In a century littered with acts of atrocity, the death of up to a million Armenians was described at the time as being unrivalled by any other crime in history. In one brutal afternoon 10,000 people perished when they were thrown into the sea to drown. Had it not been for the persistent efforts of a politician thousands of miles away in Edinburgh, the world may have been much slower to learn the full horror of what happened in the former Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1915. Appalled by the stories he was hearing, Lord James Bryce pulled together a vast collection of eyewitness accounts and gave the British Government a publication called The Blue Book. The man whose body has lain in Edinburgh's Grange Cemetery since his death in 1922 is so highly regarded in Armenia today that an urn containing earth from his grave has been set into the stone of a plaque there.
Turkey denies genocide took place.
While acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died, official records state that this was mainly as a result of fighting over independence, starvation, illness and exposure. He was rounded up with others in 1915 and taken to a prison in Aleppo. One morning they were asked to assemble in the prison courtyard and were greeted by soldiers with their bayonets ready. My uncle knew they were all going to die but he was a lay preacher and so asked for a few moments of grace to preach words of courage and comfort to the other men, telling them their lives had not been in vain. A Turkish eyewitness later told my family that it moved him to tears.