125078: Memories of the night of the Lemreway Bus Accident

One of the more interesting, and unpredictable, elements in compiling the Gazette each week is what nuggets of historical gold turn up in our archives from week to week, triggering memories and no little nostalgia among our readers.

And so it proved last week. In the section from 1946 we focussed last week on a Miraculous Escape on the Lemreway Bus, after it somersaulted down an embankment into a loch with 20 passengers on board. Unbelievably no-one was seriously injured. 

Then early on Monday morning came a phone call which was to elicit more information on a story which is even far more fascinating than what appears on the surface. 

Chris Murray, a decorated retired winchman on the coastguard helicopter, got in touch to say that one of the passengers on the bus was his mother, Agnes. And not only that but she was stuck under the back seat, having been forgotten about, and only escaped with her life by the skin of her teeth.

Chris himself takes up the story:  “When I was just a young boy I was told that the bus went off the road at a small loch before you come into Marvig. Before the big loch, Loch Eitsholl, there’s a smaller loch, Loch Caol, with a steep bank going down to it and that’s where it happened. 

“One of Mitchell’s buses, with quite a few people in it, went off the road and somersaulted down the bank into the loch. The windows were all shattered and everything. 

“The alarm was raised and a rescue came out. Well I say a rescue team, it was just people that were in Marvig – anybody who was available really. 

“Everyone survived and they got everyone out of the bus and took them to a house nearby. They were given brandy and hot cups of tea. They were very, very cold indeed, as you could imagine, and they were in shock, of course. I didn’t hear if there was anyone actually injured but it would be very surprising if there wasn’t some kind of injuries.”

Turning to his mother’s involvement, he goes on: “They were all getting themselves together in the house after the accident and settling down and it was some time afterwards that someone said: ‘Where’s Agnes – she was on the bus wasn’t she?’ That was my mother and they couldn’t see her anywhere. She was still in the bus trapped under the back seat. I was told she was in the water and she was very, very close to death. 

“Anyway they got her out and took her back to the house and she was in shock of course. It took her quite a long time to get over it.”

Agnes was 19 at the time and while fortunate to have survived, its effect was to stay with her for the rest of her life, physically and mentally.

“She didn’t speak about it much to be honest,” said Chris. “But as a result of that accident something happened to her hand and arm. I’m not exactly sure what it was but there was a weakness there or some kind of nerve damage. 

“She was certainly traumatised as a young person in that bus. The accident happened in 1946. I was born in 1950, so I came very close to not being here at all myself.”

But within the horror of the event, as often happens, there is gallows humour – a moment of light relief in the midst of the trauma.

“When they were in the house being given brandy and cups of tea there was a cailleach there, Peggy Diary, she was called, and she wasn’t on the bus at all,” said Chris.

“Anyway she liked her dram and apparently wanted a wee brandy but was told that, no, Peggy, the brandy was just for those that had been in the accident. Anyway she piped up: ‘But there’s nobody more injured here than me’.”

In yet another quirk of fate, it turns out that the nearby house that the survivors were taken to was the family home of Dolina MacLennan, the celebrated Gaelic actress, who now lives in Edinburgh, and a cousin of Chris’s.

She was eight at the time and remembers it well. 

“At that time our house was the first house coming into the village,” she said. “It was the old house; the house my father built when he came back from Canada. I was born in 1938 so I was eight, but heavens I remember it quite clearly.

“Usually I went to sleep with my father gabhail an leabhair (family worship) and Gaelic psalm singing. My brothers were older than me – Duncan and Donald, the seafarer boys as they became known and they would have been at the leabhar. 

“But that night I remember a terrible commotion. I didn’t see anything but I heard it all and I was absolutely terrified as there was wailing and shouting.

“What I remember most is a story that stayed in the family. My father was going round giving everyone a tot of brandy and Peggy Diary was there, from Calbost. My father bypassed her with the brandy and she started shouting: ‘There’s no one worse than me; there’s no-one worse than me.

“The funny thing is my brother Murdie John, who was very funny with a great sense of humour, he kept that going for the rest of his life. If you were passing chocolates or whatever round he would shout: ‘No-one’s worse than me!’ It became a family saying, but Murdie John would come out with it at the funniest times – right up until he died two years ago.”

Apart from the commotion in her house on the night, Dolina remembers that they would come across “bloodied cloths and rags and bits of cotton wool round the house” in the days after.

“I don’t actually remember the doctor being there but he would have been,” she said. “It was a Dr Macdonald at the time.

“I remember them saying that my cousin Agnes, Chris’s mother, had a glass bowl in her hand for an oil lamp. She was holding onto it on the bus for safe keeping. And the remarkable thing was that it was intact. I remember people saying how amazing it was that the glass globe didn’t break – even though all the windows in the bus broke. Why that has stuck in mind for 80 years I don’t know, but I remember them saying: Smaoinich cha do bhris an glob  (Isn’t it amazing the glass globe didn’t break.)”

Dolina doesn’t actually remember that Agnes was stuck in the bus long after everyone else had escaped, but qualifies it by explaining that “my auntie Peggy’s house was next door so Agnes would have just gone home there and not to ours”.

According to Dolina there is no real explanation as to what caused the crash, lost in the mists of time no doubt, except to say that “the road was very, very narrow. I’m sitting in my living room right now and it wouldn’t be wider than this room.

“There was no tar back then, all just gravel and stones. In those days the bus took three hours to go from Marvig to Stornoway as there was a gate at the end of each village and the bus had to stop.

“There was a driver at the time, a Mackinnon from Marvig, and a conductress from Orinsay, a Nicolson. Now I don’t know for sure if it was exactly them on duty that night, but they were certainly about at the time.

“As children we were kept away as much as possible from what happened. But the marks of the accident were there for years and years afterwards. It was a frightening place to be passing. There were no cars, so you only passed it on a bus. And when we went on the bus we were all terrified until we passed that spot.”

Dolina’s father died suddenly in 1950 through a heart attack “but my father wasn’t really one for gossiping, he didn’t talk about what happened much, just more concerned with how the people got on afterwards”.

“You have to remember there was no transport between the villages back then and there were no telephones – the only telephone was in the post office. Somebody must have gone for the doctor. Possibly one of my brothers cycled to Gravir to get him, as the post office would have been closed.

“When my mother gave birth to me in 1938, Duncan had to cycle on New Year’s night to get the nurse and she never let me forget about it. She was with a boyfriend at the time and when she went back he was gone and she never married.” (She chuckles.) “But no, never let me forget it. 

“But on the night of the accident someone would have had to cycle to get the doctor. No phones, no cars – changed days indeed.”