Royle The Flowers of the Forest

Scotland and the First World War
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-85790-125-5
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

On the brink of the First World War, Scotland was regarded throughout the British Isles as 'the workshop of the Empire'. Not only were Clyde-built ships known the world over, Scotland produced half of Britain's total production of railway equipment, and the cotton and jute industries flourished in Paisley and Dundee. In addition, Scots were a hugely important source of manpower for the colonies. Yet after the war, Scotland became an industrial and financial backwater. Emigration increased as morale slumped in the face of economic stagnation and decline. The country had paid a disproportionately high price in casualties, a result of huge numbers of volunteers and the use of Scottish battalions as shock troops in the fighting on the Western Front and Gallipoli - young men whom the novelist Ian Hay called 'the vanished generation'. In this book, Trevor Royle provides the first full account of how the war changed Scotland irrevocably by exploring a wide range of themes - the overwhelming response to the call for volunteers; the performance of Scottish military formations in 1915 and 1916; the militarization of the Scottish homeland; the resistance to war in Glasgow and the west of Scotland; and the boom in the heavy industries and the strengthening of women's role in society following on from wartime employment.

Trevor Royle is an outstanding historian of war and empire. His books include Facing the Bear: Scotland and the Cold War, The Flowers of the Forest: Scotland and the First World War and A Time of Tyrants: Scotland and the Second World War. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a member of the Scottish Government's Advisory Panel for Commemorating the First World War.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Royle, Trevor

Leseproben

The Braes of Angus 1914

Take a look at the horizon in any part of Scotland and the hills are never far away. They are constant companions, unchanging and unchangeable, part of a familiar landscape. Turn from the wider picture and focus on the particular; drive up one of the roads on the coastal littoral between Dundee and Aberdeen and to the west the hills appear as a purple line, pencilled from late autumn to spring with unmistakable streaks of snow. Beyond, out of sight, rise the peaks of the Grampian massif, the high heart of Scotland with its austere tracks leading to distant lonely places. Here lie the Angus glens, or the Braes of Angus as they are also known, Highland by reason of rising on the north side of the fault line, yet less than an hour away from the city of Dundee and then another hour from the Central Belt. The hills are softer and more rounded than anything found further west towards the Atlantic coastline; the main glens – Isla, Prosen, Clova, Lethnot and Esk – stretch like fingers into the upper reaches where the bottomland along the burns and rivers gives way to the high heather-clad moors; farms dot the landscape, with blackface sheep and beef-rich cattle never far away. The number of people who live in the glens is not huge, their numbers are declining and that has been the way for at least two centuries, but one thing binds them to the Braes of Angus. They are in league with a land that for most of them has been home for generations. Not that the relationship has always been easy: for the most part their home is best described as ‘marginal land’ whose economic viability has always been fragile and perhaps always will be.

For the romantic, though, these are the hills of home, scattered with Munros and sufficiently uninhabited to turn a day’s ridge-walk into an adventure, an open-air playground with soaring eagles and far-off deer for company. To the north, up Jock’s Road and into the Mounth, Glen Doll is the entrance to the sterner values of the Cairngorms, irresistible to hill-walkers and climbers who want to test themselves against the harsher conditions of the high ground. Beyond beckons the huge bulk of dark Lochnagar, the mountain that dominates the eastern Grampian skyline. However, locals pay less attention to the scenery for they have to work in it in all weathers. Most make their living from sheep-farming and the shepherding that goes with it. Others are gamekeepers or provide the agricultural services that keep a small country farming community in business. Tourism is also important and there is an ever-changing succession of other smaller concerns, the kind found in any rural locality in Scotland. Big estates are still the focus of much employment and provide the bulk of the housing, just as they have done for centuries.

In a sense the Braes of Angus offer a microcosm of rural Scotland. Although they are made up largely of marginal land and the numbers of people living there have never been populous, they are not so far away from urban life as to be considered overly remote. Dundee, Perth and Aberdeen are less than fifty miles away and towns like Forfar, Brechin, Montrose and Kirriemuir are civic centres in their own right, with steady populations and economies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the essential character of the Braes of Angus has altered little from what it was a hundred years ago in the period before the world went to war in August 1914. Of course there have been changes; no community ever stands still. Farming no longer offers employment to the army of horsemen, grieves, orra men and loons who once ran the big ferm-touns and won their work at the annual feeing markets; the heavy horse has disappeared to be replaced by the tractor and nowadays the farming is wholly mechanised; steam trains no longer puff along sleepy country branch lines, everywhere the car is king and in the glens themselves the numbers are declining. Take Glen Prosen, which has been in Ogilvy hands for over five hundred years since one Thomas Ogilvy bought ‘the lands of Clova, Kyrktone of Clova, Arnitybbyr, Clauchleich and Balinharde’. It is a pleasant, rolling glen which benefits from having no through road as it runs its way from Dykehead to the upper reaches at Kilbo; there is a church but no village worth the name; the bottomland along the Prosen Water was once used for cropping and the high moors are home to sturdy upland blackface sheep. As is the case in most other rural areas, employment opportunities are limited and with only tourism to add to the local agricultural and sporting economy the glen’s story has been one of steady if gentle decline over the past hundred years. The school was closed in the 1980s, attempts at running a shop or tearoom regularly come to grief, the congregation in the whitewashed church is shrinking and there are few young heads to be seen amongst the greying ones of those who worship there of a Sunday.

Today there are only a score of households in the glen yet on the eve of war in 1914 there were forty-eight. Thanks to the presence of the Ogilvys’ estate at Balnaboth, at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a sawmill, a blacksmith and a forge; each farm had its own corn mill and the estate employed a sizable workforce of gamekeepers, estate workers, shepherds and foresters, as well as domestic help in the ‘big house’.1 It was a thriving, self-contained community in which men had employment and families lived in their tenanted cottages, maintaining a thrifty domestic economy. Not that people living in Scotland’s rural areas always enjoyed an easy life. The toil on the land was hard, the working day was long, there was no electricity and few cottages had running water or proper sanitation. In 1917 a Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland remarked that the average farm worker’s house ‘has too often been selected not for its suitability as a site but for economy of land and the convenience of the farm worker. The result is that the site is often a contributing factor in the prevailing dampness of the houses, and aggravates the difficulties of water supply and drainage.’2 The pay was poor, too, with men on the land being paid an average of £20 a year, and although the Agriculture (Scotland) Act of 1911 had extended the rights of security and tenure it was still easy enough for landowners to evict tenants from their cottages. It would be convenient to sentimentalise that way of life and to make legends of the people who lived on the land but, as one of the chroniclers of rural life in Angus and the Mearns has pointed out, the area bred ‘dour folk; strange folk often droll to the point of eccentricity; folk with a humour so dry sometimes that it was just this side of maliciousness; folk whose pleasures were mainly simple and not infrequently carnal. They were people of a special strain, resilient and enduring; in another context their men became the backbone of regiments and their loyalty was heavily traded in the discreet corridors of Whitehall.’3

The First World War was the first great challenge to this frequently precarious way of life. As happened in other parts of the country the young men of the glen joined up in 1914 with the same sense of enthusiasm and urgency that took thousands of other volunteers into the colours. David Archer, a blacksmith, was already a member of the Territorial Force when he went off to war with the 1/5th (Angus) Battalion of the Black Watch, which landed at Le Havre on 13 November 1914 and was soon in action as part of 24th Brigade in the British Army’s 8th Division. David Shaw, the under-keeper at Craig Lodge, joined up as soon as he was eighteen and enlisted on 6 October with 9th Seaforth Highlanders at Fort George near Inverness. Harry Volume, the son of the schoolmaster at Wateresk, was working in Glasgow as a clerk when the war broke out but he was in uniform by the end of August as a private in the 9th Cameronians, one of the army’s special service battalions which had been formed at Hamilton to train the growing numbers of volunteers. By coincidence, across the Atlantic in Montreal his brother Edward joined up at the same time in the Montreal Highlanders. Others were already in the armed forces, notably members of the glen’s landed families. From Balnaboth John Ogilvy served in the Indian Army (1st Gurkha Rifles) as did his kinsman Alastair Fitzhugh MacLean (33rd Punjabis), while John Stormonth-Darling of neighbouring Lednathie was a career soldier in the Cameronians, having served in the Boer War with the regiment’s 2nd battalion, which was designated 2nd Scottish Rifles, but in 1914 he was with the 1st battalion when it crossed over to France on 22 August. Stormonth-Darling was described by a regimental historian as being ‘a big man physically, and a powerful heavyweight horseman. He was strict with junior officers and other ranks alike, and demanded very high standards. He was not particularly clever, but full of common sense and blunt and forthright in his speech. There was a definite type like him found in the Services in those days.’4

As the war progressed and it became obvious that it was going to be a long and drawn-out business other men from the glen followed them, first as volunteers and then as conscripts after the passing of the National Military Service Act at the beginning of 1916. William Lindsay, the shepherd at Spott farm, joined The Black Watch as soon as he was of age on 28 May 1915. George Howe, the under-gardener at Balnaboth, was called up in July 1916 at the age of twenty-six. He served with 9th Black Watch and was wounded while fighting with them as part of 15th Scottish Division during the Battle of Arras a year later. One young man,...