The Drowned and the Saved

When War Came to the Hebrides

Les Wilson, George Robertson

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788850278
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

Saltire Society "History Book of the Year" Award winner. "An absorbing and moving book" on the World War I shipwrecks off of Scotland's Islay island ( The Scotsman ). The loss of two British ships crammed with American soldiers bound for the trenches of the First World War brought the devastation of war directly to the shores of the Scottish island of Islay. The sinking of the troopship Tuscania by a German U-Boat on 5 February 1918 was the first major loss of US troops in in the war. Eight months after the people of Islay had buried more than 200 Tuscania dead, the armed merchant cruiser Otranto collided with another troopship during a terrible storm. Despite a valiant rescue attempt by HMS Mounsay, the Otranto drifted towards Islay, hit a reef, throwing 600 men into the water. Just 19 survived; the rest were drowned or crushed by the wreckage. Based on the harrowing personal recollection of survivors and rescuers, newspaper reports and original research, Les Wilson tells the story of these terrible events, painting a vivid picture which also "pays tribute to the astonishing bravery and humanity of islanders, who risked their lives pulling men from the sea, cared for survivors, and buried the dead" ( The Herald ). "A well-researched account of loss and tragedy." — Oban Times

1

A Stroke in the Dark

It came on them like a strange plague, taking their sons away and then killing them, meaninglessly, randomly.

From Iain Crichton Smith, The Telegram

Islay lies on a bed of ancient rock, set amid often angry waters at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Ireland is to the south, mainland Scotland to the east, and Newfoundland nearly 3,000 miles due west. Islay isn’t the biggest of the Hebrides, or the most populous, but its strategic position on the western seaboard of Scotland makes it stand out in the histories of immigration, emigration and war.

The islanders had already drunk deeply from the well of grief when tragedy washed up on their shores in February 1918. By the time the troopship Tuscania was torpedoed, 125 Islay men had already been killed in the war, and many hundreds more were still fighting on land and at sea. On an island of small and closely knit communities, not a family would have been untouched.

The pain of parting when men are called to war was captured by Islay bard Duncan Johnston, who served in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders until he was gassed in 1916. His song about leaving a girl to go to war, Sine Bhàn (Fair Sheena), is still sung on Islay today. Such a theme could have moved a soldier to write in English, French, German or Russian, but Johnston wrote in his native Scots Gaelic. Here are just two stanzas:

Feumaidh mise triall gun dàil

Chi mi ’m bàrr a croinne sròl.

M’ ’eudail bhàn, o soraidh slàn!

Na caoin a luaidh, na sil na deòir!

Cha ghaoir-cath’ no toirm a’ chàs’

Dh’ fhàg mi’n dràsd’ fo gheilt is bròn

’S e na dh’fhàg mi air an tràigh,

Sìne Bhàn a rinn mo leòn.

Parting time is drawing nigh,

Flags are waving at masthead,

Darling child, O do not sigh!

Do not cry, my lovely maid!

It isn’t war or cannon’s roar

Unmans me now and makes me mourn,

My heart is left on yonder shore,

My lonesome lass; my sweet, forlorn.

Hebridean islanders were used to partings. Since the mid-eighteenth century there had been mass emigration from Highland Scotland, and names like New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo and Chicago tripped easily off the tongues of Islay folk who had kin there. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Islay’s history was already deeply entwined with that of the brave new republic across the ocean. But within four years the islanders had learned a fearful new geography – Mons, Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme, Gallipoli. Islay people had blood relations in these places – fighting in the trenches, or already in their graves.

Most of the fallen had worn the uniforms of famous Scottish regiments, including that of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, which has a long tradition of recruiting on Islay. Some islanders, who in peaceful times had sought to make new lives far from home, fell alongside Canadian and Australian comrades. Islay men also died simply following the peacetime calling of merchant seaman. Others, many of them fishermen, were killed while serving in the Royal Naval Reserve and the RNR Trawler Section – a fleet of commandeered fishing boats that had been converted to serve as minesweepers. Minesweeping was a dangerous job, and cost the lives of at least two Islay men.

Some of the bodies of Islay’s dead were never found, but most lie under plain, uniform headstones in foreign fields now maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. At home on Islay, friends and loved ones had been denied the farewell rites of funerals, or graves to visit and tend. But Islay was soon to be overwhelmed with funerals and graves. The losses of the Tuscania and the Otranto gave the war-weary islanders a purpose and a cause to unite behind. Soldiers and sailors who had survived the shipwrecks found safety, sustenance and kindness among the islanders. The dead found hearts that would grieve for them and willing hands to lay them to rest.

Islay is the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides, lying between the Scottish mainland and Northern Ireland. At 240 square miles it is Scotland’s fifth biggest island. The mild climate favours agriculture and tourism, but winter gales are common. Even today Islay’s lifeline ferries to the mainland, with all their sophisticated navigation and stabilising equipment, cancel sailings in extreme weather.

Islay was, and remains, an island of scattered villages and farmhouses. Today it is home to just over 3,000 people, but the 1911 census shows that the pre-war population was twice that. About 80% of the islanders spoke Gaelic. The great majority of the people lived by farming, fishing and distilling whisky (for which the island is justifiably famous). Native islanders are called Ileachs, and their surnames appear again and again in Islay’s history, on its war memorials and on today’s electoral roll – Anderson, Campbell, Currie, Darroch, Ferguson, Gilchrist, Johnstone, MacArthur, MacDonald, MacDougall, McIndeor, MacLellan, MacMillan, McPhail, McPhee, MacTaggart . . . and many more.

Islay was remote. The first motor car didn’t arrive until 1914, there were no telephones, the first aeroplane didn’t land on Islay until 1928, and the island wasn’t connected to mainland electricity until 1965. But when war broke out in 1914 Islay enjoyed strong family and community ties that gave islanders a pride of place and a vigorous local culture.

Four years of conflict took its toll. By the dawn of 1918 Islay, like the rest of Britain, was sick of war. As well as the carnage inflicted on soldiers and sailors, civilians were suffering from shortages, rationing, rising prices and taxes, and were in constant dread of the ‘deepest sympathy’ telegram. A letter from the spring of that year, now in the Museum of Islay Life, reveals something of how the island was being affected. In it, Robert Smith of Laggan Farm brings his friend, Andrew Barr, an artillery corporal serving on the Salonica front, up to date with the news.

You would hear that young Walter MacKay is reported killed, but I understand that they have not got word from the War Office. It is a pity if it is true. Two of the McCuaigs who used to be at Laggan are ‘missing’, Neil and John, nice boys they were. John Bland is here just now. He was in Italy and had only been three days in the trenches when he was hit in the eye by some shell splinters and has been in hospital since until recently. He is nearly better but has to wear glasses. He is a 2nd Lieut in the 5th Cheshires. Last night Laggan Bay was livened by the presence of 6 mine sweepers which spent the night there, anchored near the Big Strand. This is the season for Gulls eggs and the Bowmore boys are on the hunt for them Sundays and Saturdays. Farmers are going to be hit hard under the latest Budget, they have to pay taxes on double the rents. Laggan will have to tootle up to the tune of about £31-10/-. If Kaiser Bill has called the tune somebody has to ‘pay the piper’ but folk are well off that have only got to pay instead of fighting. I am going to be hit this time not paying income tax, alas, but through the increased rates for postage, 1½d a go after 1st June. I must ‘huff’ some of my “best girls” to save writing. With regard to writing oftener I would like to do so but I am not so keen on writing letters as I used to be and since the War began one has not so much pleasure in writing, everything being overshadowed by the ‘Great Adventure’. Yet I would gladly do so, when you are so keen to hear news of the old country and of that particular ‘tight little island’ out in the Atlantic. Yes, I wish you were back home again and may the day not be far distant.

Charles MacNiven, an Islay bard with a talent for pawky humour, lamented that the war with Germany was cramping his social life by taking Islay’s young men out of the marriage market.

Tha ’m pòsadh dhìth san rìoghachd seo, se sin aon nì tha dearbhte,

Tha feum air tuille shaighdearan chum oillt chur air a’ Ghear-mailt.

This country’s short of marriages, that’s one thing that’s shown for certain,

For more soldiers are essential now for frightening the Germans.

The Kilchoman bard would be writing in a much more serious tone before the war was over.

In April 1917 the might of America – expressed through its dynamic industrial economy and the youth and vigour of its people – came to the aid of the Old World and entered the war that had been bleeding Europe dry. Once at the front, America’s men and machines would decisively tip the balance and doom the Kaiser’s Germany to defeat. But before the American ‘doughboys’ – the equivalent of Scottish ‘Jocks’ or English ‘Tommies’ – could get to the trenches, they had to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic would exact a heavy toll for that crossing, paid for in young lives. Tides, currents, geology and weather conspire to make these seas hazardous, but when you add the most deadly machines of war that mankind could invent, tragedy beckons.

Throughout the war Germany attempted to lay siege to Britain, starving her of food, men and munitions. Although the Atlantic is wide, the paths of the sea narrow as they approach the great ports of Liverpool and the Clyde. It was in these waters that ships – British, allied and neutral – were most likely to face the wrath of the U-boats of the Kaiserliche Marine, the Imperial German Navy. By the end of the conflict, nearly 15,000 British merchant mariners had lost their lives. Much of the carnage had been wrought by U-boats. One such victim was the Tuscania, a luxury liner converted into a troopship. Today she lies 80 metres below the waves between the Islay peninsula called the Mull of Oa, and Rathlin Island, off Northern Ireland.

A more ancient foe than U-boats is the wild Atlantic that unrelentingly pounds Islay’s rugged western shore. These waters are a constant battleground where the forces of nature are in eternal conflict. One evening in Port Charlotte’s Coastguard station, as the barometer fell and the ferries to and from the mainland went on ‘amber alert’, I quizzed one the men dedicated to cheating the sea of even more lives about the extremes of Islay’s weather. Donald Jones has been a volunteer Islay Coastguard for about 40 years. This, and being a farmer at Coull, on the exposed west coast of the island, has made him an expert on the ferocity of Islay weather. He told me: ‘Down south, if they get a breeze they call it a “gale”, and if they get a gale, they call it a “hurricane”. We really get hurricanes – we get extremes of wind on Islay. And if you have tide and wind coming in opposite directions, that increases the size of the waves. The last place I’d ever want to be is on a ship that’s foundering off the west coast of Islay in a storm.’

The prevailing westerly winds have the uninterrupted breadth of the Atlantic to gather force, and winter storms can bring gusts of more than 100 miles an hour screaming over the island. It was a storm of this power that sank the armed merchant cruiser, HMS Otranto. Today she lies less than half a mile off Islay’s Kilchoman Bay, which is overlooked by the last resting place of many of her crew.

Long ago, Islay’s location – lying between mainland Scotland, Ireland and the islands of the Outer Hebrides – allowed her to become the centre of a great medieval sea power, the Lordship of the Isles. But while the waters surrounding Islay have long been a highway, they are also cruel and treacherous, even in times of peace. Despite the dangers, sailors have navigated these waters since Mesolithic peoples first hunted and gathered in this land and seascape, just after the passing of the last Ice Age twelve thousand years ago. The Celtic tribes of Scotland and Ireland were connected by the sea, rather than divided by it. The Vikings arrived in the Hebrides by sea, and ruled them by sea. Trade with the New World – emigrants one way and tobacco the other – flowed in and out of Scotland though Islay’s waters.

Untold numbers of ships have perished off Islay, and its people became used to a grim harvest being cast up on their shores. In light of what happened to the Otranto, the story of one such wreck is worth retelling. In April 1847, the Exmouth of Newcastle, an old brig crammed with 240 Irish emigrants bound for Canada, was wrecked off Sanaig on Islay’s northwest coast. She’d set sail from Londonderry, but had turned back in the fac...