1	Your King and Country Need You: August 1914

 

In 1914 Scotland’s summer broke as it usually does in the northern parts of the British archipelago. July and August, the traditional holiday months, are often wet and windy, with few days of prolonged sunshine, and the fourteenth year of the new century was no exception. Later, people would remember the summer months of 1914 as representing a long hot interlude before the onset of war, the last golden age before the world was plunged into the horrors of global conflict, but the weather records of the period show a somewhat different picture. While there were days of sunshine, the polar opposite also prevailed: the Clyde Corinthian Yacht Club regatta, held on 9 July, was plagued by what the organisers called ‘fluky weather’, which made for difficult sailing on the rain-soaked Clyde estuary, while two days later on the same west coast the Turnberry Amateur Golfing tournament took place in ‘brilliant sunshine and exuberating [sic] heat’. A royal visit by King George V and his wife, Queen Mary, in the first half of the month also met with mixed conditions. It rained in Edinburgh for much of the visit, but the royal couple visited Lanarkshire on 12 July in ‘beautiful weather’ and the Scotsman reported that the visit had been a great success, underlining the importance of the monarchy to the country and its people. The only setbacks had the been enforced cancellation of a visit to Falkirk because striking joiners had refused to erect the necessary barricades and stands, and a potentially damaging incident in Dundee when an English suffragette called Olive Walton, the local organiser of the Women’s Social and Political Union, threw a missile at the royal carriage while the king and queen were visiting the Dens Flax Works in Victoria Street.

Scotland’s holidaymakers were apparently not downhearted by the prospect of the season’s frequent cold spells and showers. The previous year had seen a boom in Scotland’s popular holiday resorts and 1914 followed that pattern. The Glasgow Herald reported that record crowds had flocked to fashionable destinations such as North Berwick and Elie and the city’s trades’ fair fortnight had seen large numbers of day trippers and holidaymakers taking the traditional voyage ‘doon the watter’ from the Broomielaw in Glasgow to the resorts on the Clyde estuary. Special trains were run to resorts in England, Blackpool being a popular destination, while other holidaymakers took steamers to the Isle of Man and further afield to resorts in Northern Ireland. The trades’ holidays in Aberdeen and Edinburgh were equally busy with visitors flocking to the seaside towns on the Fife, East Lothian and Ayrshire coasts. Over 1,200 US visitors made the pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott’s home at Abbotsford in the Border country, and higher numbers of Americans than ever before were reported to be visiting Scotland. For the Scottish tourist trade, which had faced a long period of economic uncertainty at the end of the nineteenth century, business was booming and record takings looked possible.1 The mood was briskly self-confident and the tourist advertising brochures made most of the pleasures that awaited anyone wanting to visit Scotland:

Stress and strain, which are in these busy days the inevitable accompaniment of works, have made those breaks in the ordinary routine which we term ‘holidays’ almost as essential to existence as are food and raiment. More especially is this case with those whose lot is cast where the exercise of brain and intellect, rather than those of muscle, brings them the means of comfortable living . . . why not fall back on our own resources and, for this year’s holiday at least, in a voyage which shall have all the charm of novelty, moderate expense and comfort combined make the acquaintance of beautiful Britain under the auspices of the Clyde Shipping Company.²

It was not just in the market for tourism that things were improving. There was also the prospect that a parliament would be restored to Scotland with the advent of political devolution. In May 1914 a Home Rule Bill had passed its second reading in the House of Commons, mainly as a result of the promptings of the Scottish Home Rule Association and the Young Scots Society, a radical-minded grouping within the ruling Liberal Party who were in favour of free trade, social reform and what they called ‘the unquenchable and indefinable spirit of nationalism’. Introducing the bill, J. I. Macpherson, the Liberal member for Ross and Cromarty, argued that the measure had the backing of a party that had won 80 per cent of Scotland’s seventy-two seats at the last general election in 1910, and that it deserved to succeed on those grounds alone. The bill envisaged the creation of a devolved Scotland within the framework of a new federal structure for the United Kingdom, or, as Prime Minister H. H. Asquith put it, the new union would have a peculiarity in that ‘while for common purposes all its constituent members can deliberate and act together, none of them is at liberty to deal with those matters which are specially appropriate and necessary for itself without the common consent of all.’

The Liberals had supported home rule since the 1880s when it seemed that Ireland would be granted a measure of independence as part of Gladstone’s desire to settle the ‘great moral issue of Ireland’ and that in the process Scotland would lose out. In 1894 and 1895 Scottish home rule bills had gained parliamentary majorities but had not been passed due to lack of parliamentary time. The Liberals had also been responsible for the creation in 1885 of the Scottish Office under the leadership of a secretary for Scotland who had specific responsibilities in a number of areas including education, agriculture and fisheries. (It was, in fact, a restitution: the office of secretary for Scotland dated back to the period before the Act of Union of 1707.) The Liberals’ home rule initiative had the support of the Conservatives, who had introduced the post of Scottish Secretary after the Marquis of Salisbury succeeded Gladstone as prime minister following the split in the Liberal Party over Irish home rule. While the Conservatives, were not overly enthusiastic about devolution they reasoned that the union was best preserved by making concessions of this kind, or, as Salisbury expressed it in his invitation to the Duke of Richmond and Gordon to accept the post, the move would ‘redress the wounded dignities of the Scottish people – or a section of them – who think enough is not made of Scotland’.3

By 1914 the Liberal Party was still a mighty institution which permeated all levels of the country’s life although it had lost the over-arching influence that had seen it become Scotland’s political powerhouse in the years following the passing of the Reform Act in 1832. The enfranchisement of working men in 1884 had eroded its support amongst the growing working class and had encouraged the emergence of newer socialist factions, and there was dissent within the party over the question of the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland. However, despite the formation of the Liberal Unionist party to oppose home rule for Ireland in the general election of 1885, the party still enjoyed a hegemony that was seemingly proof against Labour and/or Conservative* incursions. It was the party of reform and innovation. After winning a landslide election in 1906 with fifty-eight seats being won in Scotland, it set about reforming health care and introduced old age pensions and unemployment benefit.

By 1914 the Liberals enjoyed their greatest support in Scotland in rural areas outside the Central Belt, where the Conservatives had gained ground largely as a result of their opposition to home rule for Ireland and Scotland. Even so, in successive elections the Liberals had still managed to consolidate their power. Asquith sat for a Scottish constituency, East Fife, and had married into a powerful Scottish manufacturing family, the Tennants, who held the British patent rights for producing dynamite; nearly a third of his cabinet were Scots or sat for Scottish seats; and Scots warmed to the party’s policies or ‘tribal incantations’, as the novelist John Buchan called them, of free trade, religious equality and land reform. Scottish Liberals espoused the issue of home rule with enthusiasm, candidates were obliged to embrace it, and even though the measure did not enjoy widespread support across Scotland, political change was in the air and in the early summer of 1914 Scottish Liberals were confident that their bill would eventually reach the statute books.⁴

The economy was also in reasonable fettle thanks mainly to the enduring strength of the heavy industries of the west of Scotland, which produced ships, locomotives and heavy engineering plant for the international markets. In 1913 the Clyde shipyards, the motor of Scotland’s economy, had produced a record tonnage of ships: at 757,000 tons it was a third of the British total and superior to the 646,000 tons of ships produced in German yards. Some of the most successful engineering and manufacturing enterprises were Scottish-owned or based in Scotland. Railway locomotives built by the North British Locomotive Company were sold all over the empire and accounted for half of Britain’s total production, the engineering industry employed 78,000 workers who produced an output worth £16 million in 1913 and in Clydebank the US-owned Singer Sewing Machine Company employed 10,000 workers with an output of 13,000 machines per week. Coal was still king: although seams were becoming exhausted in the Ayrshire and Lanarkshire fields this was balanced by new exploitation in Fife and the Lothians. With a skilled and specialised workforce at the disposal of the foundries and workshops of the heavy industries, Scotland’s manufacturing might seemed to be built on firm foundations. ‘Clyde-built’ was a byword for shipbuilding quality around the world, and as many of the less skilled workers were paid significantly lower wages than other parts of the United Kingdom this gave Scottish firms a distinct advantage in the marketplace. Add on other successful industries such as jute production in Dundee, the cotton factories of Paisley, the fishing industry, which employed 35,000 men and 50,000 women in seasonal work, and innovations such as the Albion motor-car company, and Scotland seemed to be in a strong economic position, largely as a result of its achievements during the Victorian period.5

Not that everything was rosy however: there is compelling evidence to suggest that in the run-up to the outbreak of war in 1914 Scotland’s industrial economy was facing a gentle decline that would accelerate in the post-war years.⁶ Scotland’s industrial success was built largely on heavy industries that supplied a specialised range of products and depended on selling them to the international market, one result being that there was little diversification. On the Clyde, for example, the shipyards owed much of their success to building warships for both the Royal and other navies. Profits also depended on keeping wages low for unskilled workers. Not only did this spread resentment, it meant that the domestic economy stagnated as low wages did not encourage consumer demand. On the first score wages had not kept pace with rises in the cost of living and this factor encouraged outbreaks of labour unrest and unofficial strike action on Clydeside in the period before the war. A Board of Trade Inquiry into the Cost of Living, Earnings in Hours, published in 1913, revealed that food prices had increased by 25 per cent since the beginning of the new century and that wages had fallen behind, and in the same year the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), founded in 1897, concluded that ‘the basic cause of labour unrest is poverty’. The Glasgow Labour History Workshop found that a rash of strikes and sporadic discontent on Clydeside in the four years before the war were created by ‘a combination of real wage erosion and high levels of under-employment and insecurity in the 1900s, with tightening labour market conditions from c1910 and an all-pervasive process of work intensification’.7

Low wages also meant that, on the whole, living conditions in the industrial areas were not of the best. Victorian wealth had changed the complexion of the big cities by allowing those who created the prosperity to benefit from it. Glasgow’s city centre was adorned with ostentatious office buildings and its west end contained fine family houses and terraces designed by architects such as Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson and John Burnett. In Edinburgh the aspiring middle classes were moving out of the confines of the city centre to new villas and terraced houses in the south-side suburbs of Newington and Morningside, which were served by an equally new suburban railway. Dundee’s wealth was reflected in the big rentier houses built by the jute barons along the Perth Road and these were replicated further north in the ‘Granite City’ of Aberdeen. For those who did the hard grinding work that allowed the wealth to be produced in the first place, life was a lot less agreeable. Due to a mixture of laissez-faire attitudes, indifference to the plight of working people, the ignorance of the scientific community and primitive approaches to sanitation, the four main cities all contained areas that were contaminated by disease and crime and in which people lived lives of abject poverty in desperate surroundings. Visitors to Victorian Scotland marvelled at the country’s growing wealth, but they were also appalled by the physical conditions and high mortality rates endured by the workers.

True, in the latter half of the century, there had been improvements in the provision of public health. Water supplies were modernised, sewage systems were brought into use and strides were made in combating epidemic diseases and introducing new standards in antisepsis, but the housing stock remained poor, with crowded tenement buildings offering little in the way of even elementary standards of hygiene. Water supplies were confined to single taps and there was little provision for basic lavatories; these were usually communal privies, but over-crowding was the eternal and most serious problem: most families lived one to a single room. In that environment men turned to alcohol for escape, thereby exacerbating the problem, women endured downtrodden lives trying to make ends meet and children were brought up believing that their lot in life was normal, perhaps even expected. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a hangover from the Victorian mindset that insisted that the people in the slums had brought their misfortune on their own heads by leading lives that were irresponsible and that they were incapable of prudence or forethought. In 1912 O. H. Mavor, an alumnus of Glasgow Academy and Glasgow University, was beginning his career as a medical practitioner and was only too aware of his native city’s shortcomings and the ways in which his patients in the poorer areas attempted to address them: ‘The badge of rank was cleanliness, and cleanliness was preserved in bug-infested houses with one tap in a kitchen sink as its only instrument.’8 During the war Mavor served as a military doctor in France, Mesopotamia and central Asia and emerged as Scotland’s leading playwright in the post-war period, writing under the name of James Bridie.

Despite the wretched conditions endured by the majority of the working-class population and the potential for instability in the industrial heartlands there were signs which suggested that Scotland, or at least Lowland Scotland, was enjoying one of its periods of economic success and social well-being. In 1911 Glasgow had mounted its third international trade exhibition, its object being to endow a chair of Scottish History and Literature at Glasgow University. Its aims might have been limited and even parochial but the exhibition raised £143,000 and attracted 9.4 million visitors to its site at Kelvingrove, where the inquisitive and the curious found ‘an old-world Scottish “toonie”, a Highland Village, a Pavilion on Old Glasgow, an Aerial Railway, a Mountain Slide, a West African Village and various side-shows.’⁹ The same city also gave birth to a Scottish National Theatre Society and in 1907 the final wing was added to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s School of Art, a pioneering example of functional architecture that explored the architect’s belief that all aspects of a building are part of a single artistic unity. Mackintosh synthesised a new kind of Scottish architecture, and from the school he created artists such as S. J. Peploe, J. D. Fergusson, F. C. B. Cadell and Leslie Hunter, who produced works that presaged the Modernist movement. Later they would be known as the Scottish Colourists. The Arts and Crafts movement also flourished in Scotland, building on traditional respect for individual craftsmanship.

Literature was going through one of its periodic troughs and, indeed, there were question marks over whether Scotland had a distinctive literature at all. Robert Louis Stevenson had died in 1894 and his early death had removed a writer who spoke with a distinctively Scottish voice that was understood and loved all over the world. Adventure novels such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped enjoyed a wide readership and in works of the calibre of The Master of Ballantrae and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde he explored an age-old schism in the Scottish psyche: the split between heart and mind, emotion and intellect. His loss meant that Scotland no longer had a world-class writer, but that did not lessen the appeal of best-selling contemporaries such as Margaret Oliphant, the author of over a hundred novels, or George Macdonald, whose fantasy novels later influenced J. R. R. Tolkien in the writing of The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately for the reputations of the practitioners, the most popular writers before the First World War belonged to a school which was later denigrated as the ‘Kailyard’, the catch-all phrase used by the critic J. H. Millar in the April 1895 issue of the New Review to describe the novels of J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett and Ian Maclaren (the pen-name of John Watson). In their work is a well-defined Arcadia of rural sentimentality peopled by characters who represent solid virtues: the minister or the village worthies who voice pastoral morality, the industrious son who rises by dint of hard work and his own endeavours, the honest tenant farmers who give of their best for no other reward than their families’ improvement and sickly virginal heroines who are not long for the world. Behind them are stock rapacious landlords, self-satisfied incomers and the ever-present figures of death and disease. The city only appears as a distant rumour, a place to be avoided; instead, the virtues of village life are emphasised, and in that sense the world created by the Kailyard novelists is little more than a projection of eighteenth-century Romantic views about nature and its beneficial effects on humankind. In that respect the Kailyard writers were only pandering to the popular taste of a public who preferred the sentimentality of an imagined past, when life was sweet and worry-free, to the harsher realities of their own lives.

At the same time that they were being devoured in numbers by a largely non-conformist middle-class British audience, they were balanced by novels such as George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901) and John Macdougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914), which borrowed many of the features of the Kailyard school but put them in a more brutal and realistic setting. And as the literary critic William Donaldson has revealed in recent studies, the excesses of the Kailyard were balanced by a wide range of novels and short stories whose authors were prepared to tackle robustly contemporary themes and to question cosy assumptions about the country and its people. Donaldson also found that many nineteenth-century newspapers were not shy about publishing work in vernacular Scots and that its tone was ‘intensely anti-imperialist, routinely anti-clerical, [and] fundamentally egalitarian in its hatred of hypocrisy’.10 This contradicts a contemporary belief that English was the only tongue for a serious Scottish writer and that the use of Scots was only suited for pawky sentiments.

This subculture ran contrary to what has come to be the received opinion about the period, namely that Scottish literature before the First World War was merely nostalgic and provincial and that it awaited a spring awakening. While it is true that the Kailyard fiction was dominant there was also a confidence to the nation’s cultural life that transcended the banalities of Thrums and Drumtochty. Political agitation for home rule was mirrored by a new sense of pride in nationhood that spilled over into art and literature and from there into everyday lives. Some of the smug self-satisfaction in defining Scottishness was bogus and rooted in the past but the creation of national cultural institutions such as the national galleries and museum in Edinburgh and the establishment of learned societies underlined a willingness to preserve the national identity against encroaching anglicisation. In his magazine The Ever-green the writer and social reformer Patrick Geddes spoke of the arrival of a Scottish renaissance and, more recently, the period between 1890 to the outbreak of the First World War has been described as ‘the high summer of a confident, renewed sense of national consciousness, at its strongest amongst the middle and working classes’.11

Only for those who cared to watch the distant horizon were there clouds of a different kind ready to spoil that high summer contentment. On 28 June came news that the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been shot to death with his wife in Sarajevo, the capital of the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Initially the incident seemed to be an isolated though shocking terrorist attack, and the first reaction was that the perpetrators would be caught and punished by the imperial authorities. Certainly, in the British press the news from Serbia had to take second place to the crisis in Ulster caused by Unionist opposition to the imminent passing of the Irish Home Rule Bill that would establish an autonomous parliament in Dublin. At that stage there was no hint that the assassination would endanger the peace that had held in Europe since the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. Even when it was reported that the blame for the outrage was being shifted on to neighbouring Serbia, the first of the Slav states to gain independence and a source of constant irritation in Vienna, there was no reason to believe that the task of hunting down those responsible would precipitate a crisis. During their annual summer camp at Machrihanish in the Mull of Kintyre a Territorial Force officer astonished the rest of the mess by reading aloud a story about ‘trouble in the Near East’ and musing that their battalion, 6^th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, could soon be at their war station at Auchterarder in Perthshire. Those listening gave him short shrift: ‘This remark was greeted with a round of incredulous laughter, but he only miscalculated the date by about a week.’¹² The general opinion was that even if there was a war it would only be a local affair involving the two countries. However, the assassination had lit a slow-burning fuse: the assassin, Gabriele Princip, had links to a Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand, which in turn was supported by Serbian military intelligence, and it did not take long for anti-Serb sentiment to sweep through Austria-Hungary, creating a mood for revenge.

What followed next was the well-documented progression towards a global confrontation with demands being issued, threats being made and positions becoming entrenched as Europe marched inexorably towards confrontation. Britain, which had wanted to remain aloof from the crisis and was not formally in alliance with any of the main participants, was now about to be pressed into the conflict through a treaty of 1839 that guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality. On 4 August, no answer having been received to an ultimatum that there must be no attack on Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany. For the Scottish poet Charles Murray, a native of Aberdeenshire, it seemed that the distant ‘sough’ (rustle) of the summer wind was about to turn into a harvest tempest that could not be stopped:

The corn was turnin’, hairst was near,

But lang afore the scythes could start

A sough o’ war gaed through the land

An’ stirred it to its benmost heart.

Nae ours the blame, but when it came

We couldna pass the challenge by,

For credit o’ our honest name

There could be but the ae reply.13

In the next quatrain Murray promised that the challenge would be met by ‘buirdly [sturdy] men fae strath and glen’ and he was not far wrong in making that bold assertion. As the news from Europe worsened and it became clear that the rumours of war were slowly becoming reality the British government had already begun taking precautionary steps. At the end of its summer manoeuvres on 29 July the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet was ordered to sail from Portland through the Dover Straits north to its war station at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, where it was put on a war footing. Part-time soldiers of the Royal Garrison Artillery (Orkney Territorial Force) were called out to man emergency gun positions alongside Royal Marines, and notices to shipping were posted indicating that harbour navigation lights would be extinguished. In the waters of the huge natural harbour the naval crews started clearing their ships for war, stripping from them wooden and unnecessary fittings and surplus ships’ boats, anything that would burn if the ship were hit in battle. For the remainder of the war this distant and Spartan anchorage would be the main base for the ships of the Grand Fleet, and for the crews it would prove to be a mixed blessing. In the long days of the summer months the Flow had an austere beauty but the short stormy daylight hours of winter when ‘everything – sea, sky, land and ships – is a dull grey and that only from 10 to 3’ could be a purgatory. One sailor’s letter home summed up what most of the crews felt about Scapa Flow: ‘Dear Mum, I cannot tell you where I am. I don’t know where I am. But where I am there is miles and miles of bugger all. Love Ted.’14 Scapa might have been a key base for the navy’s command of the North Sea but it was clearly an unloved posting.

The army, too, was on the move. As part of the ‘Precautionary Period’ of the Defence Plan Prior to Mobilisation, formations of the Regular Army based in Britain were told to return to their depots on 29 July. Most were on their annual summer camps or undergoing live firing exercises, but even so, war seems to have been far from their thoughts. The 1^st Cameronians were at camp near Blair Atholl and one of their officers, Captain James Jack, noted that the regiment had not been in that part of Scotland since 1689 ‘when, under Colonel Cleland, who was killed, they defeated a large body of Highlanders at Dunkeld [in the aftermath of the Battle of Killiecrankie]’. He also noted almost by way of an after-thought, that tensions in Europe had been increasing ever since Austria declared war on Serbia.¹⁵ Jack, a veteran of the Boer War, had just finished playing tennis at Blair Castle when the telegram arrived ordering his battalion to return to Glasgow. Further north, at Tain, on the shores of the Dornoch Firth, another kind of military exercise was coming to an end as U Company of the 1/4^th (City of Aberdeen) Battalion Gordon Highlanders ended their annual camp with ‘a huge bonfire around which the volunteer soldiers held a sing-song fuelled by some bottles of beer’.¹⁶ The following day, 30 July, came news of the general mobilisation and the 132 soldiers of U Company, all students or graduates of Aberdeen University, found themselves on the verge of going off to war. To make matters worse it began raining and the special train taking them home had to be cancelled.

The men of U Company were part-time soldiers in the Territorial Force, which had been formed in 1908 as a second line for home defence and provided one of the eight (later four) rifle companies of the local Territorial battalion, 1/4^th Gordon Highlanders. As their historian has recorded, their association with Aberdeen University meant that they were very much the Scottish nation in uniform: ‘although the majority of its members were from Aberdeen and the North-East, students from Caithness and the Lothians served in the ranks with Gaelic speakers from the Hebrides and the Western Isles’.17 One of their number, Alexander Rule, remembered that they were happy enough to embrace mobilisation provided that they could retain ‘the original title of a University Unit which, even after months of heavy trench warfare in the Ypres salient, sang Gaudeamus to the end’.¹⁸ Before it left for France U Company was designated D Company, 1/4^th Gordon Highlanders when the battalion’s companies were regrouped as double companies to meet army requirements, but within the battalion and amongst its own members it kept its old title.

Away from the world of the armed forces the countdown to war was followed with keen interest throughout Scotland and the announcement of the declaration of war was accompanied by a mixture of relief, anticipation and excitement. All over Europe there were huge public rallies in the main cities as the belligerent countries began their preparations. In Paris crowds voiced their encouragement and the first regiments began marching off to war with shouts of ‘À Berlin!’ (To Berlin!) ringing in their ears. The carriages of German military trains taking soldiers to the front for the invasion of France were chalked with the confident slogan ‘Ausflug nach Paris’ (Excursion to Paris). In Munich a contemporary photograph captured cheering crowds in the Odeonsplatz welcoming the prospect of war; amongst their number was a young painter called Adolf Hitler, who was trying to earn a living by selling his poorly executed watercolours. In London, 3 August was Bank Holiday Monday and the weather was surprisingly good, with unbroken sunshine, and amidst the heightened tensions people wanted to make the most of the balmy weather. As all special excursion trains to the Channel coast had been cancelled most people took to the streets or visited attractions such as the Anglo-American exhibition at the White City. Scotland, too, was agog at the turn of events in Europe. No sooner had war been declared on 4 August than the Scotsman declared in its leader that this was a decisive moment and that the country had to meet it with all seriousness and resolution:

Belgium has resolved to stand by her liberties at all risks and she will not stand less firmly knowing that she has Britain in the array behind her. This attitude on our part is dictated by the considerations of duty and of statesmanship. For if, as Sir Edward Grey [the British foreign secretary] points out, we allow Belgian rights to be forcibly over-ridden at this time, and if Germany succeeds in her schemes of ‘beating France down into the dust’, the independence of the smaller States that stand in the path of Teutonic aggression could never be preserved or recovered. Holland and Denmark would also be swallowed up before Germany could obtain that ‘place in the sun’ that accords with the aspirations of those who guide her destinies. In time, and probably no long time, it would be our turn to fall victims to the greed and ambition of a Power which, to judge by the latest development in its policy, is prepared to go to any lengths of force and cunning to attain its ends and that regards no rights as sacred except its own.19

Elsewhere, the paper recorded that the declaration had been greeted with enthusiasm and that an anti-war demonstration mounted in Edinburgh city centre on the Mound had been broken up by ‘an antagonistic element in the large crowd’. Quiet satisfaction was also expressed at the alert reaction of the sentries on the Forth Railway Bridge when they chased two men who seemed to be making drawings of the defences at the Rosyth naval base. The two men jumped on an Edinburgh-bound train at Dalmeny and were not apprehended: they were to be the first participants in a succession of ‘spy scares’ reported by the Scotsman and other papers in those initial uneasy weeks. Another ‘first’ reported widely and enthusiastically in the Scottish press was the landing at Scapa pier of thirteen German fishermen who had been apprehended at sea on the first day of war. This was followed on 7 August by equally gratifying reports that German vessels had been detained in the ports of Leith, Grangemouth, Burntisland and Wick,²⁰ and all Scottish papers carried warnings that the registration of aliens was about to begin.

There was no danger that Britain would be invaded, but self-defence also provided an impulse for the displays of public patriotism that were common to all the nations about to face the unknown horrors of modern industrialised warfare. (Of the European powers only Holland, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Norway and Sweden remained outside the conflict.) Contemporary evidence shows that thousands of Scottish people were prepared to voice their support for war and found themselves taking part in demonstrations of national pride and patriotism which often bordered on hysteria. Even realists who should have had their feet on the ground were caught up in the excitement. After war had been declared the novelist and journalist Neil Munro travelled by train to Glasgow from his home in Inveraray and later shamefacedly admitted, ‘what silly patriotic and romantic elations were stirred in me when I found that already there were armed guards on every railway viaduct, on reservoirs, and the Loch Long torpedo testing station. All along the Callendar-and-Oban and West Highland Railways, the fiendish ubiquity of German spies, and their readiness to start immediately blowing up culverts and railway bridges, or poisoning us at our kitchen-taps, were already taken for granted!’21 By that time Munro was fifty and a successful novelist – his latest novel, The New Road, an adventure in the tradition of Stevenson, had just been published – but even he was caught up in the excitement of the hour and wanted to do something. That sense of enthusiastic conviction was shared by many others and gave the early days of the war an unreal quality, creating a feeling that war was a great adventure and that man had been transformed and liberated from the doldrums of a humdrum existence.

Chivalry, self-sacrifice and heroism were the catchwords of those early days of the war and there were very few people who did not respond to their call. Artless verses flooded by the thousand into local papers speaking of the noble necessity of doing one’s duty; everywhere tub-thumping patriotism was rife; and the elation even found its way into mainstream literature. Two years later, in 1916, long after the initial enthusiasm had waned, Neil Munro produced a series of poems under the collective title of ‘Bagpipe Ballads’ that were published in Blackwood’s Magazine. By then his son Hugh had been killed in action while serving with 1/8^th Argylls at the Battle of Loos and he himself had visited the Western Front as a correspondent, but, as he told his publisher George Blackwood, the poems were a compensation of sorts, having been ‘suggested by the names of bagpipe airs, so that some of them take on that spirit of braggadocio which comes so natural to youth: and to races like the Gaels who loiter so much in their past that they are always the youngest and most ardent when it comes to sentiment – the first and last excuse for poetry’.22 One of them, ‘Hey, Jock, are ye glad ye “listed”?’, caught the exhilaration of those first days of the war:

Come awa, Jock, and cock your bonnet,

Swing your kilt as best ye can;

Auld Dumbarton’s Drums are dirlin’

Come awa, Jock, and kill your man!²³

Not everyone was caught up in the Gadarene rush to hate the Hun and to turn war into a great adventure. Five days after the declaration 5,000 protesters attended a large anti-war rally in Glasgow featuring speakers from the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Scottish branch of the British Socialist Party and the Glasgow branch of the Peace Society. Amongst those who addressed the demonstration were Patrick Dollan, a prominent city councillor representing the ILP, and a young militant socialist called James McDougall, who had already been sacked by the Clydesdale Bank for participating in socialist political activities. To McDougall the war was not only unnecessary but a capitalist adventure that would benefit the profiteers and damage the working class, and according to contemporary newspaper reports the crowd appeared to agree with him. Initial panic in some sections of the industrial sector seemed to suggest that the first victims of the war might indeed be the workers. In Ayrshire a number of textile factories decided to cut back on their output and issued short-time notices to their workforces. As a result of cancelled orders one firm, Morton Sundour Fabrics Ltd, decided to introduce half-day working on Thursdays along with a curtailed working day on Saturdays until further notice. The directors also warned the workforces not to panic and that they should ‘try to LIVE ON LESS’, keep their money in the bank and refuse the temptation to lay in large supplies of food and other requisites.²⁴

On the political left, though, there was some confusion about how best to respond. Although the chairman of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, resigned in protest on 6 August (for which offence he was expelled from the Moray Golf Club), the party itself decided to support the government and they were followed by other labour movements such as the Trades Union Congress and the Co-op movement. At that stage the ILP also kept to a pacifist line, a stance which it maintained throughout the conflict, but it was left to men like McDougall, Tom Bell and above all John Maclean, a remarkable socialist teacher and Marxist agitator, to lead the most sustained opposition to the war in Scotland. In a letter to the radical newspaper Forward, Maclean claimed that the war was essentially a confrontation between two rival capitalist ideologies and that the question of Belgium’s neutrality was a smokescreen to wage a decisive war against Germany: ‘In view of the eventualities like these indicated, it is our business as Socialists to develop a class patriotism, refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism.’25 Similar views were being put forward in Germany by socialists such as Karl Liebknecht, who spoke out against the war, claiming that ‘the chief enemy is at home’ and founded the anti-war newspaper the Internationale. His agitation proved that socialist opposition was not an irrelevant minority on either side of the battle-lines, and in Scotland, as we shall see, the anti-war sentiments voiced by Maclean and his colleagues were to grow in strength and significance as the conflict progressed. When conscription was introduced in 1916 some men would go to prison rather than compromise deeply held religious, ethical or political beliefs about the conflict.

Others, too, were repelled by the cheering crowds and the widespread fervour for the unknown war that lay ahead. Charles Hamilton Sorley was born in 1895 in Aberdeen, where his father had been professor of moral philosophy, but the family had moved to England five years later when Professor Sorley was appointed to a chair at Cambridge. Educated at Marlborough, an English private school, Charles Hamilton Sorley spent some time in Germany before taking up a place at University College, Oxford, and was attending the University of Jena when war broke out. With a friend he managed to get back to Britain, travelling by train and a specially commandeered ferry from Antwerp. Having spent seven enjoyable months in Germany he was disposed to be understanding about the country he had just visited, telling an old school friend in a letter, ‘They are a splendid lot, and I wish the silly papers would realise that they are fighting for a principle just as much as we are.’ But what took him aback was the hysteria and unthinking patriotism. A letter to another friend, Alan Hutchinson, reflected his exasperation with the mood he found on his return: ‘But isn’t all this bloody? I am full of mute and burning rage and annoyance and sulkiness about it. I could wager that out of twelve million eventual combatants there aren’t twelve who really want it. And “serving one’s country” is so unpicturesque and unheroic when it comes to the point. Spending a year in a beastly Territorial camp guarding telegraph wires has nothing poetical about it: nor very useful as far as I can see.’26 Even so, and despite his cynicism about patriotic impulses, like thousands of others of his class, Sorley soon joined up as a volunteer and was gazetted a second lieutenant in the 7^th Suffolk Regiment.

Enthusiasm for the war was one thing, finding the soldiers to fight it was another. As yet Britain had no troops in continental Europe, and it would take another fortnight before the four (later six) divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) crossed over to France to take their prearranged place on the left of the French Army. Even at that stage some members of the government thought that such a deployment might not be necessary; Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey assured the House of Commons that there was no definite military commitment. A feeling grew that the war might be over quickly, perhaps before Christmas, and that the main weight of the fighting would fall on the Royal Navy and the continental armies. One man thought otherwise and his pronouncements on the matter were to lay the foundation for the creation of Britain’s volunteer army: Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the hero of the Victorian wars in the Sudan and the later Boer War and generally considered to be the greatest British soldier of the period.

Against his better instincts Kitchener accepted the post of secretary of war in Asquith’s government and in so doing became the first serving soldier to sit in the Cabinet since General George Monck held the post in 1660. To the man in the street all was well now that Britain had secured the services of its most famous soldier in its greatest hour of need: in their eyes Kitchener could do no wrong. His career had seen him move from victory to victory in the remote parts of the empire and his very presence – his huge frame, his luxuriant moustache, the fixity of his gaze – had become the symbol of British pluck and resolve.

Kitchener took up his post with characteristic energy. From the outset he disagreed with the prevailing opinion that the war would be short-lived and largely naval. He also believed that Britain’s professional army was too small to offer anything but limited support to France – it numbered only 247,432 men – and that huge new armies would have to be raised if the country was to make any impact on the direction of the war. On 8 August he called for the first hundred thousand volunteers aged between eighteen and thirty, the aim being to create an army of seventy divisions, approximately 1.2 million men, by 1917. Its arrival would come at a time when Germany’s resources would be overstretched, and, according to Kitchener, Britain would then be in a position to crush the enemy and dictate the peace.

Kitchener’s methods were also controversial. Instead of expanding the part-time soldiers of the Territorial Force, which had been raised for home defence in 1908, he would build on the existing regimental structure of the British Regular Army. No new formations would be raised but the existing infantry regiments would expand their numbers of battalions to meet the demand for men. These would be known as ‘special service battalions’: by the war’s end a not untypical regiment such as the Highland Light Infantry had twenty-six special service and Territorial Force battalions instead of the normal two active service battalions and one depot battalion. In that way, argued Kitchener, volunteers could be assimilated quickly into the ‘New’ or ‘Kitchener’ armies and no new machinery would have to be assembled to deal with them.

From the outset of his tenure at the War Office Kitchener decided not to introduce conscription. He knew little about the Territorial Force, having been out of the country for much of his service, and what little he did know he distrusted, believing its members to be amateurs at best and playboys at worst. Had Kitchener read a diary kept by Major J. Craig Barr, 6^th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he would have felt vindicated. Barr’s battalion of Territorials recruited from Renfrewshire and were on their summer camp at Machrihanish where there was golf and riding for the officers and everything seemed cosily familiar: ‘The camp was similar in most ways to the training camps which some of us had attended for almost twenty years of service. The same canvas city gleaming white in the last rays of the setting sun, the same military routine, the same cheery mess tents and the same holiday spirit and jolly comradeship of old friends!’27

As it turned out, 6^th Argylls, like every other Territorial battalion, gave sterling service, but that was in the future. At the time Kitchener wanted little to do with them. Showing the same sense of certainty that had guided him throughout his career he plumped for the voluntary principle and quietened doubters with the question ‘If you are only ready to go when you are fetched, where is the merit in that? Are you only going to do your duty when the law says you must?’ Such was Kitchener’s personal standing and the strength of his political connections that he had the full support of the government, even though no one in the Cabinet really knew how the armies would be raised or if a million men would actually volunteer. As for the Territorials, who went on to play an illustrious role in the war, Kitchener was obdurate; Haldane complained that he was ‘unable to prevail on him [Kitchener] to adopt, or even to make much use of the Territorial organisation’.28

Backed by a huge publicity machine which included the press and the influential all-party Parliamentary Recruiting Committee the national appeal for recruits was loud and insistent and the campaigners quickly showed that they meant business. Before long, Kitchener’s instantly recognisable features with the famous luxuriant moustache were assisting in the campaign as Alfred Leete’s famous recruiting poster began to be seen everywhere all over the country. Very few young men caught swithering outside an army recruiting office found it easy to ignore Kitchener’s pointed exhortation ‘Your Country Needs You!’ By 12 September the first 100,000 men had been recruited; aged between 19 and 30 they signed on for three years or the duration of hostilities and formed the First New Army or K1 consisting of six divisions, 9^th to 14^th. By the end of the following month there were sufficient men to form twelve new divisions, which formed the Second New Army (15^th to 20^th Division) and the Third New Army (21^st to 26^th Division). In character and manpower two of those New Army divisions were entirely Scottish formations: 9^th (Scottish) and 15^th (Scottish). On one day in October 35,000 men enlisted, as many as had been recruited during the whole of 1913. In Scotland, as in other parts of the country, the call to arms was shrill and insistent. ‘I feel certain that Scotsmen have only to know that the country urgently needs their services to offer them with the same splendid patriotism as they have always shown in the past,’ Kitchener told Sir Alexander Baird of Urie, Lord Lieutenant of Kincardineshire, in a letter that was given considerable prominence in the Scottish press. ‘Tell them from me, please, that their services were never more needed than they are today and that I rely confidently on a splendid response to the national appeal.’29

His words did not fall on deaf ears. Within a day of the declaration of war the army’s recruiting office in Edinburgh’s Cockburn Street was doing brisk business under the judicious eye of Captain William Robertson, a Gordon Highlander who had won the Victoria Cross in the Boer War, and by the end of August the Glasgow Herald reported that 20,000 men had been processed through the recruiting office in the Gallowgate. From other parts of Scotland came news of equally high figures of enlistment during August: 1,500 from Coatbridge, 900 from Clydebank, 940 from Dumbarton and 750 from Alloa. Recruits in Inverness rushed to join a special service battalion of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders that was being formed by D. W. Cameron of Lochiel; it would fight as the 5^th Camerons, and Lochiel offered his personal guarantee that ‘at the end of the war the battalion would be brought back to Inverness where it will be disbanded with all possible dispatch’.

A number of factors prompted those volunteers from all over Scotland to take the King’s Shilling. Workers doing repetitive or menial jobs saw a chance to escape the drudgery of their existence. The Scots’ traditional respect for militarism also encouraged many a young man who thought he would look a god in a kilt and a Glengarry bonnet. In those days, too, words such as duty, honour and patriotism were not idle concepts but the cornerstone of many young lives: within a year the Rev. Duncan Cameron, minister of Kilsyth, claimed that after painstaking research, he had found that 90 per cent of the country’s ministers had seen their offspring (‘sons of the manse’) volunteer for duty in the armed forces.³⁰ Unskilled workers or the unemployed looked forward to the prospect of work and a steady wage but, as the Scotsman reported on 8 August, the recruits in Cockburn Street (Edinburgh) came from all walks of life: ‘Men of all types and classes passed along, some in professions and trades – well groomed and spruce – and others with whom the world had dealt more hardly, but all curious to take their paces in the ranks and shoulder a rifle.’ Peer pressure was brought to bear on the undecided and there was a general feeling that the whole thing was a bit of a lark and that it would be a shame to miss the great adventure. Few seem to have given any thought to the dangers that lay ahead or even realised that warfare would bring casualties. That was the impulse that took John Cooper to war when he enlisted in The Black Watch in Dundee:

The folk at home said never a word to dissuade me, and for that I was grateful. I knew they would not rejoice to see me going, but as the going was in any case inevitable it was better to say nothing about it. Many people went into no end of a flurry about their young lads joining up. It was really all very senseless I thought. The right way to look at it was the way the boys themselves looked at it, and they went joyfully, most of them, even although they may occasionally have had misgivings about the probable end of the adventure. Not that young lads ever thought morbidly of death in battle – we all had a pathetic faith that we should come through somehow.

Others, like Carson Stewart, simply let curiosity get the better of them. In September he went down to the Institute in Cambuslang to watch the crowds of young men queuing to join up and was so enthused by the sight that he joined up himself and was ‘duly sworn in and became a Soldier of the king, in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders’. The newly enlisted Private Stewart had joined the regiment’s 7^th (Service) Battalion, which would serve with the 15^th Scottish Division in the Second New Army. From Cambuslang he went north to the regiment’s depot in Inverness where, a Camerons’ officer remembered, conditions were not always of the best: ‘Soon the barracks were crowded out, and for a few nights men had to sleep where they could. Even the distillery at Inverness (already with an insect population of its own) was brought into use.’31

In the first flush of enthusiasm the War Office’s problem was not how to raise sufficient recruits so much as what to do with them once they had enlisted. So great was the pressure on the existing army structure that recruits frequently went without uniforms, weapons with which to train and even accommodation. Vast tented encampments soon mushroomed in civic parks, farmers’ fields and in country estates as enthusiastic recruits drilled with broomsticks while still wearing their best suits. To meet the shortages, production of khaki uniforms and boots had to be increased, supplies were purchased from the United States and the Post Office helped out with blue uniforms surplus to requirements. Stewart and his fellow Cameron volunteers did not feel that they were proper soldiers until the first kilts were issued later in the year.

One of the most popular manifestations of the volunteering craze in that unreal late summer and autumn of 1914 was the formation of ‘pals battalions’, so called because they kept together volunteers from the same cities or towns, or from working, sporting or social clubs. All told, 215 ‘pals’ or locally raised battalions had been formed in the UK by the summer of 1916, and although the title was never fully recognised in Scotland the concept of men serving together did catch on, especially in the big cities. Shortly after the declaration of war the Glasgow Boys’ Brigade, inspired by their treasurer, David Laidlaw, had volunteered to form a special service battalion for the Highland Light Infantry. Finding that the regiment was not enthusiastic, Laidlaw, formerly of the Lanarkshire Engineer Volunteers, approached the Cameron Highlanders, but he did not achieve recognition until 1 September when the Glasgow Corporation gave the go-ahead for the formation of a Highland Light Infantry battalion drawn from the city’s public transport system. Wearing their green uniforms and marching behind a pipe band, the motormen and conductors of the tramways department paraded through the city, where they presented themselves for enlistment on 7 September. Under the direction of James Dalrymple, Glasgow’s transport manager, the Coplawhill tram-ways depot became a giant recruiting hall and it took just sixteen hours to enlist the members of what would become the 15^th (Tramways) Battalion, Highland Light Infantry.

Encouraged by that success, official approval was given to the Boys’ Brigade to form a 16^th (Boys Brigade) Battalion, a move which caused a great deal of public excitement in the city. ‘Never will it be said that men who were connected with the Boys’ Brigade throughout the length and breadth of the United Kingdom and Ireland funked in the hour of Britain’s need’, noted a patriotic journalist in the Glasgow Post. A few days later, a third ‘pals’ battalion, numbered 17^th, was formed at the instigation of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, with recruits being enrolled in the Lesser Hall of the Merchants House.32 Not to be outdone, the Glasgow Stock Exchange formed a special company for the Cameron Highlanders. Edinburgh also followed suit, the first calls for a regiment of city volunteers appeared in the Scotsman on 12 August but it was not until 12 September that Lord Provost Robert Kirk Inches announced that a ‘City of Edinburgh Battalion’ would be formed. By then the local regiment, The Royal Scots, had formed three service battalions for the New Armies (11^th, 12^th, 13^th), but Inches was keen to see a designated Edinburgh regiment that would be the equal of the three Glasgow battalions. Then as now, rivalry between the two cities was intense and no excuse was needed to bring it into play. The result was the formation of two battalions, which served with The Royal Scots as 15^th (1^st City of Edinburgh, Service) and 16^th (2^nd City of Edinburgh, Service). As they both owed their existence to local commanding officers, they were also known by the men who served in them as Cranston’s Battalion and McCrae’s Battalion.

Both men were prominent members of the local business community. Sir Robert Cranston had served as treasurer and provost on the city council and had interests in local drapery stores and temperance hotels, and, like many of his class, he enjoyed a long association with the old Volunteer movement. Sir George McCrae was equally well regarded, but he was a self-made man who had set up in the drapery business on his own account, having managed to bury the secret that he had been born an illegitimate child, a fact that could have hindered his advancement. Hard work had made him a wealthy man and he was elected to parliament as a Liberal MP in 1899. Like Cranston, he had also served as a Volunteer.

Both battalions were raised in the latter months of 1914 and both went on to serve on the Western Front, but McCrae’s battalion was unique in that it contained a large number of footballers, most of whom played for one of the local football clubs, the romantically named Heart of Midlothian. Shortly after the battalion was raised one of the new recruits penned a suitable verse for McCrae to read out when he appeared in uniform at a special performance of the annual Christmas pantomime in the King’s Theatre: ‘Do not ask where Hearts are playing and then look at me askance. If it’s football that you’re wanting, you must come with us to France.’ By then McCrae had recruited over a thousand officers and men, and his battalion assembled in George Street on 15 December with each volunteer being told to bring with him ‘one pair good Boots, Topcoat, two pairs Socks, and shaving outfit’.33 The occasion prompted a good deal of local excitement as they marched off to their temporary billets in the examination halls of George Heriot’s School and in the nearby Castle Brewery.

Despite initial doubts, the volunteer principle worked: by the end of 1915, the British total was 2,466,719 men, more than would be achieved after the introduction of conscription in May 1916 and just under half the wartime total of 5.7 million men who served in the army during the war years. Of their number, 320,589, or 13 per cent, of those who volunteered in 1914–15 were Scots. By the end of the war, the number of Scots in the armed forces rose to 688,416, consisting of 71,707 in the Royal Navy, 584,098 in the army (Regular, New and Territorial) and 32,611 in the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force.³⁴

At that point in the war the reality of the fighting on the Western Front had not yet sunk in and the enthusiasm for volunteering was still high. But the intervening months had also seen changes which made the people of Scotland realise that they were now on a war footing. The authorities wanted to get across the message that ‘the war has falsified every prophecy [of panic]’ and that it was a case of ‘business as usual’, but in those first anxious weeks it was difficult to believe the official line as there were too many instances of unusual occurrences. In the weeks that followed the declaration of war three special liners were chartered to take 2,800 US visitors back to their homes; they sailed from the Clyde on 15 August and their departure marked the first serious downturn in the Scottish tourist trade. The shooting season was a washout, not because the Glorious Twelfth was wet – a recurring problem – but because there was no mood to pursue sport during a time of national emergency. Ironically the weather held fair and most of the big Highland sporting estates reported plentiful numbers of grouse. The holiday trade was also constrained by a rash of spy mania especially after the passing of the first of the Defence of the Realm Acts on 8 August when the government took over control of vital resources and communications. The public was advised to be on the lookout for spies, with the result that strangers in country areas were often thought to be German intelligence agents and there were a number of newsworthy incidents.

On 18 August John Campbell of Dalwhinnie came across a strange motor car, with one female and three male passengers, parked on the main Perth to Inverness road. He reported the matter to the police at Newtonmore because he noticed that ‘one of the men and the woman were about 80 yards off the road on the south side and near the bank of the River Truim. The man had a theodolite mounted on a tripod, and was apparently taking a survey of the district on the south side of the River as the needle of the theodolite was pointing southwards’. Clearly the matter had to be investigated, but when challenged the party said that they were government surveyors. Even so, Campbell did not believe them, as they failed to produce official papers apart from a telegram, and despite his misgivings – ‘they spoke good English and I did not think they looked like foreigners’ – Campbell passed on the information to the authorities.35 Other cases were often more risible. In Edinburgh the Evening Dispatch reported that an elderly man had been arrested for discharging a shotgun at a pigeon in the mistaken belief that the bird was being used by an enemy spy. There were also reports of defeatism and these were duly passed on to the authorities. On 30 August the War Office received a letter addressed to Kitchener from Sidney Herbert of Stonehaven stating that a message had been read from the pulpit of Fettereso parish church in Kincardineshire claiming that ‘the British Expeditionary Force had been practically cut to pieces’. As the message had come from the Lord Lieutenant Sir Alexander Baird of Urie, who said that he had received the news from the battle-front it carried weight but, as Herbert argued, the announcement caused no little local panic. Herbert continued:

I learn here that there is no foundation, as yet, for such a statement, and I venture to suggest that had it been true it would have been unwise to have proclaimed it so baldly, but being untrue it is a most cruel action.

May I appeal to you to prevent the Laird from running riot. When I left Stonehaven knees were shaking and hearts quailed.

Given the person involved, the letter called for discretion and it received only a brief acknowledgement from the War Office: Baird of Urie played a role in local recruiting efforts and had been one of the first lords lieutenant to respond to Kitchener’s call for volunteers.³⁶

The other example of abnormality which no one could miss was the first appearance in the press of wartime casualty lists. As most people thought that the war would be won by the superiority of the Royal Navy it was not surprising that the first casualties were sailors. In fact the war was only twelve hours old when the first hostilities took place in the North Sea, in the area between Harwich and Antwerp. In the early morning of 5 August the light cruiser HMS Amphion, commanded by Captain H. C. Fox and accompanied by two destroyers, Lance and Landrail, came across the German minelayer Königin Luise, formerly a Hamburg–America excursion liner, which had been sowing her mines in the approaches to the estuary of the River Thames. In a short and decisive action the German ship was sunk and 56 of her crew of 130 were taken on board the British cruiser. It was their last piece of luck. At six-thirty in the morning on 6 August Amphion hit a mine which had most certainly been laid by the German warship and settled in the water. As the sailors began to abandon ship two huge explosions ripped through the crippled cruiser and, her back broken, she quickly went to the bottom – Fox later remembered that ‘the foremost half of the ship seemed to rise out of the water’. Despite the best efforts of the escorting destroyers 132 British sailors and 27 German prisoners were killed in the explosion: they were the first casualties of the war and Amphion was the first naval vessel to fall victim to a magnetic mine. Amongst those killed were John Maxwell of Edinburgh, a signal boy and the son of the church officer of St Giles’; Stoker William Douglas of Aberdeen, son of the green-keeper of the local links golf course; and William Carson Mair of Freuchie in Fife whose parents had the melancholy experience a few days later of opening his last, hopeful letter home.

Another milestone was reached a month later, on 3 September. The light cruiser HMS Pathfinder was leading a patrol of the 8^th Flotilla in the mouth of the Firth of Forth when it became the first British warship to be sunk by a German submarine, U-21, commanded by Lieutenant Otto Hersing. Although the submarine was sighted there was no time to take evasive action. Pathfinder was torn apart by a huge explosion in the forward magazine and sank within four minutes, drowning all but nine of her crew of 259. The briefly blazing wreck could be seen from the Fife coast and the East Lothian shores and Hersing’s successful attack led to an immediate outbreak of nerves, known as ‘periscopitis’, as the Royal Navy came to terms with this new undersea threat. Worse followed three weeks later with an even more audacious attack. On 22 September the small kerosene-powered submarine, U-9, commanded by Otto Weddigen, torpedoed three elderly British armoured cruisers, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, which were operating a patrol in the ‘Broad Fourteens’ off the Dutch coast. First to be hit was Aboukir, and as her sister ships attempted to pick up survivors they too fell victim to U-9’s torpedoes. The casualty list was high – 1,459 officers and men – and once again the pride of the Royal Navy had been severely dented. But all three ships should never have been at sea. Not only were they ancient rust-buckets, having been held in reserve on the Medway, but they were crewed by reservists, most of whom had not been at sea for years. In an attempt to make them battle-worthy all the cruisers had regular navy captains and senior officers, but tragically each ship had been assigned nine young midshipmen from the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. Amongst the thirteen midshipmen killed in the action was the fifteen-year-old nephew of Lord Erskine, the heir to the Mar and Kellie earldom, who was serving with the army in France. A letter from Erskine’s mother written two days after the sinking summed up the sense of loss and waste: ‘Of course, one is proud of him but it is desperately young to be called upon to give one’s life for one’s country . . . It is wicked to have sent those children into that frightful strain. They were doing patrol work all the time in the North Sea and had sent their destroyers into port on account of the bad weather and should never have been cruising about without them. Those slow old boats were absolutely defenceless.’37

As the war progressed letters like that would become commonplace as grieving families attempted to come to terms with the losses. It was not the end of the bloodletting at sea. Three weeks later Weddigen struck again, hitting the elderly cruiser HMS Hawke as it was slowly patrolling in the North Sea off Aberdeen. A destroyer sent to search for the cruiser found a lifeboat holding twenty-nine sailors, but over five hundred men had been drowned earlier when the cruiser capsized and quickly sank after being hit by U-9’s torpedoes. U-9 survived the war, the only submarine of her class to do so, but Weddigen was less fortunate. Decorated with the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest gallantry award, he was killed on 18 March 1915 off the north-east coast of Scotland when his submarine, U-29, was rammed and sunk by HMS Dreadnought. In the meantime, for the Royal Navy at least, the war was becoming painful reality: ships were being sunk by modern sophisticated weapons such as mines and submarines, and hundreds of lives were being lost.

 

* In 1912 the breakaway Scottish Liberal Unionists joined forces with the Scottish Conservatives to create the Scottish Unionist Party to oppose the granting of home rule to Ireland. While both names were used in Scotland the party will be referred to throughout as Conservative.