1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [194]
I went three times with Mother to visit Father in Cumberland Infirmary before he was moved from Carlisle. The first journey was the worst. I don’t know who organised the visit, but a lot of the wives and parents went, and travelling down in the train in the morning most of the women were in tears – it was only the day after the crash – and no one knew what to expect. But when we met up again for the journey home they were all smiles. As a child I couldn’t understand this change. I remember Mother explaining that they’d all been through a terrible anxious time. My father had a badly fractured ankle which left him with a permanent limp, and he was badly cut about the nose and face.
Mrs A. Marshall, nee Duff.
My family lived in Musselburgh, and there was quite a bunch of Musselburgh boys in the battalion. All the relatives went rushing to the railway station, but they were told to go to the post office and wait there for news. My mother was in a state, for she had a baby eleven months old in her arms (which was myself) and my brother, who was just three, and they said that my granny was in an even worse state because, of course, she had two boys in the same company. They were both killed – my father and my uncle. My father was twenty-seven and my mother was twenty-five, and there she was, left on her own, a widow, with the two of us to bring up. But it was a good while before they got definite news.
The anxious crowd was still waiting for news at nightfall. At long intervals a window was flung up and a name called out. Then it slammed shut and the waiting began again. The names they called were only those of the survivors, and there were few enough of them. Some people who could not stand the suspense made the tortuous journey to Carlisle by branch lines and local trains to find out the situation at first hand. Bob White’s father took with him Bob’s last letter from Larbert by way of identification, for it was written on notepaper headed with the badge of the 7th Royal Scots. In it Bob had written delightedly, ‘I put my name in for the signalling and I and Sinclair were accepted, so I do no duties until further orders! The sun has been very hot and we have played football all day.’ But the signallers had all gone. The pipers had all gone. Three officers and two hundred and eleven men had been killed, and two hundred and forty-six seriously wounded.*
Mrs A. E. Cowley.
My father was the Reverend William Swan, DD, minister of South Leith Parish Church, and he was also the local chaplain of the 7th Royal Scots. He was summoned to Carlisle at once, and he had the heart-rending duty of comforting the wounded and the relatives after the dreadful train disaster. How well I remember it! He didn’t come home until very late the next night and he was deeply upset. He told us that he had to stand on a chair on the platform at Carlisle station and had to read the casualty list to the anxious relatives who had rushed to Carlisle. It was the saddest thing he ever had to do in his life. Then a few days later he held the mass funeral at Leith. It was almost too much to bear.
The hospitals were overwhelmed. Church halls were commandeered, GPs from miles around rushed to Carlisle to help, and surgeons, doctors, nurses, worked right round the clock attending to the injured. Some of them died in the night and to Dr Edwards’s distress one was the drummer boy of sixteen whose legs he had amputated to release him from the burning train. Near the boy’s bed another badly burned man lay dying. He tossed and turned and muttered all night. Edwards, bending over him, caught his words: ‘If only we could have had a fight for it!’ He muttered it over and over again.
In the early hours of Sunday morning Colonel Peebles led the remnant of his half battalion of 7th Royal Scots up the gangway to board the Empress of Britain – six officers and fifty-seven dazed, dishevelled men. Their Brigadier was waiting on the deck. He returned Colonel Peebles’s salute then shook his hand in silence. At that particular moment neither man was