The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  He was in truth an old man in a hurry. William Leverhulme was as fit and lively as any teetotal 67-year-old who has observed a life-long regimen of sleeping in a bed exposed to the four seasons. But he was only thirty-six months from the end of his three score years and ten. He had never been a patient man and it was clear to everybody that the transformation of Lewis from a sleepy rural backwater to the epicentre of western industry would not be accomplished overnight. Despite his soothing mantra of wanting only to settle down quietly among pleasant neighbours (which was repeated less often and with less conviction as the months passed, until it disappeared altogether from his repertoire), he was – as his son and others reported – a small bundle of seething energy, anxious to make a start, intolerant of delay or scepticism and determined to bulldoze over irrelevant objections.

  He had returned to England when the Armistice was signed at 11.00 a.m. on Monday 11 November 1918. Across the whole of the United Kingdom the sweet flavour of victory was cloyed by an unexpected mephitic; a dull, lingering cloud which tempered the celebrations with weariness and sorrow, and which would never entirely disperse from the lives of the survivors.

  But celebrations there were on the forenoon and afternoon and evening of that November Monday. Perhaps 5,000 men and women, one-sixth of the entire population of Lewis, had been actively engaged in the conflict. Most of them would at last be coming home. On the west coast of the island ‘boys struggled to the housetops to hoist white flags for peace on anything that might serve as a flagpole; even bamboo fishing rods were used.’22 On the east coast the Home Fleet vessels of the Stornoway Patrol and other steamers blew their sirens in jubilant, noisy discord.

  Stornoway Town Council met on the Monday afternoon, in time to receive a telegram which read:

  Heartiest congratulations to town of Stornoway and people of Lewis on victory which brave lads from Lewis have done full share in winning. Hope will be celebrated with happy rejoicings and with dignity worthy of so great a people. All necessary expenses please charge to myself. – Leverhulme.

  Tuesday 12 November was a school holiday throughout the island. The harbour was gay with bunting and the pipe band led the men of the Stornoway Patrol and the boys of the Naval Corps on a march around the town. There was an open-air meeting outside the Imperial Hotel which began with a prayer and closed with a rendition of the National Anthem. In the evening a large congregation attended an ecumenical religious service at the United Free Church.

  And then they went off to celebrate, and if they were men over the age of twenty-one or women over the age of thirty, to vote, and to observe as they trickled into the public prints the results of the first General Election since 1910.

  The 1918 election was startling both nationally and locally. Across the whole of the country Lloyd George’s Coalition Conservative/Liberal alliance, which credited itself with having won the war, swept back into power with a landslide majority of 351. The Prime Minister had at his shoulder 526 members of parliament. The Labour Party had sixty-three MPs, its highest ever, and the Irish Nationalists totalled seventy-three. But the old Liberal Party, the party of Gladstone and Asquith – the party of Scottish Secretary Robert Munro and Lloyd George themselves before they thought better of it, the party which had been in government with a large majority just eight years earlier – was utterly destroyed. It returned just twenty-eight MPs, and it never fully recovered.

  One of those lonely twenty-eight Liberal MPs was sent to Westminster from the new constituency of the Western Isles. Herbert Asquith himself may have lost his seat, but Dr Donald Murray of Stornoway was elected with 3,765 Hebridean votes. The Lloyd George Coalition candidate, the Dumfriesshire coal-owner William Mitchell Cotts, came a close second with 3,375 votes, and the first Labour Party candidate to offer himself to the electors of the Western Isles, Hugh McCowan, who had the unenviable task of campaigning with local support but without national Labour Party endorsement, ran in third place with 809 votes.

  The ballot was shockingly low. Across the whole of Britain little more than 50 per cent of the voters bothered to tick a ballot paper in Lloyd George’s khaki election. In the Western Isles the percentage was even smaller. Donald Murray was elected by a Hebridean turn-out of 43.6 per cent of eligible voters. Only 7,949 islanders bothered to vote out of a total registered electorate of 18,235. The reasons have been glibly ascribed to the number of servicemen still abroad and not bothering with a postal vote (which was available in 1918 for the first time in a United Kingdom general election), or the number of Hebridean women reluctant to exercise their new franchise, or even the inability of Gaelic-speaking people of both sexes to comprehend an anglophone election campaign.

  The first two explanations do not hold water and the third is essentially racist. In four of the five further constituency elections over the next thirteen years the Western Isles turn-out would actually be lower than 43 per cent. The troops, as everybody in Lewis and Harris had good reason to know, were certainly home by 1922. By 1931, when the turn-out was just 36 per cent, one may assume that the women of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd were by and large no longer intimidated by the notion of striding down to the parish school and casting a vote. There is certainly no evidence that the people of Lewis, Harris and the Uists were finding English-language electoral debate more difficult to understand as the twentieth century progressed. They had always understood not only as much Beurla as was necessary, but also what a vote meant and where best to cast it. The inter-war electoral malaise in the Western Isles – as, indeed, in the rest of the Highlands of Scotland – seems to have been caused less by illiteracy, by absentee males or by Gaelic female modesty, and more by lack of faith in established party politics.

  But in December 1918 Dr Donald Murray of Stornoway, the former Medical Officer and chairman of the School Board and current Justice of the Peace who believed in ‘speedy distribution of all the available land in the Highlands and Islands among the people’ began his four-year spell as the first Member of Parliament for the Western Isles. Murray would be unlikely to follow the example of Roderick MacDonald and marry into Stornoway Castle, if only because he already had a wife. He took with him to the House of Commons the good wishes and high expectations of such men as Reverend Donald MacCallum of Keose and the serving soldier Roderick MacLeod, and the deep suspicion, bordering on hostility, of Lord Leverhulme and his coterie on the hill.

  A state of open conflict between the two camps would be delayed, however. For as 1918 turned into 1919 the islands of Lewis and Harris were violated with such unimaginable severity that politics were made irrelevant, and were left with a suppurating wound beyond the scope of any doctor, landowner, soldier, MP or even minister to heal.

  5

  FIT FOR HEROES

  In the late evening gloom of New Year’s Eve 1918 a long line, two men deep, of Royal Naval Reservists stood, lit by the yellow jetty lights and railhead lamps, on the platform at Kyle of Lochalsh in Wester Ross.

  Where the railway station ended the mailboat pier began. It stood a minute’s march from the train and the carriages, jutting abruptly out into the narrow kyle towards Skye. Between 7.00 p.m. and 8.00 p.m. on Tuesday 31 December 1918, two large boats were tied alongside. They were the regular MacBraynes Lewis ferry Sheila and an armed yacht which had been requisitioned three months earlier by the Admiralty, based at Stornoway and rechristened Iolaire, which is Gaelic for ‘Eagle’. She was a fast, attractive, slim and low-slung ship with a mast fore and aft and a single large funnel amidships.

  At an order the line of Reservists divided. Sixty were marched aboard the Sheila and the remaining seventy embarked on the His Majesty’s Yacht Iolaire.

  The former would survive. Almost every one of the latter group, as well as scores of their comrades, relatives and neighbours who were already on board the armed yacht, had just a few hours left to live.

  They were from Lewis and Harris; some of the 3,000 islanders who had served their country as sailors during the Great War. It is e
stimated that 6,200 Lewismen joined the Armed Forces between 1914 and 1918. Around 600 were returned emigrants who fought in colonial regiments. The remainder came from elsewhere in Britain and – the great majority – from the island itself, from its total population of 31,000. By the end of the war about 800 had been killed, chiefly on the Western Front. Almost exactly half of the 6,200, virtually all of whom came directly from Lewis, served in the Navy. Those totals represent the largest percentage of volunteer and conscript servicemen to join that conflict from any community in the British Empire.23

  They returned not in a single joyous group but piecemeal, slowly and steadily, a few hundred at a time in the last few weeks of 1918 and the early months of 1919. The 530 men who arrived by train at Kyle of Lochalsh from Inverness and points south on New Year’s Eve 1918 considered themselves to be relatively fortunate. They were ‘libertymen’, demobilised Naval Reservists who were being sent home within a few weeks of the Armistice and who would arrive back in Stornoway, Tarbert, Ness, Uig and Lochs in time to combine celebrating the peace with that most vital of Gaelic festivals: the advent of the New Year. Kyle of Lochalsh on that day, said Donald MacDonald, who knew several of them and whose township of North Tolsta would lose eleven sons in the early hours of 1 January 1919, ‘presented an animated scene as many friends and relatives were reunited, some for the first time in four years. The war was over, and Lewis and their loved ones only forty miles away.’

  The ‘small, sturdy’ Sheila could not carry them all. The Iolaire was consequently pressed into service. The yacht had only eighty lifejackets and lifeboat capacity for 100 men. Nonetheless 262 island servicemen, mostly from Lewis but including a small number of Harrismen, were ordered aboard. She made good headway northwards with a total ship’s complement, including her own officers and crew, of 284, and by thirty minutes after midnight was crossing the Minch in squalls and drizzling rain. Neither the Iolaire nor her officers had ever previously entered Stornoway harbour at night.

  Shortly before 2.00 a.m. the captain of the waiting pilot boat, Lieutenant W.B. Wenlock, saw distress rockets go up outside the mouth of the harbour. He immediately manoeuvred H.M. Drifter Budding Rose towards ‘what I considered to be the position from where the rockets were being fired and found a ship in distress on the Biastan Holm rocks, but was unable to render any assistance owing to the heavy seas running’.

  James Macdonald was on board the fishing boat Spider, which was also sailing northwards back to Stornoway when the Iolaire overtook her on the starboard side. He recalled:

  We followed immediately in her wake, and when approaching Arnish Light I noticed that the vessel did not alter her course but kept straight on in the direction of the Beasts [of Holm].

  I remarked to one of the crew that the vessel would not clear the headland at Holm as it went too far off its course to make the harbour in safety. Immediately afterwards we heard loud shouting and then knew the vessel was on the rocks. We were passing the Beacon light at Arnish at that time and could hear the shouting of the men as we were coming into the harbour. The night was very dark and a strong breeze from the south raging and a heavy sea running. We were unable to give any assistance as we could not rely on our engine to operate in such rough seas.

  The Iolaire had struck the rocks known as the Beasts of Holm, less than 20 yards from the shore at the western lip of the harbour mouth. She was immediately holed and foundered, ‘listing heavily to starboard after striking’. Some time between 3.00 a.m. and 3.30 a.m. she broke her back and sank in shallow water. In such circumstances and conditions her lifeboats and even her lifejackets were of little use – she was, in the words of Tormod Calum Domhnallach, ‘caught between the wind and the sea in total darkness on the one hand and on the other, a steep and rocky shore constantly pounded by huge waves.’24 The men aboard required shore-to-ship rescue equipment, and that was not available on Holm Point at 2.00 a.m. on 1 January 1919.

  Through heroic efforts seventy-nine men were saved. John Finlay MacLeod of Port of Ness threw his boots ashore (he never saw them again), and then followed them with a heaving line, which was used to drag a hawser from the boat to safety, and along that hawser some forty men reached Holm Point. John MacLeod’s fellow Nessman Donald Morrison clung for almost eight hours to a mast which leaned out of the water, festooned with redundant rigging and sheets and spars, before he was rescued at 10.00 a.m. by a naval boat.

  Two hundred and five men drowned in the biggest peacetime maritime disaster in British history. Among them were 181 naval ratings from Lewis and Harris and almost all of the ship’s officers and crew, some of whom were also Hebrideans. The Leodhasaich who perished came from every parish in the island. Twenty-five were from Ness and its west side neighbourhoods. Eleven were from the village of Leurbost in Lochs. The war memorials at Stornoway and Tarbert in Harris – uniquely in the United Kingdom – date the duration of the Great War from 1914 to 1919 in order to encompass the crowning tragedy of the Iolaire.

  No words in any language could register the pain or evoke the trauma. It was an event so cataclysmic as to affect Lewis and Harris for the rest of the century and beyond. In its immediate aftermath the people of the islands found themselves in the opaque, contorted world of a sleepless nightmare, racked between horror and uncertainty. Some men returned across the moor like ghosts: ‘how he got ashore I do not know, but he was like a man out of his mind. And those in the village that had lost men – the mothers and the wives – they were coming in to ask if he had seen any sight of Donald, or Angus, or John, but he could only look at them and the tears coming down his cheeks; and he had two words, I remember that, he had two words that he said often: “Good God . . . Good God . . .”’25

  Calum Smith’s uncle John, whom the boy had last seen returning to the Navy in the company of Calum’s father after leave (‘quietly smiling as he made some derisive comment about my father giving my mother a farewell peck’), was among the lost. Calum was six-and-a-half years old on New Year’s Day 1919:

  A group of us were standing in front of one of the croft houses in North Shawbost when a sailor in uniform came trudging wearily along the street with his head down. We recognised him, and as he went past one of the boys called, ‘A Mhurchaidh, an tainig m’athair-sa raoir?’ – ‘Murdo, did my father come home last night?

  We all thought it strange that Murdo didn’t lift his downcast head, look round or make any response. Later that day we heard what had happened and that Murdo was one of the survivors, and we understood. When the news did come through my recollection is of everything suddenly going very quiet, of women talking in hushed voices: it was as if there was a feeling that noise would be an offence to the dead.26

  And so the muted and bewildered first days of 1919 progressed. Survivors with drawn faces had the cuts and abrasions they had sustained on the Holm rocks washed and dressed before peat fires. The bodies of the dead were gradually recovered and laid out for identification on the floor of the ammunition store in Stornoway. The contents of their pockets were put in brown paper bags which were then numbered with the same one, two or three digits, from the number one to the number 200, that were chalked onto the soles of their boots. An endless queue of Leodhasaich filed in and out of that ammunition store on their harrowing quest. ‘For months after it was all over,’ said a naval lieutenant, ‘I saw in my dreams rows of naval issue boots with numbers chalked on their soles.’

  As if in someone else’s dream, Calum Smith would be able to describe until his old age the monochromatic image of himself as a curious six-year-old on the west coast at Shawbost watching with solemn eyes ‘the horses and carts with their burdens of coffins going head to tail along the main road to the Bragar cemetery’.

  The pain was intensified by the fact that no complete list had been taken at Kyle of Lochalsh of the Iolaire’s passengers, and that scores of the bodies were not recovered for weeks. Mothers and wives were frequently left in limbo, unsure as to whether or not their sons and husbands had been aboar
d the yacht. In some instances people went to comfort relatives or neighbours on their loss, only for the consolers to be bludgeoned by the news that their own son had also died. There was no escape from cruel bereavement or from haunting fear. Calum Smith’s mother was afraid that as her husband had left with his brother John at the end of their last leave, they may also have returned together. Only a frantic exchange of telegrams with the Navy reassured her that she was not a widow.

  The Stornoway Gazette which appeared in Lewis on Thursday 2nd and Friday, 3 January 1919 carried no mention of the Iolaire. It could not have done so: when the Admiralty yacht set sail from Kyle of Lochalsh on New Year’s Eve the pages of the Gazette were already made up far from Lewis at William Grant’s printing works in Dingwall. The few thousand printed copies, carrying their chirpy best wishes for a happy and prosperous 1919, were transported across the Minch aboard a dumbstruck Sheila on the second day of the year.

  Grant made good his omission a week later. He must have hovered soberly and long over his words before committing them to slugs of hot metal. On his phrasing would hang the reputation and perhaps the future existence of a newspaper which had purported to serve and to represent Lewis for less than two years. He got it right:

  No one now alive in Lewis can ever forget the 1st of 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 NewYear’s morning has plunged every home 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 these circles multiplied by the number of the dead, overlapping and overlapping each other till the whole island – every hearth and home in it – is shrouded in deepest gloom.