Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 59

Many Scots served in the British Army (see pp. 104-8), and many died on active service.

War memorials are found all over Scotland. This one, at Uig, Lewis, includes the tragic deaths of servicemen on the Iolaire. On 1 January 1919, the ship was carrying servicemen home to Lewis after the First World War when it struck a rock and sank just outside Stornoway harbour, drowning 205 of them within a stone’s throw of safety. Scarcely a family in Lewis was unaffected. In Uig, we were told of an old lady who had died only recently, whose father conceived her before he left for the war. He survived the horrors of the trenches, but then drowned before he ever held his little daughter.

War graves of all British service personnel can be found through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (www.cwgc.org), and you can also look at local war memorials and in published Rolls of Honour.

These are not just names. James Patrick Crowley, born in Falkirk in 1890, was educated at St Aloysius’s College and St Mungo’s Academy, Glasgow, before becoming a schoolmaster on Barra, where he wanted to help the local children. Jim volunteered for the 16th Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry as a private. He sent this postcard to his parents in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, telling of an early and unexpected danger he encountered:

‘We had just left Kinghorn [Fife] when there was a terrible whistling & we were backed into the station, or rather a siding. We were scarcely there when an Express thundered past – right across where we had been just a minute & a half before…Fondest love & pray for me, Jim.’

Jim was sent on the Dardanelles Campaign and, as this old photocopied newspaper cutting reveals, he was killed in action on 16 August 1915. The Helles Memorial on the Gallipoli Peninsula commemorates Jim and the 20,834 other British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in the campaign.

(and indexes at www.findmypast.com) and Scottish soldiers and sailors in the Second World War.