Today’s post is written by Andrew McLean, our Head Curator.
The devastating accident on the Caledonian Railway at Quintinshill near Gretna on 22 May 1915 is Britain’s greatest railway disaster.
At least 227 people were killed in a multiple crash exacerbated by a fire which engulfed the wreckage. The majority of deaths came from the 1/7th (Leith) Battalion the Royal Scots who were journeying to Liverpool to board a troop ship on its way to Gallipoli. Instead, the Battalion was decimated and barely a family in the historic port of Leith – from where the men had been recruited – was left untouched by the tragedy.
The National Railway Museum contains two objects connected to this disaster; both very different in character but each standing as witness to those terrible events.
Our first object is the clock case from Quintinshill signal box. Timekeeping was essential to the running of not just an efficient but a safe railway. Safety policies were there to be enforced but on that day there were a number of breaches of official policy that took place at Quintinshill. Now devoid of the clock mechanism the case stands as a silent witness to the disaster that unfolded.
The crash was blamed on the poor working practices of Quintinshill’s signalmen, George Meakin and James Tinsley. Time played its part. Tinsley should have relieved Meakin at 6am but an arrangement between the two men allowed Tinsley to arrive half an hour late for duty after hitching a ride on a local train. The crew of the train waited in the box to allow late running cross border trains to pass whilst Tinsley backfilled the log to take into account the 30 minutes that he should have been on shift. Meakin was reading the paper Tinsley had brought with him. Neither signalman seemed aware of the time – perhaps lost in the distractions of so many people being in the signal box as the clock ticked ominously towards the time of the first collision: 6.49am. Just over a minute later a third train would crash into the wreckage.
The crash investigation found Meakin and Tinsley guilty of culpable homicide. The signal box in which the men had worked would be forever tainted by the tragedy. Although the box was demolished in the 1970s the clock case – minus the mechanism and face – has survived to represent the role of the fatal errors made inside the signal box on that fateful day. There is a curious legacy to this clock. Inside the case Meakin and Tinsley’s successors marked the date of the crash and signed their names. Subsequent signalmen further added their names as well as other pieces of information such as General Election results, deaths of railway workers in service and dates of union strikes. This act of memorialising inside a signal box that was witness to such an horrific accident seems both touching and appropriate.
If the clock bears witness to the accident itself then our second item, a coin from the reign of William IV, is testimony to the ferocity of the aftermath of the crashes when fire raged through the broken and scattered carriages.
The transportation of troops during the First World War involved huge trains traversing the whole length and breadth of the country. With the increase in traffic older carriages were put into use as was the case of the troop train involved in the Quintinshill accident. These older carriages – from the Great Central Railway – were lit by gas. Extra gas was stored under the carriage bodies in cylinders which had recently been recharged before the train had left Larbert. These cylinders ignited after the final train had crashed into the earlier wreckage. The fire was so fierce that the bodies of many of the soldiers could not be identified and their remains were buried in a mass grave at Rosebank Cemetery, Edinburgh.
Amongst artefacts recovered from the scene was this little coin its metal twisted and scalded, evidence of the unimaginable fire that engulfed the wreckage. This coin has added poignancy for it is a shilling – one of almost 4 million minted in the reign of William IV. But this is also – we may reasonably assume – a King’s shilling, the, by then, symbolic indication that a man had joined the armed forces.
Often soldiers would keep their shillings as a keepsake – perhaps even a symbol of luck. Many would become family heirlooms. But the coin now in the National Railway Museum was uncovered by a railway worker clearing through the wreckage of the Quintinshill crash – its owner unknown but its broken and contorted form surviving as testimony to the massive loss of life amongst a group of young soldiers setting out to War.
» More information about the Quintinshill disaster is in this article from the latest ‘NRM Review’ by the Friends of the NRM.
» On Saturday 23 May at 11:30am, 1:45pm and 3pm our volunteers will be re-enacting the disaster at our Signalling School in the Warehouse.