00:00On the morning of May 22nd, 1915, tragedy struck the heart of Britain's railways.
00:10In what would become the worst rail disaster in the nation's history, over 200 lives were lost.
00:16Most of them were young soldiers, Royal Scots of the 1 7th Battalion, bound for war.
00:22Recruited from the streets of Leith in Edinburgh, they were on their way to the front lines of
00:26Gallipoli, ready to serve. But they would never reach the battlefield.
00:33Their journey ended in disaster, in a moment that would leave an indelible scar on a generation.
00:42It was a very local battalion. It drew its officers and its soldiers from Leith, Portobello and Musselburgh.
01:03They were very much a family affair. Many fathers and sons, and many had been in the battalion for 10,
01:1312, 15 years by the time the war came. They were very close.
01:21My father served in the Royal Scots. He joined the 7th Battalion in 1913.
01:27And when the war broke out, he and all the other 7th officers volunteered for overseas service.
01:35They went to Larbert and at 8.30 pm on the 19th of May, they heard that the order to entrain had been
01:46cancelled. This was because the troop ship had gone aground in Amersi. And if that had not had happened,
01:54the 7th would have travelled on another day and no doubt have reached Liverpool quite safely.
02:02Technically you had to be 17 to join. A number undoubtedly slipped through saying I'm 17,
02:09when I think some were probably as low as 15. They had been waiting since August 1914,
02:16and now at last they were going to war.
02:23Just before the train
02:26left, my father was asked by Christian Salverson in the next compartment, whether he would like to
02:34join them and make up a fall for bridge. My father wasn't that keen on bridge and he said,
02:39no thank you, I'll just stay with my friends, Willie Cormack and TG Clark, where I am.
02:45At 6.49 am, the troop train carrying nearly 500 soldiers of the 1 7th Royal Scots hurtled south
02:55along the west coast main line. The men, fresh from Leith, were bound for war, unaware that disaster
03:01lay ahead. Just north of Gretna Green, the track should have been clear. Instead, a stationary local
03:08train sat directly in their path. There was no warning, no time to stop. The impact was devastating.
03:21Wooden carriages shattered, sending soldiers flying through the wreckage. Within seconds,
03:26the scene became a tangle of splintered wood, twisted metal and broken bodies.
03:30Then, another horror. A northbound express, unable to stop in time, slammed into the wreckage.
03:48Oil lamps and gas fittings ignited. The tangled mass of trains erupted into an inferno. Flames consumed
03:55the shattered carriages and those trapped inside had no way out. In just moments, the calm of the
04:02Scottish countryside was replaced with chaos, fire and unimaginable loss.
04:09The worst railway disaster in British history had unfolded in an instant.
04:12When the crash came, my father was thrown down onto the floor of the compartment and made a shower of
04:35water and glass. He must have recovered fairly quickly because he and Willie Kermack managed to
04:42take TG Clark, who had been badly injured, out of the compartment before it was enveloped in flames.
04:52In the next compartment, all the bridge players were killed.
04:58Later that morning, there was a sad roll call and only five out of my father's platoon of 45 answered their names.
05:08The commanding officer paraded the survivors and there were 55 soldiers and seven officers, 62 out of the
05:22498 who'd set out from Larboard, who were uninjured or not dead.
05:28Thank you, Corporal Crichton. Stand to tease.
05:29We arrived just on the border and I looked out and I said, oh, a lovely morning.
05:36And then the next thing was the crash. I landed on my face, with a pile of stuff on my back,
05:46was hemmed to the ground, couldn't move. But where my face was, there was a hole. I could see the
05:53lake and I smelt fresh air. Then the next thing was, there was a second crash. And it made the hole bigger,
06:01but I made a tent and I got out. I got on my feet and I walked along the line.
06:05And it was blazing and the soldiers was trapped. They couldn't get away. They were
06:12caught in the fire. Then my leg gave way and I collapsed.
06:17How did it feel like waking up to know that over 220 of your comrades had died in that crash?
06:24Oh, of course, you see, the point is this. You had no thought for anything like that,
06:30you know what I mean? You were just a matter of wondering if you were going to be right yourself.
06:39The funeral procession stretched through the streets of Leith for three hours.
06:47Making its way from the Drill Hall on Dalmany Street to the solemn grounds of Rosebank Cemetery.
06:56There wasn't the family untouched by the disaster. And it had always been there in the Leith memory.
07:06The battalion was almost all raised from the Leith area. So with over 200 soldiers killed by the train
07:21crash, it must have had a devastating effect on such a close-knit community.
07:26As a parent, you would accept your child going to war as a soldier. But to have a death occur
07:38through a train crash must have been a really quite challenging thing to have to come to terms with.
07:44After he had recovered from his injuries, he went to Gallipoli, where, still only 21,
07:57he was made a company commander in action. He then led his troops in a good half-dozen
08:04hard-fought battles in Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine, and the Western Front. He was wounded twice and awarded
08:16the military cross. Three weeks after he was demobilized, he wrote my mother a letter including
08:24this passage. Is anyone really happy? I come to wish oftener and oftener that I had been killed sometime
08:34during these four years. The happy young man of pre-war days was now subject to recurrent depressions
08:43which would go on for the whole of the rest of his life. My father tells the story of they were playing
08:51cricket in the late 1930s and a ball hit his hand and some glass came out and he said this must be
08:58from the train crash. So I think things like the physical impact and the mental impact of the depression
09:05meant that it's something that he carried with him, the burden of that terrible crash throughout his
09:10whole life. Fifty years after the crash, my father lay dying in a nursing home in Edinburgh,
09:19semi-conscious and drugged with morphine. The nurse who looked after him on the night he died told my
09:29mother that he had talked and talked of a train crash. Nowhere did we lose 216 soldiers within
09:42a hundred miles of their home having never got to the war they had so valiantly set out to take part in
09:52their home. And that is something which we will always remember.
10:04allows us to find out to help out their parents that we are studying.
10:16I'll see you next week.
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