning sorrow of the war'
A report in the Stornoway Gazette recorded the impact of the tragedy:
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.
Messages of sympathy were received from far and wide, including from the King and Queen and from Lord Leverhulme, who had purchased the island of Lewis the previous year. He also led calls for a disaster fund to be set up and fund raising events were initiated. The Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Associations of Edinburgh and Glasgow arranged to take collections in all picture houses under their control for a week. A fundraising concert was arranged in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on 14th February 1919, at which Scott Skinner, the acclaimed fiddler and composer and many others performed.
Calls for an enquiry came quickly, amidst suggestions of negligence on the part of the crew. A public inquiry was held in February 1919 and the jury found that insufficient care had been taken on the approach to Stornoway, as the vessel did not slow down or change course. In addition, it was not carrying enough life-saving equipment and there had been delays in the emergency services reaching the scene. HMY Iolaire was equipped with lifeboats for 100 men but was sailing with more than 300. There followed various recommendations, including that the Lighthouse Commissioners consider putting up a light on the Holm side of the harbour, and that the Government should improve travelling facilities for naval ratings and soldiers.
A naval inquiry held at the time was not made public until 1970. It had concluded that no blame could be attributed to anybody as the ship’s log had been lost and all of the officers had perished.
Even before the Iolaire sinking, The Outer Hebrides had a hard war even before the sinking, Lewis and Harris, the two northern islands of the Western Isles, had a population of 34,600 in 1911. Estimates report about 1,500 of those were killed during the war, and with another 201 lost on the Iolaire, that was an immense cumulative loss of young men and fathers.
There were 79 survivors in total of this disaster, it remains the UK’s worst peacetime maritime disaster since the sinking of the Titanic.
There are accounts of drenched, numb survivors immediately walking home across the moors in the storm, too traumatised to wait for help; of women who rushed to the shore to find their sons’ and brothers’ inert bodies among the rocks or surf, their baggage and presents strewn over the sand; of the stream of coffins being taken by horse and cart to be buried every day throughout the following week.
