Head-On Collision North of Ladysmith - Part 2

You won’t find this in Bob Dougan’s book, A Story To Be Told. It’s something he told me personally; of growing up on the family farm on Telegraph Road, Cobble Hill, and of knowing ever so vaguely, even as a child, that there was a skeleton in the family closet.

Whispers, sometimes, between adults, and hints, even smirks, from his schoolmates—but nothing substantial, nothing he could really grasp in his young mind: just something sinister in his father’s past...

There was more to it than that. Every so often when he was very young and playing in the yard with his brothers and sisters, a big man in a big car (as both seemed to small children who seldom saw either one close-up) would sometimes visit his father. Nathan Paul Dougan would invite him in and the two would talk for hours.

But for days after each visit, Nathan would be quiet, “down” as Bob put it.

So who was the big man in the big car?

It wasn’t until he was an adult that his father told him of his short-lived career as a telegrapher-dispatcher for the E&N Railway. A career cut short when Nathan made a fatal mistake and allowed two trains on the same track at the same time and four men died.

Without denying his own culpability, Nathan explained how the railway’s traffic system was also at fault, how improvements were made after the fatal crash and after Nathan was convicted of manslaughter.

And the big man in the big car? Nathan’s jailer with whom he’d become friends.

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