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A witness at the Napier inquiry
Kenneth Roy recently set out the distressing lack of action regarding a fatal accident inquiry into the death of Natasha Paton in a coach crash in March 2010. There have been many similar cases and no doubt we can expect more in the future.
In London, the Independent Police Complaints Commission is preparing to publish is report into the shooting of Mark Duggan, an event which allegedly precipitated the Tottenham and wider riots of a year ago. However, the officers involved in the shooting have refused to give evidence (apparently, this is their right and somehow that is supposed to be a satisfactory state of affairs). And let us not have as a benchmark the infamous Bloody Sunday inquiry into the events in Derry in January 1972; it was launched 26 years after the event in 1998, and eventually reported in 2010, having cost in excess of £400 million. Something is surely going adrift.
Inquiries were not always such sluggish affairs. Following the Aberfan disaster in October 1966, the inquiry opened the same month and reported a mere 10 months later. As we go further back and look at inquiries which struggled without the aid of computers, CCTV, databases and other modern technology, the speed and efficiency seem to increase.
After the Quintinshill railway disaster of 22 May 1915, in which 230 soldiers heading for Gallipoli died in Britain’s worst railway accident near Gretna, the Board of Trade Inquiry opened three days later and reported by 17 June. (There was also a coroner’s inquest in England, where some victims died, a criminal trial of two signalmen and a fireman in Edinburgh, and an FAI in Dumfries.)
The US Senate inquiry into the ‘Titanic’ sinking of 15 April 1912 opened four days later – before the survivors had even reached New York – and reported on 25 May (the British Board of Trade inquiry ran from 2 May till 3 July); and the inquiry into the Tay Bridge collapse on 28 December 1879, opened six days later and reported after six months.
The commission was appointed in 1883 and published the record of evidence and accompanying report in a total of over 4,000 pages the following year. The verbatim testimony of the crofters has a surprising potency, and the report is as significant today as a historical source as it was when it was published.
Francis Napier, 10th Lord Napier and Ettrick, was a polyglot, diplomat and colonial administrator with private interests in history and anthropology and a well-developed sense of social justice. He had served in the USA, the Netherlands, Russia and Madras, acting as Viceroy of India in 1872. His fellow-members were Sir Donald Cameron of Locheil; Sir Kenneth Mackenzie of Gairloch; Charles Fraser-Mackintosh, MP for Inverness Burghs; Alexander Nicolson, Sheriff of Kirkcudbright; and Professor Donald MacKinnon, first occupant of the Chair of Celtic at Edinburgh University. Two were Gaelic speakers, at least two (if not all) were landlords, and Fraser-Mackintosh was known to be sympathetic to the crofters.
The commission recommended security of tenure, improving leases and a form of township organisation – the latter proposal being smartly rejected by the government, which feared ‘creeping socialism’. However, the commission’s work resulted in the 1886 Crofters Act (influenced by legislation enacted in Ireland) which, despite its faults and omissions, was nevertheless a major progressive step for the crofting communities.
Dave Harvie was a film editor in a past life, and now writes in a variety of guises
