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After the crash, what then? When the stunned survivors of the Quintinshill train crash of May 22nd 1915 answered the roll – there were only about 50-60 of them left on their feet. 216 of their comrades were dead and as many again injured. The core was knocked out of the 7th battalion Royal Scots and a community left reeling with loss.

They’d started out before the war as a territorial battalion centred on their Drill Hall in Dalmeny Street in Leith. When war came they transferred to regular service. They were bound for Gallipoli when the train taking them to embark was incinerated in the disaster – and those poor survivors were sent to carry on to the docks in Liverpool – before it dawned on someone that they weren’t fit for war. One of the men who survived was Heather Thomson’s grandfather Alexander Thomson

He was sent back to the Drill Hall via Craigleith Hospital – but the dead were already there, in 107 coffins for 216 men – just think about that. Of those retrieved, many could not be identified. There was no way to have a normal funeral under those circumstances – though the army tried to give some of the trappings of one. Between the flag-draped coffins stood two rows of potted palms – the drill hall replacing the front parlour where a coffin would usually rest in the home. Horse-drawn hearses took the individual coffins of the identified men while troops lined the streets and piper played ‘Lochaber No More’. But there was no disguising the horror implicit in the mass grave in Rosebank Cemetery or the Red Cross Motorised ambulances which shuttled the bones of the unknown soldiers to the grave in trip after trip.

One of the men in that grave was Jim Renwick’s uncle – Private Robert Renwick who left a widow and two children.

Families were left shattered and where a breadwinner was gone – facing difficult realities about child-care and women going out to work. Jim’s aunt was one of the lucky ones she was given a job as a council cleaner and his grandfather moved in to help bring up the children. Her daughter in turn named her son Robert after her lost father – only to lose him as well in the Merchant Navy in World War 2.

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