The most venerated date for all Scots is Hogmanay, the last day of December. It’s the night to feast the old year out and welcome in the new one, and in no place is it more celebrated than the Outer Hebrides.
By the end of the Great War, the Isle of Lewis had lost over 1,150 of the 3,100 men who’d gone to serve and fight, but on Hogmanay 1918 many islanders waited in anticipation of their men returning after years of wartime. Crofts were filled with celebratory food and drink; windows were illuminated, and peat fires burned. But all were anxious, for the weather and sea conditions had been extreme all day, and by nightfall had become atrocious. Earlier, there’d been joy when some men returned on the regular ferry, but many more still waited at Kyle of Lochalsh. HMY Iolaire, a converted luxury yacht, was ordered to sail with these additional men, but before it sailed, two more trains arrived with yet more men eager to get home. No man was refused passage, but no record was kept of the numbers, and Iolaire sailed with just two lifeboats and eighty lifejackets.
When they left at 9.30 pm visibility was poor, with sleet beginning to fall and the sea becoming wilder. The men onboard knew the area and watched uneasily, knowing that neither the captain, nor the navigator, had ever taken a ship into Stornoway harbour at night. Unease turned to terror when the ship, in worsening conditions, inexplicably veered off course in sight of the Stornoway lights and struck the treacherous rocks called Beasts of Holm just twenty yards from the shore. Many couldn’t swim but the appalling circumstances made it almost impossible for any man to attempt to swim to safety. Within minutes, many were thrown into the sea as the ship listed and flooded. One mast broke and the two men clinging to it were drowned. Another man held onto the remaining mast for over seven hours and survived.
By 3 am on New Year’s Day 1919, Marion Macleod was in the hell of a force 10 gale. It appeared the whole island population had converged on the shoreline; frantic wraiths moving everywhere, occasionally exposed by shifting moonlit shadows. The noise was indescribable. People cried in despair; voices smothered in the thunderous noise of the sea as it swelled, crashed, and disgorged its flotsam onto the land; human flotsam – the men they had waited so long to welcome.
Marion searched with them, soaked from sleet and icy sea-spray, buffeted by the howling wind. Her sodden skirt clung to her legs and the shawl she held over her head gave barely any protection as it was whipped awry. She searched with desperation. Close-by, her father, Donal, grimly held a guttering lantern, looking at bodies discarded on the shore. Some men staggered to their feet, too traumatised to notice the freezing air. Others lay lifeless, dragged back and forth by the roiling water.
Marion searched for Finlay. They’d married weeks before war was declared and she prayed that God would spare him.
When Donal halted at the side of a body, Marion recognised Finlay’s face, discoloured and half covered in seaweed. The night’s mayhem swallowed her screams as she dropped to her knees. Then Donal turned the body over and water spewed from Finlay’s mouth as he convulsed, gagged, and struggled for air.
More than 200 men died that tragic night, with the last body found six weeks later. But in that ‘crowning sorrow of the war’ Marion’s man survived.
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