Christmas 1914 E-Book

John Hudson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 266

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

By December 1914, it had become clear to even the most optimistic observer that the war would not be over by Christmas. That month brought the first enemy inflicted deaths on the home front, when German warships bombarded three north-east coastal towns; meanwhile, the recently invented aeroplane was being put to fearsome use in raids over the south east. In Europe, Mons, the Marne and Ypres had given a taste of the devastating power of modern warfare – a reality to which troops in the trenches on both sides tried to turn a blind eye in the famous Christmas truce. This book uses contemporary newspapers and magazines, diaries and other records to present a comprehensive image of this extraordinary Christmas, both at home and abroad.

Leseprobe

In memory of Private John Rigby Foy, 12th Battalion, The King’s (Liverpool Regiment) who died in Northern France, 2 June 1918

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Christmas 1914

Brave Hearts to the Front

The Belgian Invasion

The First Submariner VC

Knitting for Victory

A Poet is Born

Remember Scarborough - and Hartlepool and Whitby, too

Business as usual in Country Courtrooms

Mark Sheridan, the Tragic Trouper

‘A Man whose Strong Heart still Beats Loudly’

The Christmas Number One

‘It isn’t War, it’s just Slaughter’

On Christmas Leave

Shot at Dawn

Dover, First and Last

The Pope’s Failed Bid for a Ceasefire

Funny Old Fritz

The Truce to End all Truces

Truce? What Truce?

Christmas Dinner with an Aerial Show

The Christmas Day Raid on Cuxhaven

Bradford’s Great Escapism

The Plunge of the Night Hawk

A ‘Spanking’ Christmas

Roast Horse and Boiled Potatoes

Christmas Day in the Workhouse

Prisoners’ Christmas Holiday in Southend

‘My own Little boy is in the Hospital with Diphtheria’

Mercy Disguised by Mockery

From Footlights to Trenches

Bibliography

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to David Glass and Bob Duckett of the Bradford Historical and Antiquarian Society; Jan Sykes of Bradford Local Studies Library; Su Holgate at Bradford Metropolitan District Council; the staff of Bristol Central Library; Stephen Dixon; Linda Hudson, for proofreading and much more; the Trustees and Documents and Sound Section of the Imperial War Museum for allowing access to the collections and to E. Morgan, copyright holder of the papers of W.M. Floyd; Cate Ludlow and Ruth Boyes of The History Press; Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis for permission to use an extract from A War In Words, with acknowledgements to Simon and Schuster UK; Toby Pinn of Clevedon Salerooms; the staff of Stroud Library; Gillian Thomas of Treorchy Library; Phil Vasili; and the copyright holders of all quoted songs.

INTRODUCTION

There are two facts about Christmas 1914 that are known by all and will probably be so another 100 years from now. One is that everybody believed the Great War would be over by then and festive peace would be celebrated around the home fires, and the other is that extraordinary truce, with the football kickabouts and shared sweets, Schnapps and cigarettes with ‘our friend the enemy’ Fritz in no-man’s-land.

The truth, of course, is rather different: any realistic hopes of an early end to the war had dissipated almost within days of its outbreak. The British Expeditionary Force’s first significant taste of action at the Battle of Mons had seen it inflict heavy casualties on the enemy but fail to hold the line of the Mons–Condé Canal and eventually retreat over two weeks to almost the outskirts of Paris. A straightforward tactical retreat executed in good order, the top brass explained. To the British press, however, yet to be properly reminded that truth is the first casualty of war, it was a humiliating and bitter disaster; a bravely fought disaster, granted, but a disaster for all that.

When our troops again came face to face with the German First Army, at the River Marne east of Paris, it was still only early September. This time, however, the French, whose tactical withdrawal at Mons had unwittingly helped to put the British forces in an impossible position, were everything an ally should be in their fierce defence of their capital, and the Kaiser’s hopes of a swift victory on the Western Front came to nothing. Instead, his army retreated to the north east, the British and French pursued it and both sides then showed they had learned lessons from the way they had been conducting themselves to date by digging deep trenches and settling in for the long, long haul. Any brave talk of victory by Christmas – and in truth, both sides had at first been dreaming that dream – soon foundered in the mud of Flanders.

Trench warfare was not unknown in military history, but it was not what the British public had foreseen; they were far more familiar with the concept of fast-moving, fluid battle lines, and while the retreat from Mons was the last thing they wanted to see in the way of fluidity, at least they understood the scenario. Trench warfare? Idle men peeping over the parapet and eyeballing the equally indolent and inactive enemy? To some armchair generals back at home by their firesides there was almost something comical about it.

We can see, then, that it had been determined some months before the event that Christmas 1914 would not be a peacetime celebration; and developments leading immediately up to it, that December, saw such an escalation in hostilities that any hopes of a happier New Year were now equally forlorn. Already the newspapers were dominated by war news, and tributes to bewildering numbers of young men who were losing their lives on the other side of the English Channel. This was particularly disorienting and distressing in the local weekly press, whose pages hitherto had rarely been sullied by troubles any more disturbing than the police court sequels to fights outside the Dog and Duck on Saturday nights. December, however, was the month when ‘Over There’ became ‘Over Here’, and that was a backward step by no means everybody had reckoned with.

The trenches as a somewhat comical curiosity: this postcard did not appear again after that first Christmas of war. (Author’s collection)

It started in the middle of the month and swiftly escalated; a bag of what looked to be rusty rivets was dropped on Southend; on the 15th the first Zeppelin was sighted off the east coast – and as these had long been supposed to pose Germany’s main threat from the air, were such an outlandish proposition possible at all, that seemed an ominous sign; not nearly so ominous, however, as the events of the following morning, when German battleships were left free to bombard the north-east coastal towns of the Hartlepools, Scarborough and Whitby, killing well over 100 defenceless men, women and children. At the same time, one of their flotillas was sowing mines off Filey which accounted for hundreds more lives before they were cleared. There were clearly questions to be faced by the British Grand Fleet, questions rarely if ever asked in living memory as our ships ‘Ruled the Waves’.

The action quickened considerably in the last days leading up to Christmas. On 21 December a German seaplane, as distinct from an airship, dropped two bombs just off Dover Harbour, and three days later one landed on the town itself, breaking a lot of windows and blowing a gardener out of a holly tree. It was the first airborne bomb to land on British soil, and although its end result was almost comical, like something out of the latest Keystone Cops film, its implications were not, with the engineering might of the Ruhr gearing up for the battle ahead. The first Zeppelin raid came on 19 January 1915, but airships as a fighting force were quickly made obsolete by fast-advancing technology, as were those aircraft that dealt the earliest blows of the war. On both sides of the Channel, hostility was the very fertile mother of invention.

The Christmas Spirit 1914, as seen in the New York World by Rollin Kirby, who won the first Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1922 and repeated the feat twice more in a career that spanned both world wars. (The War Budget, 16 January 1915)

And then came Christmas Day, that time of sharing pictures of wives and girlfriends with the foe and exchanging verses of ‘Silent Night’ one with another; up to a point. It was also the day of Britain’s first air raid on Germany, where seaplanes did what they were able in stormy skies over Cuxhaven. The enemy were doing likewise over London Docks and the Medway towns, while those mines planted in the North Sea nine days earlier were blowing ships out of the water with distressing loss of life. Even on the Western Front, all was far from quiet in most areas: men were still fighting and dying; in some trenches, the enemy was passive, so the other side stayed passive, too; there was ‘gardening’ to be done on no-man’s–land, burying bodies, clearing weapons and debris, and spasmodic local arrangements were made for this to be carried out by both sides without fear of aggression. Anything over and above this was the exception; so exceptional, in fact, that it is still recalled with awe to this day. The other fact everyone knows about it is that it never happened again.

The aim of this book, as its title suggests, is to give a rounded account of life in Britain at or around Christmas 1914, by far the strangest Christmas everyone who lived through it had ever known. Apart from the conflict, and the toll it was taking on families’ menfolk and morale, there were so many other life-changing developments to take in and digest: the sudden need for women in the workplace, quiet towns that had been transformed into part of the war machine by creating arms and weapons, young men who had not enlisted for whatever reason being constantly harried to do so, the patriotic need for a recently volatile workforce to buckle down, the wounded soldiers in the streets and parks, the refugees from Belgium and elsewhere who were now a part of our local communities, with all the civic responsibilities that implied.

On New Year’s Day the editor of a small West Country weekly newspaper wrote:

A stranger and duller sort of Christmas could hardly be imagined … The awful anxieties and grief of war touched the whole country very closely, and in our district there was little of the usual festivities and jollity. There were no attractions beyond the local variety theatres, and whatever Christmas parties there were were quiet, while the town was in the evenings completely deserted. The weather was, on the whole, wet and dreary … There were few visitors this year, and no engagements to interest them, while the customary list of football matches dwindled down to one or two games …

Yet in other ways, life went on. As the above report hints, the music halls were still churning out their songs and their jokes, although at first the singers were wrapping themselves in the red, white and blue and the humour was taking on a spiky, we shall overcome feel. Soon enough, it would be back to normal with the cheek and the chutzpah. There were still personalities to read about in the papers, even if it was only footballers taking up arms or leading ladies knitting socks for sailors. America was sending over, if not its men, then engaging songs as diverse as ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’ and ‘Aba Daba Honeymoon’. And yes, outside the Dog and Duck, Saturday night drunks were still punching one another on the nose.

We cannot begin to recognise a good deal of what our countrymen were going through then: the dread of the telegraph boy clicking the gate latch and knocking on the door, the previously unheard-of fear of destruction from the air, the stark fact that nobody had a new 1915 calendar saying ‘This is the second year of the First World War, 1914–18, which Britain won at great cost’. Uncertainty can be a devastating enemy.

Yet what we can see is a sense of commitment and community which we now regard as essentially British, even if, to some of us, it does not seem quite so much a part of our national character 100 years on in 2014. It was this, as much as the bombs and heavy artillery, maybe even as much as the Americans and Russians, that saw us through both this world war and the next one. In 1918, while German society fell apart in hunger, discontent and near-revolution, our ancestors not only held firm but redoubled their efforts on the Home Front. Men turned their backs on safe jobs to enlist, often well above (and in some cases, below) conventional military age, and the community as a whole set aside conflicts over industrial relations, universal suffrage or the rights and wrongs of the war to put their shoulders together to the wheel.

That, however, was nearly four years down the line. Christmas 1914 had challenges of its own, and some small compensations and comforts, too. Glimpsing it now we visit another world; but one in which, because of the Great War’s continuing influence on all that came after it, we can still trace far-off foreshadowings of our lives today.

A PRESENTFROMAPRINCESS

A still familiar memento of Christmas 1914 is the comforts tin issued to all the Empire’s serving personnel in the name of Princess Mary, the 17-year-old daughter of George V and Queen Mary. In brass embossed with a somewhat self-important classical design, it cried out to be kept as a souvenir, and that was the exact fate of hundreds of thousands of them. What we must not think, if we come across one today, is ‘Ah, this must have come through the hell of the trenches to survive.’ The better its condition, the more likely it is that it got no nearer to Flanders than Aldershot, Whitehall or Wellington Barracks.

The gift was organised within weeks of Christmas, meaning that many of the tins did not get out until early 1915, with a ‘Victorious New Year’ greeting rather than a Christmas card. An advertisement in the national press invited contributions to a ‘Sailors and Soldiers Christmas Fund’ created by the princess, with the aim of presenting a ‘gift from the nation’ to ‘every Sailor afloat and every Soldier at the front’ on Christmas Day. The impressive sum of £162,591 12s 5d was quickly raised, and eligibility for the gift was widened to take in everyone ‘wearing the King’s uniform on Christmas Day, 1914’, and then the wounded on leave or in hospital, nurses and the widows or parents of the fallen. Prisoners of war had theirs reserved until they came home, and while most had received their gift by the summer of 1916, even in early 1919 ‘considerable numbers’ had reportedly still to be distributed. When the fund closed in 1920, more than 2.5 million boxes and their contents had gone out. Around 400,000 – exact estimates vary – had reached their destination by that first Christmas Day of the war.

The 17-year-old Princess Mary. The caption to this portrait of her in The Illustrated War News in early November 1914 described her as ‘the royal Santa Claus’, though it was the public that financed the bulk of the fund for her Christmas gift. (The Illustrated War News, 4 November 1914)

As the order list for the boxes grew, so their quality declined. The brass came from the United States, but a large consignment went down with the Lusitania in May 1915 and besides, weapons and munitions, not to mention medals and memorial plaques, were ahead of pretty little tins in the pecking order for brass. The later ones came in various plated base metals and alloys, which explains why those found today vary considerably in quality. The ones made in pure brass have at least a chance of having found their way to the trenches.

The size of a typical tobacco tin of the day – 5 inches long, 3 wide, 1 deep – the boxes were designed by the studio of Messrs Adshead and Ramsey, architects who were well in with the royal family at that time. The previous year they had designed classical-influenced brick cottages for the Prince of Wales’s Duchy of Cornwall estate in Courtenay Street, Lambeth, and it must have struck some palace mandarin that they were the ones to come up with a seemly, stately design for the princess’s gift. And so they did, in a manner of speaking. They would have loved it in Napoleon’s Empire days; but the design craze of the day was Art Nouveau in its later form, and that would surely have pleased the public at least as much. It would certainly be more to the taste of the large number of traders who are trying to offload them in quantity on the Internet today.

At the centre of the lid is a profile of Princess Mary within a laurel wreath, her initial ‘M’ prominent on either side. At the top in a decorative cartouche are the words ‘Imperium Britannicum’ with a sword and scabbard either side, at the bottom ‘Christmas 1914’, flanked by battleship bows forging through the foam. Roundels in the corner display the names of the lesser Allies, Belgium, Japan, Montenegro and Servia (sic), while France and Russia take pride of place along the edges, with a due flurry of flags. In a heavy-handed way – even the brass tin of chocolates sent out by Queen Victoria to the Boer War troops in 1899 was not so resolutely imperial – the little box certainly had the presence to prompt anyone who received it to keep it as a souvenir, if they had the option. Tobacco tins were handy standbys for keeping bits and pieces in, but if possible, this was definitely something for ‘Keeping Nice’. Nearly forty years on, there was a commercial parallel when Oxo issued a neat little tin to commemorate the Queen’s coronation in 1953; these, too, were put away by their tens of thousands after their contents had been consumed, and large numbers of them can still be found in sparkling condition.

Princess Mary’s gift, a brass tobacco box of somewhat self-important but undeniably impressive design. (The Illustrated War Weekly, 16 December 1914)

Distributing these gifts must have been a logistical nightmare, given the conditions at the front and at sea. In fact even that first Christmas, when the gesture was still fresh, officers in charge of supplies grumbled that they were getting in the way of issuing normal rations. The standard gift, accompanied by a greetings card and a photograph of the princess, was a pipe, a tinder lighter, an ounce of tobacco and twenty cigarettes in yellow monogrammed wrappers, while non-smokers and boys were given a bullet pencil and a packet of sweets, Indians might have received sweets and spices, and there were chocolates for the nurses. Contents could vary from this, depending on supplies. Acid tablets and writing paper were among the less exciting offerings, while the most durable and collectable today was the sterling silver bullet pencil in a monogrammed brass .303 cartridge case.

As often as not these items were sent out separately from the tins themselves, which conjures up an image of some hapless orderlies in the field post offices, the whizz-bangs exploding above them, trying to make sense of the piles of tins, tobacco and confectionery all around: ‘Now Captain Smith, he’s a smoker, isn’t he? Private Jones, don’t think he likes a fag, but maybe he’ll take to the pipe? Poor old Bill Brown; didn’t he cop it yesterday?’ This, of course, was after the tins had made their hazardous journey from Britain without being raided for their tobacco. ‘Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent any loss en route to the front of the presents of the Princess Mary’s Fund,’ The London Illustrated Weekly’s War Pictures Weekly noted early in the New Year. ‘They were conveyed in closed vans locked by letter-locks, of which the key-word was known only to certain officers. Some of the vans were also tied up with barbed wire. This great precaution nearly led to disaster in one case. The receiving officer had either forgotten or not received the opening word, “Noel”, and could not get the van open until he hauled on the fastening with a motor-lorry.’ On balance, it is no surprise that the grand gesture was never repeated.

The distributors’ lot was not made any happier by the Christmas gifts that flooded to the front from other sources – friends and family, of course, but also from charities and the corporate hampers sent out en masse to specified recipients. The Leicester County Club sent a box of chocolates to every man in the Leicestershire Regiment – ‘very nice, neat little boxes’, according to one of the officers, perhaps sending out the coded message ‘Do bigger next year’. On the other hand, ‘Of course, the men were absolutely overcome; they were just like children at a prize distribution, and went round comparing their boxes, and making complimentary remarks about the “nibs [toffs] what sent them”.’

Considerably more generously, although targeting fewer numbers, the directors and workers at a brewery in Guildford had a whip-round and sent to each of their colleagues at the front a Christmas hamper that deserves to be celebrated in detail: 2-pound Christmas pudding; tin of tongue; two tins sardines; tin Irish stew; two chickens; two tins bloater paste; large packet chocolate; Oxo; large tin biscuits; tin salmon; tin pineapple; mustard, salt, pepper; tin opener; peppermints; paper and pencil; soap; two packs of playing cards. A handsome gift by anybody’s standards, although one worries rather about the fate of the chickens. ‘There’s all the stuff in the newspapers about Tommy at the Front enjoying a full Christmas dinner, and all we got was cold bully beef and cold pudding,’ one of the lads not lucky enough to be a brewery worker in Guildford complained; shades of the glistening plastic turkey borne in triumph into the Iraq mess room by George W. Bush in December 2003 before his troops were given ‘airline-style meals of pre-packaged meat’.

Then there were all the commercial organisations with their various promotions – free Christmas puddings from the Daily Mail, chocolate from Cadbury’s, butterscotch toffee from Callard & Bowser, Wills’ cut-price cigarette offers. Friends and relatives could send 1,000 Woodbines to their man at the front for 9 shillings, 1,000 Gold Flakes for 15 shillings, both complete with a cheery Christmas card. Given the limited resources open to them, compared to today, the marketing men of a century ago were up to all the tricks. ‘I am keeping well in spite of the large number of Christmas parcels received,’ a rifleman wrote home on Christmas Eve, displaying a fine taste in twenty-first century irony.

Princess Mary, born in 1897, gained a higher public profile as the war went on, coming of age just a few months before it ended. She regularly visited hospitals and welfare organisations, actively promoting the Girl Guide movement, the Voluntary Aid Detachment and the Women’s Land Army. In 1918 she took a nursing course and went to work at Great Ormond Street, and retained her interest in the Guides, the women’s services and nursing up to her comparatively early death in 1965. Her marriage to the considerably older Viscount Lascelles, who became Earl of Harewood, was said to have been forced on her by her parents; one story doing the rounds was that he had proposed to her to win a bet at his club. That said, they seemed a contented enough couple to those who knew them as the years passed by.

Her loyalty to her brother David after his abdication as Edward VIII also allegedly put her at odds with the royal establishment, despite her being granted the title Princess Royal in 1932. She and her husband went to stay with David (by now the Duke of Windsor) at Enzenfeld Castle, near Vienna, and in 1947 she is said to have turned down an invitation to Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, pleading ill health, in protest against the palace’s decision not to invite the Windsors. At the outbreak of the Second World War she became chief controller and then controller commandant of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and other duties and honours followed. Away from her official life, however, it is the 1939–45 war that created one of the nation’s most abiding collective memories of her; whether or not it is a false memory remains open to doubt.

It was in Harrods that the famously forgetful Sir Thomas Beecham encountered a pleasant-looking woman in her early middle years, and knew he had met her somewhere.

‘Hello, Madam. And how are you?’

‘I’m very well, thank you, but I do worry about my brother. He’s working far too hard.’

‘Ah yes, your brother. And what’s he doing these days.’

‘Oh, he’s still King.’

Many variations of this story have proliferated since then, but it does not seem to have surfaced much before it appeared in a biography of Sir Thomas published in 1943. You never know, it could even be true.

BRAVE HEARTSTOTHEFRONT

It was a spectacle as extraordinary as any ever seen on a British football ground. On cold winter afternoons in Edinburgh, half-time was usually reserved for hot pies and Bovril and hanging around the refreshment hut for as long as possible to soak up any warmth that might come your way; but on Saturday, 5 December 1914, hordes of local men had something very different in mind. They poured on to the pitch to enlist for the army, or, more precisely, McCrae’s Own Battalion. The game was a local derby at Heart of Midlothian’s Tynecastle ground against their old foe Hibernian, and hundreds of ‘Jam Tarts’ fans were joined by scores of ‘Hibees’ in showing loyalty to their country.

The man who inspired them, whatever their political or sporting persuasion, was Lieutenant Colonel Sir George McCrae, a prominent magistrate, local politician and businessman, a textile merchant by trade, who had served as a Liberal MP for Edinburgh East for ten years until 1909 and was proud to be an army volunteer. He made no pretence about his background – the illegitimate son of a housemaid, who never knew his father – and was admired all the more for that. He also had a way with words, and in the previous month, before the introduction of conscription, he had been given permission to try to raise a battalion for the Royal Scots. Aged 54, and cutting a somewhat incongruous figure, tartan-clad on horseback, he was not everyone’s idea of a battlefield leader; but he gave the men plenty to think about, the Hearts-Hibs game turned into the glorious climax to his recruitment drive, and so the Royal Scots’ Sixteenth Battalion, McCrae’s Own, came into being.

Even before that day, thirteen Hearts players had answered the call to arms, and more soon followed; seven of them were to go on and die in battle. At the time they were top of the Scottish League, having won their first eight games, and looked set fair for their first championship since 1897; but among sportsmen they were very quick to see that whatever their fellow countryman Bill Shankly might have had to say years later, there are rather more important things in life than football.

In truth, plenty of people were keen to remind them of this fact, with young men dying by their thousands out in France while these fine specimens of manhood continued to be paid to kick a bag of wind around the field as though everything was normal. Nevertheless, the pressure was on every team alike in Scotland – and to their lasting credit, it was Hearts who were first to rise magnificently to the call. Others who followed them into the battalion were professionals from Raith Rovers, Falkirk and Dunfermline, along with men from some seventy-five local Edinburgh-area clubs, rugby and hockey players, strongmen, golfers, bowlers and field athletes.

In his appeal to the crowd, McCrae was able to point to these fine fellows as true examples to follow, and there is no doubt that their involvement was crucial to his cause. Up and down the country, Pals’ battalions, made up of men from the same communities, factories, sports leagues or interest groups, had become a key component in the recruiting campaign. The Royal Scots’ Sixteenth, the Edinburgh footballers’ and fans’ battalion, was quickly seen as a classic example of the breed.

The tragedy of Pals’ battalions, as became all too apparent as hostilities wore on, was that if they met with disaster, the impact on their home communities was all the greater. So it was with McCrae’s Own. In the words of Jack Alexander, the author of the definitive history of the battalion:

McCrae’s men crossed to France in 1916, and on July 1 they took part in the infamous opening day of the Battle of the Somme. They were selected to assault the most dangerous part of the enemy position, a fearsome network of barbed wire and entrenchments, bristling with machine-guns. In spite of this, they took every objective and achieved the deepest penetration of the German line anywhere on the front; in the process they lost three-quarters of their strength.

McCrae himself, by this time promoted to full colonel, was swiftly withdrawn from the front line, invalided home and returned to the ranks of reservists. As far as the top brass were concerned, the inspirational recruitment officer was out of his depth on the front line, an amateur among professionals, and on balance, their judgment was doubtless correct. His men, what was left of them, never lost their faith in him or affection for him, and his bravery was never in question; but as a proactive leader in an integrated modern army, he understandably did not quite measure up. Though he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, this was almost routine for senior officers at that time.

The Royal Scots’ Sixteenth Battalion was reconstituted later in the war, and saw brave and distinguished service at Arras in April 1917, Passchendaele later that year, and Lys in the German spring offensive of 1918, when with others it held its line in the face of a furious enemy onslaught. By this time, many of the troops in its ranks knew little or nothing of Colonel McCrae, and for those few who did, December 1914 seemed a long, long time ago.

After the war, from 1919 to 1922, McCrae served as chairman of the Scottish Board of Health before a brief return to Westminster. He failed as a Lloyd George National Liberal against the sitting Labour MP in Edinburgh Central in 1922, but squeezed in for the Liberals at Stirling and Falkirk Burghs the following year, with a majority of 156. October 1924 brought a further election after Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour Government had lost a motion of no confidence, and while the Conservatives won by a landslide, Labour comfortably regained their seat in Sterling. It was the election that spelled the end of the Liberals as major contenders for government, and for McCrae it was the finale to a long career in the public eye. He died four years later, aged 68.

As for Hearts, they had to wait until 1958 for their next Scottish League championship. Remarkably, the league’s first division continued throughout the war, and at the end of the season Celtic came out victorious with 65 points, 4 points more than the men from Tynecastle. Success in football was a gamble in those years, with player absentees, guest players and inexperienced youths filling the gaps, and constantly the demoralising drip-feed of tragic news of old friends and colleagues at the front; a lottery – but one that was won every season by either Celtic or Rangers. It takes more than a world war to upset the balance of Scottish football.

And that might have been the end of the story had it not been for Jack Alexander and his book McCrae’s Battalion (2003). ‘The research took me twelve years and involved tracing more than a thousand families of Sir George’s original volunteers,’ Mr Alexander revealed, continuing:

The resultant mountain of letters, diaries, photographs and personal recollection unearthed a long-abandoned plan from 1919 for a memorial to the battalion – a fourteen-foot-high Scottish cairn in the rebuilt village of Contalmaison, complete with a large bronze-relief plaque to record McCrae’s men’s sacrifice for generations to come.