A Fife writer has told of his quest to pay poetic tribute to the driver of the train involved in the Tay Rail Bridge Disaster more than 130 years after the event.
Ian Nimmo White (63), from Glenrothes, hopes for a memorial to David Mitchell after he traced the descendants of the Leslie-born locomotive driver, whose train plunged into the Tay on December 28, 1879.
Mr Mitchell was one of 75 people killed when the bridge collapsed during a violent storm that night.
While plans for a tribute on the site at the side of the Tay continue, Mr Nimmo White is keen to see the Leslie community commemorate a key figure in the story.
After a great deal of work delving into the past, Mr Nimmo White said he had learned members of Mr Mitchell’s family are living in Edinburgh and hopes to meet them soon, although he is keen to protect their identity for now.
“It’s a remarkable story and I’m elated to find the family,” he told The Courier yesterday. “I’m looking forward to meeting them and it is of great sadness that at no stage were the family ever able to afford a headstone.
“It’s been a bit of a revelation to everybody that he was from Leslie and I’m hoping that some public body or the people in Leslie will erect a headstone for the family.
“David will be just one name on the national memorial but the Leslie thing is separate and whatever would be on the headstone would be up to whoever is behind it.”
Mr Mitchell was buried in an unmarked grave in Leslie Cemetery, but a small plaque marking his final resting place has since been put up.Tracing descendantsMr Nimmo White’s search began by tracing one of Mr Mitchell’s children, Isabella, who died a spinster at the age of 95 in Leslie.
He then learned of a Beatrice Taylor, a granddaughter of Mr Mitchell, and has now been able to track down living descendants he hopes will get involved in the project.
“I looked into the Mitchells that still lived in Leslie and none of them were related to David Mitchell, but you have to come at this from different angles,” he said.
“A lot of the information is limited but nevertheless you can get quite a lot from on the internet and I’ve had a lot of help from other sources as well.”
Mr Nimmo White also traced a David Mitchell III, who is 90 and lives in England, while his sister is understood to be living in a nursing home in Edinburgh.
“He’s the eldest living descendant I’ve found and apparently he still has his grandfather’s pocket watch, recovered from his body when he was washed up nine weeks after the disaster,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Nimmo White unveiled a poem to be inscribed on the new memorial in Dundee.
A public appeal to raise money for a permanent monument was launched last month and spearheaded by Stuart Morris, of Balgonie Castle, who is a descendant of Elizabeth Mann who was killed when the bridge collapsed.
Mr Morris established the Tay Rail Bridge Memorial Disaster Trust year to create a lasting memorial and hopes to collect more than £50,000 towards the project.
William McGonagall’s poem The Tay Bridge Disaster has long been associated with the disaster but Mr Nimmo White, who writes in English and Scots, feels McGonagall’s poem is “disrespectful” to those who lost their lives and their families.
“McGonagall wrote that poem for his own kudos and self gratification so I’m assuming they (those behind the planned new memorial) asked me to do this because it will have some gravitas,” he said.
His poem, likely to be on a large memorial on the Dundee side of the river, reads, “Deep waters can’t erase the love of those whose lives were once so cruelly blighted.
“Let them stand again, on this spot reclaimed, cherished and united.”