Paul F Cockburn explores the memories of some of those who survived “the Railways’ Titantic” 100 years ago this month.
Corporal Thomas Gleave was lucky. When he woke up in a Carlisle hospital, distraught and anxious parents by his bedside, he was surprised to learn that he had been unconscious for 10 days. But there was worse to come; he had survived, albeit with a compound fracture of the skull and a leg broken in three places, the most terrible accident in the history of Britain’s railways.
Gleave’s last memories had been of the bright morning of Saturday 22 May, 1915. He and eight fellow soldiers, along with their full kit and rifles, had been tightly packed within one compartment of an old wooden passenger train, but the mood was good. After weeks of speculation – and some frustrating last-minute delays – Gleave and his fellow troops were finally on their way to do their bit for King and Country.
Some 50 years later, Gleave told the writer J A B Hamilton that it had been general knowledge among the troops that, with training at Larbert, Stirlingshire, now complete, they were to join British forces gathering in the Dardanelles. As part of D company, he was put on the first of three trains that would transport the 7th (Leith) Battalion of the Royal Scots down to Liverpool, where their transport ship awaited them.
When the train reached Carstairs at 5am, Gleave remembers a large crowd on the platform waiting to welcome them with sweets and cakes: “Everything they could possibly muster to make us happy,” he said. Some of the troops took this final opportunity to send off farewell postcards to their families, not knowing that many would arrive the following Monday, long after the news that their senders were dead.
The Quintinshill Rail Disaster
The events at Quintinshill, north of Gretna, remain the UK’s largest single railway accident in terms of scale – five steam trains were involved – and casualties, now generally agreed to be 226 dead, 246 injured.
At 6:49am the troop train, on which Corporal Gleave was by then sleeping, collided with a stationary local passenger train which had been shunted onto the main line because two nearby passing loops were occupied by goods trains. Less than a minute later, a passenger express bound for Glasgow crashed into the wreckage.
As a local newspaper reporter wrote: “One private said that when the first shock was received the sergeant in charge of the compartment gave the order to hold tight, and the men stood on the seats and clung desperately to the luggage racks as the carriages appeared to be toppling over, though they were still running in their derailed condition.
“The awful force of the second collision then burst upon them. In a moment all was terrible confusion. Engines were heaped upon another, carriages telescoped and overturned, and others mounted one upon the other. Men were hurled from the train – a fortunate few well clear. Others clambered out from the wreckage as best they could. Many were pinned below the overturned carriages.”
The severity of the crash was exacerbated by escaped gas from the lighting system used in the old wooden carriages of the troop train. “Already the troop train and the leading carriages of the London train were ablaze,” continued the reporter. “The successive collisions had effectively jammed the carriage doors. Exit that way was impossible. Windows refused to come down, and the glass had to be smashed before the men could get clear. Many men confessed that they did not know by what means or in what manner they got out.”
The speed of bad news.
Peter Cumming was the youngest member of the battalion; six months shy of 16 years old, he had wanted to serve alongside his father and brother John, two years his senior. Located in the middle of the troop train, Cumming escaped with little more than cuts and bruises, but his brother John was less fortunate.
“I realised at once when the news got through to Edinburgh my mother would be greatly worried.” Peter explained, many years later. “I therefore wrote out a message and gave it to a man on the field and asked him to send a telegram. I remember to this day the wording: ‘John hurt, father not on train, myself safe, Peter.’ The telegram was, I learned later, delivered quite quickly.”
Despite the limited communications technology of the time, the Battalion History of the Royal Scots records just how quickly reports of the disaster reached Leith later that day. “Few Leith residents are likely to forget the anxious whisperings of that spring afternoon,” it reports, “and the wave of dismay that later swept over the Burgh when it became known that the local battalion on its way to the front had been involved in an appalling railway collision.”
By the Sunday morning sufficient information was available for pulpit announcements of the known dead, injured and missing. The latter was particularly hard to accept for some families, given that the accident had happened on Scottish soil; some of the dead, meantime, were already being returned to the Drill Hall on Leith’s Dalmeny Street – the building from which they had marched away, full of excitement, just a few weeks earlier.
May Stewart (neé Patterson) was just eight years when, two days after the disaster, some 100 bodies were buried in a mass grave at Rosebank Cemetery. “I remember as an eight year old seeing the funeral procession starting in Dalmeny Street at the Drill Hall,” she had told her son. “There were hundreds of horses and carriages carrying the coffins and pipe bands. I ran up Leith Walk trying to follow it but the street was mobbed by people and the soldiers lining the route. I eventually found myself down at the Cemetery gates sitting there. I really didn’t appreciate the sadness of it all, being the age I was. It was just a spectacle.”
The aftermath.
Cumming did ultimately get to see the Dardanelles, albeit in 1919, when he sailed through the Straits en route to garrison duty in what is now Istanbul. After leaving the British Army, he rose through the ranks of the police to become an inspector. He insisted that the only permanent effect of his experiences that day in May 1915 was that he was never afterwards able to sleep while travelling on a train.
Indeed, the chief sentiment amongst the survivors was one of gratitude, first for having survived and next for having escaped being part of the Royal Scots’ disastrous campaign at Gallipoli on June 28th, when some of them would almost certainly have been killed.
It was eight months before Thomas Gleave was discharged from hospital, as doctors were unable to set his thigh-bone until his head injury had eased. He left with one leg slightly shorter than the other, of no more use to the British Army but, to his great relief, still able to play football! He apparently kept only one memento of his time in hospital– a small slice of his skull removed during an operation.
On the plus side, the disaster did produce at least one romance: Royal Scot soldier Archie Simpson would eventually marry the young woman who had nursed him in hospital at Penrith. By all accounts the marriage was a long and happy one.
Article first published in Scottish Memories, May 2015.
