Quintinshill - Britain's worst train crash

Tonight at 2100 the BBC4 tv channel will tell the story of Britain’s worst ever rail disaster, which happened 100 years ago tomorrow. It was a three train pile-up during the First World War at Quintinshill near Gretna on the West Coast main line early on the morning of 22 May 2015, in which about 226 people died, most of them soldiers on a troop train.

The troop train was carrying about 500 men south on the first leg of their journey to Gallipoli. It was made up of gas-lit wooden coaches. Congestion in the area that morning meant that a local train was being held stationary on the main line.

The troop train ploughed into it, and then shortly after, a sleeper coming up from the south ran into the wreckage. The carriages of the troop train were soon alight, the blaze spreading with nightmare speed.

Two signalmen were blamed for the crash. One was sentenced to three years’ hard labour, and the other to 18 months in gaol, but pre-publicity for tonight’s programme suggests it may have new information on the causes.

For more on Quintinshill, see A Disastrous History of Britain.

Who remembers the Armenians?

'Who remembers the Armenians?' was supposed to have been Hitler's scornful question to his commanders as he urged them to be pitiless to the people of Poland on the eve of the German invasion in 1939. He was referring to the massacre of the Armenian Christian minority in the Turkish Ottoman Empire 100 years ago.

A century on, the answer to Hitler's question seems to be: 'quite a lot of people.' Over the past week, remembrance ceremonies have been held all over the world, and the French president, Francois Hollande, urged Turkey to recognise the massacre of up to 1.5 million people as genocide.

Turkey's president said his country 'shared the pain' of the Armenians, but rejected the suggestion that the killings were part of a systematic campaign, and said that many innocent Muslims also perished during the horrors of the First World War.

The fate of the Armenians has long been a subject of bitter controversy in Turkey. In 2006, Orhan Pamuk, the first Turk to win the Nobel Prize for literature, was charged with'insulting Turkish identity' when he referred to the massacre, and the following year, a journalist of Armenian descent was shot dead in Istanbul after he described it as 'genocide'.

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 17 - Gallipoli

The attack on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula by Britain and France in 1915 was conceived as a way of getting round the bloody stalemate of the Western Front, which was devouring soldiers’ lives at an almost unimaginable rate.

The initial idea was for warships to breeze through the Dardanelles straits into the Sea of Marmara, threaten Constantinople and force Germany’s Turkish allies to pull out of the war, but as the navy failed to make progress, it was decided that a major land invasion would also be needed.

Suffering uninspired leadership and handicapped by extremely difficult terrain, this quickly degenerated into a murderous deadlock that looked disconcertingly similar to what was happening in Flanders.

After 11 months, with 38,000 British and British Empire troops killed, the invasion was abandoned.  It was feared that the withdrawal would entail heavy losses, but, in fact, this proved the most successful part of the operation.   A brilliant campaign of deception involving rifles firing automatically from deserted trenches, and noisy empty supply trucks running back and forth at night, enabled the pull-out to be made without any significant casualties.

Darfur war crimes + warship explosion

Further evidence of a growing determination to hold suspected war criminals to account. For the first time ever the International Criminal Court has called on the UN Security Council to take action against a country for failing to arrest suspects.

The country in question is Sudan, and the suspects former Humanitarian Affairs (!) Minister Ahmed Haroun - who allegedly recruited and armed the Janjaweed militia - and Ali Muhammad Abd-Al-Rahman, one of the militia leaders – both accused of war crimes in Darfur. Today Omar al-Bashir, himself an alleged war criminal, begins a new term as Sudan’s president. More than 300,000 people are believed to have been killed in Darfur. (See my blogs of March 4 and Aug 6, 2009).

On this day…..95 years ago, a huge explosion ripped through HMS Princess Irene, a British navy minelayer berthed at Sheerness in Kent. Aboard were 300 Royal Navy personnel plus 76 dockyard workers. Just one of them survived.

As the First World War was raging at the time, there were all sort of rumours that the blast had been caused by dastardly and ingenious enemy action, but an official inquiry came to the conclusion that it was actually a faulty mine primer. For more details, see A Disastrous History of Britain.