37 mins
The Big Question
QUESTION
Jennifer Boag, reader, Greenock: Westburn
Isobel Booth-Clibborn, Children’s Development Worker with Church of Scotland’s Mission and Discipleship Council
“On my father’s side of the family, two of my uncles were conscientious objectors (COs) because they were Quakers and pacifists who took the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to heart.
“I have some photos and letters from Uncle Willie who was arrested and imprisoned in Barlinnie and Wakefield prisons as well as serving in a logging team in Wigtownshire.
Many COs were proud of the stand they took and developed a strong social life in prison with football teams and drama groups.
“There was a lot of ill-feeling against COs across the country and my father said he much admired his mother for being willing to marry the brother of a CO during the war.
“My mother’s side of the family was completely different. Two of her uncles were killed in WWI. One was an airman in the Royal Naval Air Service, before the days of the RAF. He was killed falling from his plane into the Solent. In 1915, he was the first airman in Greenock to be killed and there was a huge turnout for his funeral as reported in the local paper. The other brother was killed in 1917 at Arras.
“My grandfather on my mother’s side served in the Royal Engineers and was in Egypt and Palestine. He brought my grandmother a book of pressed flowers from sites in the Holy Land such as Nazareth, Bethlehem and Gethsemane, which I have sadly now lost.”
“Every family across the country was affected by the First World War.
“I was reminded of this on a recent visit with my mother and aunt, to Glen Lyon, where my grandmother Isobel McColl grew up. My grandmother and her brother were ‘children of the Manse’. Duncan her brother was at boarding school in Edinburgh and when he was 18 joined up, along with that whole generation of young men. He was sent to France.
“On one leave he said that there were only two boys from his year at school left and three of their cousins had also been killed. Duncan had to return to the front and was killed when he was just 19. “It was very moving to see his name, along with many others, on the war memorial in Glen Lyon.
“His death had a huge effect on his parents and my grandmother. She had always felt called to missionary service but was then unable to go. She married my grandfather Willie Forrester who had been sent to Mesopotamia following his degree in Glasgow. There he caught malaria and was sent to India to recuperate and there was cholera on the ship. But he survived.
“I remember my ‘maiden aunt’ – one of a generation who had not been able to marry.
“From the end of the war these relatives were very positive about the formation of the League of Nations as a way of preventing another war and bringing nations together.
But then horrified and fearful when the Second World War started.”
Ruth and Sandy Simpson, Dundee: Menzieshill
Iain Whyte, General Secretary, the Church of Scotland Guild
The Rev Barbara Quigley, minister, Glasgow: St Andrew’s East
“In the Battle of Arras museum, piercing the darkness of a tunnel wall, an illuminated line from Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting poem is the only light.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend…
“We visited the museum recently, to pay tribute to a young man, cut down, remembered always by his grieving family back home.
“One of the many, many killed in that terrible conflict – Alex McKenzie of the Royal Scots – April 18 1917 – is laid to rest in Etaples Cemetery, northern France, alongside many others who died the same day.
“We’ve seen the images, the endless lines of countless graves but nothing really prepares you. And then you find that one grave amongst thousands you were looking for.
“Alex, brother of Ruth’s mother and therefore her uncle.
“At home in Dundee are the faded photographs, medals, condolence message and the St John’s Gospel which he carried … evocative connections to a war becoming more distant with each passing year.
“Just another family member who didn’t return, one of millions across the world.
“We’d never had the opportunity to visit the grave before, but in 2017, a hundred years after the battle, the right moment came. We did the journey to Northern France together, journeying ‘for family reasons – because he’s my uncle’.
“We took a couple of pebbles from Alex’s home church in Glen Lethnot in Angus, and pressed them into the soil at his grave; then we said good-bye.”
“George Adamson Whyte was 27 when he left Barrhead in 1915. Newly married, he went offto fight for ‘King and country’, a phrase that grates on me in the context of WW1 and its effect on ordinary people.
“Details are unclear, but on September 4 1917, during the third battle of Ypres, ‘Passchendaele’, he was in a work party repairing defences. Several died. George was badly injured, dying later that day in a clearing station on the outskirts of Ypres.
“100 years later, my generation still bears the marks of the Great War. Our family, our history, where we lived, our politics, all affected by what happened then and by why it happened.
“George’s only son was 11 months. His widow, Jeannie, 28, was a widow for 77 years.
“My dad, Wilson, could have stayed at school on a bursary, but Jeannie refused such ‘charity’. Instead, he left at 14 and worked until 1981 in Shanks’ toilet factory.
“I have no uncles, aunts or cousins (my mother was the only child of another injured soldier).
“Wilson never realised his potential. Jeannie missed the long marriage and other children she hoped for. George never became a chemist and was lost to the Independent Labour Party, of which he had been a member.
“I found George’s grave in 1998 and have gone to visit almost every year since and was privileged to deliver the ‘exhortation’ at the Menin Gate on the 100th anniversary of his death. There are so many lessons to be learned and it is no glib phrase to say ‘lest we forget’.”
“France 7-9-18
Dear Mrs Quigley,
I am taking the liberty of writing this note to express my deepest sympathy with you in the loss of your husband who died fighting for the cause of truth and liberty on 27th August…
D.N.Craig, 2/Lt”
“My Grandfather Thomas [Tommy] Quigley was an Ayrshire man of good Irish Catholic stock. He was a member of the Royal Flying Corps, the forerunner of the RAF, and yet he is recorded as having served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and he died as a member of the 1st/6th Bn Seaforth Highlanders, a regiment raised in Dornoch, the opposite side of the country.
“This letter signalled a huge change in the life of Mary Ellen Quigley’s young family.
There was little financial support for widows and orphans and she was left with a three-year-old daughter, Mary, and a son of 13 months, George. Mother Quigley had to provide for her family and so she ran a number of bakeries/dairies in Glasgow. Her baby son was sent to live with Brethren grandparents in Blantyre and the link with the Roman Catholic Church was lost.
“Fast forward 25 years to the Second World War and that little girl Mary received a similar letter saying that her husband had perished by what we would now call ‘friendly fire’ leaving her with three small children, whilst her baby brother George was fighting his way through Italy. George married a Yorkshire Congregationalist and I was born in 1953.
“A snapshot of one family defined by their men at war.”
This article appears in the November 2018 Issue of Life and Work
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