Reid Arras, 1917

A Journey to Railway Triangle
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-85790-055-5
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Arras, 1917 is a biography of the author's uncle, Ernest Reid, who died in 1917, an officer in the Black Watch, of wounds sustained in the Battle of Arras. Born and raised in Paisley, educated at Paisley Grammar School, then Glasgow University, Ernest Reid intended to become a lawyer before he volunteered for war service. The author the climate in which he grew up, and the influences which formed him and his generation, the generation which supplied the subalterns of the Great War. As a result, although the book remains primarily a biography of its subject, it also explored the spirit in which Britain, still essentially Victorian, went to war in 1914. This is the true and poignant account of a young Scottish officer, pinned down and fatally wounded in No-man's land on the first day of the Battle of Arras, on Easter Monday 1917. The gripping narrative creates a mood of sombre inevitability. It does not simply set out the events of Captain Ernest Reid's life, but puts Ernest's life into its moral as well as its historical context and describes the cultural influences - the code of duty, an unquestioning patriotism - that moulded him and his contemporaries for service and sacrifice in the killing fields of France and Flanders. In retrospect, he and they seem almost programmed for the role they were required to play, and in this lies the pathos at the heart of this moving book.

Walter Reid studied at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh and is the author of a number of acclaimed biographies and books of military and political history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reid, Walter

Leseproben

2

ERNEST IN HIS LANDSCAPE

Ernest was very much a product of Paisley and Renfrewshire, but his roots, both paternal and maternal, were in Ayrshire. The Reids can be traced back to Kilwinning in that county in the middle of the seventeenth century, in or near the hamlet of Reidstoun. Little biographical information is available until we reach John Reid of Fairlie Boag, Kilwinning. He was born in 1753 and had a small farm. His son, William, was born in 1788 and it was he who made the move from Ayrshire to Paisley.

He moved to a town of about 5,000 people which had a long history. There is a local tradition that there were two Roman forts where Paisley is, but it is now accepted that the habitation which Ptolemy called Vanduara is not on its site, despite claims to the contrary. The earliest historical record of what is now the town is the establishment there in the twelfth century of a Cluniac Monastery by Walter Fitzallan, who had been given lands in Renfrewshire by David I. The monastery was to become Paisley Abbey, capable of supporting itself because it was situated on good agricultural land close to the River Cart. There was already a flour mill in the nearby village of Seedhill, now part of Paisley, which was gifted to the Abbey, and the site was of some importance in medieval times. It was on the King’s highway at the point where it crossed the Cart by the Paisley or Seedhill ford, and on the route, through what is called the Lochwinnoch Gap, to the rich agricultural lands of Ayrshire, and the coast.

Through the middle ages and till the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, Paisley remained a quiet market town, flourishing, at least until the Reformation, because of the Abbey. The agricultural richness of the area which had attracted Fitzallan to the location in the first place continued to generate prosperity, and the monks stimulated and encouraged good husbandry. James IV made the village of Paisley a royal burgh in 1488.

What radically changed the economy of the town was the establishment of an important textile industry – or rather a series of textile industries: there was a succession of rises and declines of a variety of enterprises. Weaving had been an important occupation in the town from an early point: in the Poll Tax Roll for Renfrewshire for 1695, the weavers outnumbered all other tradesmen. By the early eighteenth century, Paisley was an established regional centre for textiles and its fabrics were well known in England as well as in Scotland. Initially rough linens and mixed fabrics were manufactured, but from this developed the manufacture of linen yarn, and this was to be the basis of the town’s prosperity throughout the eighteenth century.

As that century approaches, and with it the Age of Enlightenment, it is worth looking for a moment at an extraordinary incident which sheds light on the persistence of medieval ideas into modern times, and which was eventually to have an important effect on the local textile industry. On 30 December 1696, at a meeting of Paisley Presbytery, the minister of Erskine reported the bewitching of Christian Shaw, the daughter of the Laird of Bargarran. Christian was in her early teens. She was suffering from wild convulsions, with rolling eyes and frothing mouth. She had episodes of blindness and could be deaf and mute. When she vomited she threw up feathers, straw, hay, rags, bones, coal, stones and candles. The doctors said that she was bewitched.

The case was reported to the Privy Council in Edinburgh and Commissioners were appointed to deal with the matter. Arrests were carried out throughout the whole county of Renfrew in a frenzy that illustrates the aptness of the metaphor, ‘witchhunt’. Christian herself accused some people directly, including a servant girl who had said to her, ‘The devil harl [take] your soul to hell’. Some were named by others of the accused.

‘Prickers’, professional witch identifiers, were called in. The accused men and women were stripped and their bodies searched with a large needle. If a spot were found where the prick of the needle was not felt and there was no bleeding, that was clear evidence that the devil’s fingers had touched the warlock or witch.

These prickers, remember (and the Commissioners, of whom there were 17, educated men of consequence, including Lord Blantyre, Sir John Maxwell of Pollok, Sir John Shaw of Greenock and William Cunningham of Craigends), were contemporaries of Locke and Newton. The Privy Council was composed of even more substantial men, sophisticated and frequently educated in Europe as well as in Scotland. But within a generation of the Age of Enlightenment, when Gibbon was to speak of the brave light of philosophy breaking in from Scotland, they sent for the prickers.

Twenty-one men and women were put on trial in the Tolbooth of Paisley before the King’s Commissioners in May 1697. Three men and four women were convicted and were condemned to be throttled and burned on the Gallow Green on 10 June of that year. One of the men hanged himself in his cell, and it was understood that the devil had been impatient for his soul, and had strangled the man himself.

The remaining six were taken to the Gallow Green. Stakes had been driven into the ground and one was chained to each stake. The hangman passed along the line strangling each person with a rope. Then kindling dipped in tar was piled around the victims, whose bodies were burnt.

Local legend says that the remains of the bodies were buried at the point where George Street and Maxwellton Street cross. There is there a horseshoe embedded in a causey stone, which was left in place in recent years when all the other causey stones were lifted. It is said that this marks the place where the witches and warlocks were burned and that the horseshoe keeps their spirits down.

There was a coda to the story in the nineteenth century when a local man known as Pate the Pirate drunkenly prised the horseshoe out of the stone. Immediately there was an epidemic of suicides, and weavers hanged themselves all over the town. Pate sobered up and confessed what he had done: the horseshoe was replaced and at once the suicides stopped.

The connection between this story of witches and the textile industry is Christian Shaw. She recovered completely. In 1718 she married the parish minister of Kilmaurs. He died after only three years and she then set off with her mother to explore the Low Countries, where she became interested in the thread industry which Holland had more or less monopolised. She and her mother studied the operations in detail and smuggled apparatus and plans home, where they set up a factory at Bargarran. Christian proved a very capable businesswoman and her enterprise flourished remarkably, and so this woman, whose youth resembles something from the early Middle Ages, ends up as an integral part of the Industrial Revolution. The girl who starts off being remembered for flying around her room is finally ‘regarded as a founder of the sewing thread industry’.

By 1789 that industry employed no less than 4,800 workers. Alongside the production of thread, other textile industries came and went. Linen gave way to silk. In 1766, 855 looms produced linen and 702 silk; by 1773 only 557 looms were producing linen and 876 were producing silk. Paisley was the main centre for the production of silk in Britain for several years but, typically of the rise and fall of these textile trades, silk manufacture began to decline as early as 1790, and by 1812 there was no silk production in the town.

For a time cotton took its place, and in the nineteenth century shawls with the so-called pine pattern design, ‘the Paisley pattern’, had become a signature Paisley product. But the garment was essentially a fashion item and its popularity faded, despite Queen Victoria’s attempt to encourage it by wearing the shawl. By 1882 there were fewer than 1,000 weavers in Paisley and there were not 50 left by 1910.

More enduring was the production of cotton thread. It became mechanised and was extremely important to Paisley. In the mid-nineteenth century there were 45 firms in Paisley producing thread, but much the most important businesses were those run by two families: the Coats and the Clarks. These families were generous benefactors, but ruthless business people. They became linked by marriage and soon controlled the whole of the local industry, forcing every competing firm in the town out of business. They bought up those who would sell at premium prices; the others were undercut and driven into liquidation. These monopolist techniques were applied on almost every continent, so that by 1910 Paisley was regarded as the thread capital of the world; and over 10,000 were employed in Paisley itself. The Coats/Clark nexus was an empire of mills, dominating and impressive buildings, built on a palatial scale and scattered around the world, sending their profits back to Renfrewshire.

The Clark and Coats families were large ones, and many people could boast a connection with them, as indeed could the Reids. The grandest members of the clan were very grand indeed. Titles were conferred on them, they became the friends of Edward VII and George V and they distanced themselves as much as they could from the source of their mercantile fortunes. Others were not so grand. The clan was for convenience divided into the Greatcoats and the Petticoats. The Reids’ connection was with the Petticoats.

Paisley was on the wrong side of Scotland for access to the trade routes to Europe, but by the nineteenth century, trade to the west had become at least as important as that to mainland Europe. Until the Clyde was dredged as far as Glasgow,...