Andrew Fitzpatrick, Quartermaster Sergeant Scottish Rifles, aged 37.
Of all the First World War casualties with local connections and who do not feature on Strathblane War Memorial, the case of Quartermaster Sergeant Andrew Fitzpatrick is the most puzzling. Though Andrew did not die until December 1920, there is no doubt at all that it was as a direct result of his war service. After all, he is buried in Strathblane Churchyard under a Commonwealth War Graves Commission tombstone. Yet, though the war memorial was not unveiled until August 1921, his name is missing. Moreover, at that time there was still space left for two more names, as contemporary press reports refer to 25 names, whereas today there are 27.
Andrew was born in Manchester and raised as a Roman Catholic, though when he walked down the aisle in February 1914 after marrying his sweetheart Grace Elliott, it was in the United Reform Church in Springburn Road, Glasgow. At the time he was living at 19 Mansfield Street in Partick. After more than a decade as a regular soldier, he was back on Civvy Street. What the newly-weds did not know was that within six months Andrew would be once again a full time soldier and the world pitched into warfare on a scale never previously known.
At 17 he had signed on for six years as a regular soldier with the Lancashire Fusiliers, transferring to the Scottish Rifles in May 1907. According to 1911 Census data, he was serving at that time overseas in Harrismith South Africa. By the time he married, he was working as a cattle wharf labourer, presumably unloading livestock bound for the huge slaughterhouse in Yorkhill. Grace was in service.
Andrew probably retained links with the Scottish Rifles. Following what were known as the ‘Haldane reforms’ of 1908 – named after the then Secretary of State for War Viscount Richard Haldane – Andrew’s unit, the 1/8 Battalion Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) became a part of a new ‘Territorial Force’, the volunteer reserve component of the British Army.
The Cameronians appear to have just departed for their annual training camp when war was declared, on 4 August 1914. Emergency orders had to be issued to recall them to their home base. They were subsequently moved to Scottish coastal defence duties. The expectation was that the Territorial Force would be deployed, in wartime on British soil to free the regular army for service overseas. At first his unit, which became part of the 52nd (Lowland) Division, served on the east coast of Scotland. However, by spring 1915, climbing casualty levels and the escalating demands of the war meant that on 5 April the division was warned that it would be going overseas. On 7 May it was confirmed that the division was to deploy to the fighting in the Dardanelles – Gallipoli.
Even before they had left Scotland the division suffered grievous losses. On 22 May 1915 troop trains carrying the battalion headquarters and two companies from Larbert to Liverpool for embarkation, were involved in what remains the worst ever railway accident, in terms of loss of life, in Britain. At Quintinshill, near Gretna Green, the crash occurred when one of the troop trains crashed into a local train, which had been shunted in error on to the main line. An express train to Glasgow crashed into the wreckage a minute later.
A catastrophic fire destroyed the three passenger trains and two goods trains waiting in a ‘passing loop’. Of the estimated 230 fatalities most were travelling in the troop train – 3 officers and 207 men died, 5 officers and 219 were injured and fewer than 70 men from the troop train survived unscathed. It could hardly have been a more ominous departure when the 52 (Lowland) Division, including, we assume, Company Quartermaster Sergeant Andrew Fitzpatrick, sailed from Liverpool two days later on 24 May.
The 1/8th Cameronians landed in Turkey, at Gallipoli (Cape Helles), on 14 June. This was approximately six weeks after the initial landings and by all accounts the conditions met by Andrew Fitzpatrick and his Cameronian comrades were truly horrendous. As a consequence of inept command and decision making, together with widespread dysentery arising from an unbearably hot Turkish summer and swarms of flies feasting on unburied decaying corpses, casualties were staggeringly high, even by the callous standards of WW1.
Contemporaneous war diaries indicate that the regiment suffered particularly savage losses in the period from 28 June to 1 July in fighting near Gully Ravine. The human costs and the obvious failures of the Gallipoli campaign became evident to all and in early December the British Cabinet ordered the evacuation of all Allied forces.
The Cameronians were evacuated from Cape Helles to Egypt on 6/7 January 1916. The Suez Canal, providing an essential sea route to much of the British Empire, had enormous strategic importance for Britain. The Cameronians were deployed with other units to maintain free passage for allied shipping through the canal. The British authorities sought to reinforce and improve communications by strengthening the railway track and building a water pipe line to supply troops and towns along the canal. It is known that Andrew Fitzpatrick’s unit was deployed in the defence of these works in what was known as Section 3 of the Canal and, in late April 1916, was in action repelling a Turkish attack close to the small oasis at Dueidar, near Katia.
Turkey’s Ottoman Empire had ruled most of the Arab Middle East for several centuries and early in 1916 a plan emerged for Turkish troops, under the command of German General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein to cross the Sinai desert and attack the canal. Anticipating this, British Commander Sir Archibald Murray ordered defences to be strengthen around Romani. A line of eighteen redoubts (small enclosed defensive emplacements) was constructed and these were manned by the 52nd (Lowland) Division. As Company Quartermaster Sergeant, Andrew Fitzpatrick would have played a significant role in occupying the defensive line and in the major action – which became known as the Battle of Romani – on 4th/5th August 1916.
We must assume that Andrew Fitzpatrick was seriously wounded in action during the Palestine campaign some time between August 1916 and early the following year. He was discharged as unfit for military service as a consequence of his wounds, on 12 March 1917.
When he died three years later he was living with his wife Grace at Maryfield (a now-demolished tenement block in Station Road), Blanefield and working as a shoemaker, which had been his father’s profession. The official cause of death was given as pulmonary tuberculosis. His name appears on neither Strathblane War Memorial, nor either of the two local Rolls of Honour. However, he is named on the brass plaque commemorating the fallen from the former United Free Church in Blanefield. And his CWCG grave at Strathblane Kirk is inscribed with the following words: “A good comrade and a true friend.”