Church trip ends in doom, destruction, and death

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1957, hundreds of members of the Holy Name Society of St Anne’s Roman Catholic Church boarded a train at the Kingston Railway Station for an all-day excursion to Montego Bay in the company of their leader, the Reverend Father Charles Earle.

Around 11:30 p.m., on the train’s return leg, as the two diesel engines and 12 wooden coaches approached the town of Kendal, Manchester, three shrill whistle blasts occurred. The train then picked up speed, after which a horrendous sound punctuated the stillness of the night as it derailed and crashed to pieces.

In the pitch-dark night, the injured mourned and moaned, writhing in excruciating pain, some bleeding profusely until they passed.

When daybreak came, it was a scene of unspeakable horror that the residents in the area witnessed. Fragments of human bodies and dead bodies were strewn among heaps of twisted metal and board all over the place.

“Word travelled fast, and hundreds flocked to the scene, only to be greeted with the sight of corpse after corpse laid out on an embankment, looking, in the words of a survivor, like bundles of dirty clothes,” one source says. Some people had gone over a precipice with parts of the wreckage. They were never recovered, the research says.

‘Maas George’ was one of the residents who arrived on the spot. He did not live far from it. It was a horrible sight he came upon.

Born George Stewart in December 1932 at Roxborough, where National Hero Norman Manley, too, was born, he was 25 years old at the time of the accident. Two years ago, he spoke with The Gleaner about what he saw on Monday, September 2, 1957, and it was not pretty.

“Mi neva feel good bout it because inna my boy days, mi sort a fraid,” he said laughing. “But after a while, everything just come back to normal,” he said about his initial reaction.

Among other things, he saw a man who was crushed between two coaches. His feet were pointing to the sky and his head to the ground. People were still stealing in full view of everybody. He recalled a man removing a gold ring from a woman’s finger, yet she was still alive. The woman, he said, asked the thief to wait until she was dead. He told her to shut her mouth because the doctor said she was dead.

And the stories of people who were thrown into the ground en masse are not true, he said. Every body or body part was placed into big board boxes as there was nothing else to put them into. Those who died in the hospital at Mandeville and Spaldings were brought back to the burial spot. “Me go the funeral pon the train car weh carry the dead people dem” to the burial site, he claimed.

He eventually took The Gleaner team to a point near the burial site. The train lines were still visible, but the place had been overgrown by grass. Sometime ago, a storyboard about the crash was mounted there. But what was going on on that train that fateful Sunday night?

It is said that hundreds of known criminals, hooligans, and pickpockets were among the passengers, who numbered about 1,600, one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty per coach instead of 80. Also, the train should have left at 2 p.m., but for whatever reason, it pulled out at 6.

“The criminals were said to have caused such a ruckus during the trip that a priest declared that the wrath of God had surely descended on them. Unknown to him, that statement was prophetic,” the source says.

There was much confrontation between the hoodlums and other passengers, including the church folk. Maas George told The Gleaner that the priests who survived, perhaps did because they were travelling in the back coaches: the last, second-to-last, and the back ones.

“The cause of the accident was later determined to be the accidental closure of an angled wheel (brake) cock that had been placed incorrectly. Some survivors reported that many of the hooligans had ridden on the platforms and steps and some had tampered with that angle cock while en route to Montego Bay. Others indicated they had seen the wheel in question tightened in Montego Bay,” Pieces of the Past, an online source, says.

“While neither of these accounts could be confirmed, some things were known for sure. The train was overcrowded. There were 130-150 passengers per car. Confidence in the rail service was shaken, and much looting and robbing of the dead and injured occurred after the crash. The ensuing investigation found a number of deficiencies at the Jamaica Railway Corporation. Regarding the train in question, the general standard of maintenance of the brake equipment was deemed unsatisfactory.”

Over 200 souls, including several people from the same families, were lost on the spot, and over 700 were injured, making the crash the worst rail disaster in Jamaica’s history and the second-worst rail disaster in the world at that time. The Gleaner Archives are replete with stories about this memorable rail disaster.