Writing about the Iolaire
Writing a short story about the Iolaire Disaster affected me in unexpected ways. Māori writer Tihini Grant, calls it ‘the deeply saddening burden’. The more you enter in stories like this, the more the burden grows.
“Even now, writing about it, I feel the saddening burden.”
So many people gathered
Waiting for the young men
Who had sailed over the sea
Sisters and brothers
Children, none complaining.
Fathers and mothers
To welcome them home.
(Òran na h-Iolaire / Song of the Iolaire by Tormod Macleòid)
The Iolaire Disaster is little known, considering it was the second worst maritime disaster in British waters during peacetime. On New Year’s Eve, 1918, servicemen from the island were returning from the Great War to the Isle of Lewis on HMY Iolaire.
The Iolaire went off course and struck the Beasts of Holm, at the mouth of Stornoway Harbour. A terrible sea. Complete darkness. The waves broke her back and she foundered. Some made it to land. One man, Ian Mhurdo, managed to get a rope to the shore and some made it to shore that way. Am Patch, climbed the mast and held on till daylight.
201 men lost their lives.
The Melbost Bard, Murdo MacFarlane, was on the shoreline the following morning. Just a boy at the time. The Iolaire’s Captain was there, by the graveyard, with two life jackets on. A man stood there looking at him and said to him. ‘Cha do shàbhail siud thu. That didn’t save you.’ One of the men who was lost, MacFarlane says, had been at war for four years and was found drowned at the foot of his mother’s croft.
Here are the final lines from MacFarlane’s poem – ‘Last night the Iolaire was lost/Raoir Reubadh an Iolaire’.
Her young drowned under her wing
From Harris the mourning
as far Ness of the fair-haired men.
As you didn’t give them alive to us
I ask the sea, give them to us drowned.
So we can turn our gaze
from your hungry mouth.
The tragic details are overwhelming, too much to take in at once. The men who made it to shore, only to go back out to the ship to try and find their brothers. The men who wandered the hills for days with their guilt that they survived.
Talking to the families of survivors, many of them said that the men never spoke of it. It was a traumatic event of great scale. It undoubtedly caused a community trauma which was like a quiet waterfall through the generations.
The poet Ann Frater wrote a poem about her grandmother Màiri Iain Mhurch’ Chaluim, who lost her father that night. He was on the rope when it broke. Here is an extract.
on the sharp rock of memory;
and the brine rises up
in the grey seas of your eyes.
“He was on the rope
when it broke ...”
And your heart also broke
with the loss of the sturdy rope
which you had clung to lovingly
while you were growing up
as a child
And, at ten years of age,
you had only a memory of the rock
that used to keep you straight;
and every hope that was in your eyes
was drowned on that night,
and through each New Year that followed.
During the Centenary, An Lanntair Gallery in Stornoway led an artistic project which became on outlet for this community grief. It was important. A new memorial was made, by the artists Will Maclean, Marian Leven and Arthur Watson. A number of documentaries were made, which let people speak.
Even now, writing about it, I feel the saddening burden.
A short story I wrote about it for the BBC was on the National Curriculum in Italy and I had the good luck to speak to a class of young people who had studied it, at the Liceo Artistico Caravaggio in Rome. Class 5B. Italy has its own stories from that awful war, which I knew nothing about. So many untold stories, but they have to live somewhere. Often, they make their way as emotions through the generations.
The young people asked some great questions. Would the island have been different now, if it hadn’t have happened? I think so. Think of the individual stories. The mothers and fathers waiting. The wives and girlfriends waiting. The sons and daughters waiting. Och, it’s too much, is it not. When you begin to glimpse the true weight of the darkness.
The students’ specialisation was Architecture. They asked if I had visited the place of the disaster and how it made me feel. Yes, there is no describing the feeling in ways which make sense in words. What they had lived through. And the rocks are so close and the steep, so hard to climb.
They wouldn’t have been much older at all, than these young people.
Tihini Grant quoted Kahil Gibran to me – “is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?”. We try and make some sense of things through art. But that can only go so far. In the end, such a tragedy is unknowable in its entirety. We can only glimpse it in parts. For if we did, it would surely overwhelm us.
I will finish with an extract from Iain Chrichton Smith's poem called 'Iolaire'.
the New Year brought them home. It was a day
that orbed the horizon with an enigma.
It seemed that there were masts. It seemed that men
buzzed in the water round them. It seemed that fire
shone in the water which was thin and white
unravelling towards the shore.
END.
Next up - The Third Wave - BBC Radio 4 Short Story
I wrote a short story for BBC Radio 4 based on the story of the Iolaire Disaster. You can find out more about it (and listen) in the next blog post - The Third Wave.