This day brings back his memory fresh…
By Susan Higgins
At the outset of war in 1914, Berwick Barracks was filled with an influx of enthusiastic volunteers. Photographs show smiling faces marching proudly off to war. So many of them never returned and The King’s Own Scottish Borderers lost over 7,000 of its men in the First World War. The level of death and destruction during the 1914-18 war is still overwhelming, but hidden within the large scale national memorials and their associated hero-worship, are the individual stories of those who fought and died, and of those who survived and were left behind. These three KOSB cases dissect the collective, individual, and multi-layered trauma of the First World War.
Captain Shaw, 1st Battalion KOSB, kept a diary throughout his time serving with the Regiment at Gallipoli. The beginning of the diary is fairly mundane, as he describes day-to-day routine. The tone is light-hearted, as he writes about the weather and scenery. As the level of conflict increases, his tone shifts dramatically. He begins to see the vulnerability in himself and the men around him. As conditions worsen, he maintains his commitment to writing the diary, talking through his daily experiences with his imagined reader. He begins to see others dying all around him and gives some small amount of permanence to his own existence by putting pen to paper. It feels like a form of personal therapy, as he writes, stream-of-consciousness-like, trying to make sense of his own experiences.
Mail came. Some sweet lavender, very home-like. Saw a dappled wood pecker last night just like the Chinese variety. This war is like a bad dream. I feel very dirty but keep cheerful and full of hope. Identity disk of one of my Company was sent in. Some Territorials had buried him last night near our well. They said he had no wound so the Dr and I went down and had him exhumed. He was shot through the heart. How like sleep death is. I felt I was tucking the poor lad into bed in his shallow grave.
He flits from one unrelated thought to another, and his mind seems increasingly fractured. The account of exhuming and re-burying a young man from his Company tells us something of the unimaginable daily ordeals that Shaw and those around him would have encountered. His last sentence reminds us of young so many of these soldiers were.
Captain Shaw was killed in action in the early days of the Battle of the Somme, 9th July, 1916.
The White Family were from East Hope Farm, Berwick. Mrs White had five sons, four of whom joined up at the start of WW1, all to different regiments. Her youngest son remained with her to help on the family farm. Hopefully he provided some comfort at such a worrying time.
John White joined the KOSB and he can be seen in the photograph wearing his uniform and sporting a large moustache. Amongst his personal items is a Bible, given to him by his mother before the war and in it she had written “My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not”.
The collection of archive material relating to the family contains a number of items relating to their church and temperance societies. Their family bond seems strong and the thought of suddenly being left on the farm with only one son must have been difficult for Mrs White to deal with. By the end of the war, two of Mrs White’s sons had died. John White never returned. Like Captain Shaw, he was part of 1st Battalion KOSB but was killed on the 4th of June 1915 at Gallipoli. The items sent home after his death were his identity disc and a small pocket diary into which he’d tucked a small photograph of his mother.
A hand-written and unsigned poem is in the White Family archive collection. There is no information as to who wrote it, but seems to have been Mrs White:
Oh cruel war what hast thou done
Why hast thou robbed me of my son.
I little thought that thou so soon
Would cut him down in his bloom.
I’ll sit and think upon my son
With tearful eyes I’ll sit and mourn
When thinking he will never return.
This day brings back his memory fresh
To all who loved him here.
In 1982 the KOSB Museum received a parcel of archive material and some medals belong to William Mackay. They had an accompanying letter from someone who had just visited an elderly lady in Edinburgh called Mrs Wilson. William Mackay had been with the KOSB’s 6th Battalion during WW1, and he had been awarded the Military Medal for rescuing the wounded despite being under heavy machine gun fire. A wonderful feat of bravery from someone who looks so young in his photograph.
William Mackay had left home at the age of 14 and it seems that it may not have been a happy home, as the 1982 letter states that he felt no allegiance to his family, which was made up of only his father and a brother. This is confirmed when, in 1929, he made a will leaving all he owned to his fiancée and, in the event of her death, her mother. The fiancée was the aged Mrs Wilson, formerly Margaret Cuthbert. They had gone to school together, though she was four years younger than him. They had set up a home together, but war and its aftermath stood in their way. After WW1, William MacKay was sent to India for five years and, upon his return, was unable to get a job because of ‘lung trouble’, most likely the aftereffects of being gassed. Their planned marriage was thwarted when he died in 1931. She told the letter writer in 1982 that she could never go back to the house after he died.
She must have married but, by 1982, she seems to have been alone and suffering from heart trouble and moving around with the help of a Zimmer frame. Someone posing as a tradesman had gained entry to her house and stolen lots of her things. Her fear was that it would happen again and her dead fiancé’s medals would be lost forever and that is how his medals and archive material came to be cared for by the KOSB Museum.
When items are donated to the KOSB Museum, it is quite often that the reason given is so that they won’t be lost or forgotten. Some people have no one to leave the items to. Others fear that subsequent generations won’t appreciate them and will put them in a skip. With the huge number of individual archive folders we house within the collection, it is impossible to tell all of their stories at once. But the knowledge that they are safely cared for is a comfort to families, to those with an interest in the Regiment, and to those who strive to ensure the legacy of those individuals who sacrificed so much. The gates to Berwick Barracks are a memorial to fallen Borderers, but it is the collection of stories within the KOSB archive that gives them voice.