George Cumming Gardner, Cpl King’s Own Scottish Borderers, aged 26
George Cumming Gardner was born at Muirhouse Farm, Strathblane, on September 6 1889. Having left the village in his youth to live in Craigton, his name finds no place on the Strathblane War Memorial, though he is commemorated in no fewer than six other places, including the imposing memorial to the (20,000) missing from the Battle of Loos.
His Strathblane connections were through his mother, Jane Cumming. Her parents, George and Christine, were the latest in a long line of the Cumming family who for around two centuries had owned Muirhouse Farm, located between Ardunan (Strathblane Country House Hotel) and Loch Ardinning. In 1889 Jane, aged 31, had taken a job as a dairymaid in Craigton and was stepping out with a local warehouseman, 26-year old William Gardner, when she fell pregnant. Though, George was born illegitimate, his birth was legitimised retrospectively by the marriage of his parents at Muirhouse three weeks later. (Quite a common occurrence at the time.)
The family settled at Craigton Stables. William Gardner initially worked as a warehouseman, then took employment in the local bleachfields. By 1901, George had acquired five younger siblings: a sister, Christina, and four brothers, William, Walter, Alexander and Samuel. George was an exceptionally bright child. He started his education at Craigton Public School, where he won the Lowrie Medal as Dux Pupil of his year. He continued to excel during secondary school at New Kilpatrick Higher Grade School in Bearsden, and went on to enrol at the Normal College for Teacher Training in Cowcaddens. This institute was originally named after the French ‘Ecole Normale’, and was to become Dundas Vale Teachers’ Centre, merging with Stow College in 1906 and then Jordanhill College of Education in 1922. (The fine building still stands, close to the M8 flyover at Cowcaddens.) William Gardner, the eldest of his four younger brothers, also chose this vocation, being listed alongside George as a student teacher in the 1911 Census. The thought of joining their mother’s Strathblane farming business does not seem to have been considered by either.
After graduation George was employed as a teacher at the Sir John Neilson Cuthbertson School in Govanhill, Glasgow, which was built in 1906 and named after a former Chairman of the Glasgow School Board.
On the 10th December 1914, aged twenty five, George put his teaching career on hold to enlist as a private with the 6th Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB). No doubt his sense of duty and desire to protect the future of his pupils played a major part in this decision at a time when the general public was being subjected to a flood of propaganda about the evils of “the Hun”. He was soon promoted to corporal.
Records suggest that three of George’s younger brothers also fought in the war: Walter joined the 6th (City of Glasgow) Highland Light Infantry and Alexander became a trooper in the 1st Scottish Horse. Another son, named as John, was a farrier in the 3rd Scottish Horse. As we have no record of a son called John, it seems likely that this is the name adopted by William Gardner (born in Craigton in 1893), to distinguish him from his father, also named William. In 1911 William, like George, had been working as a student teacher.
George Gardner and the 6th Battalion KOSB, part of 28th Brigade of the 9th (Scottish) Division, sailed from Folkestone for Boulogne in May 1915. After further months of training 6th KOSB became embroiled in The Battle of Loos (September 25 to October 15), or ‘the big push’, which is recognised as the first use of poison gas by the British Army. The historian Paul Reed acknowledges that in essence this was a Scottish Battle, due the high representation of local regiments.
George’s battalion’s objective was to capture the villages of Haisnes and Douvrin, south of Auchy-les-la-Bassee (today called Auchy-les-Mines) which lay on the northern part of the line. This was coal mining territory, requiring a different and more challenging type of village warfare, between miners’ houses called ‘corons’, mining slagheaps or ‘crassiers’, and ‘fosses’ pit-heads. At the same time, and further South, both sister battalions, 7th & 8th KOSB (as part of the 46th Brigade of 15th Division), were preparing to attack Hill 70, East of Loos.
A major obstacle lying directly in the path of the 9th (Scottish) Division was the Hohenzollern Redoubt, a heavily fortified German position bristling with machine guns. On September 25 6th KOSB was ordered to attack the ‘Little Willie’ trench system which ran from the Hohenzollern Redoubt to merge with the Fosse Trench further north. It had to run the gauntlet of No Man’s Land, heavily defended on either side by the German machine gun nests of Strong Point and Madagascar Mad Point.
Unfortunately, when a thick yellow screen of chlorine gas was discharged by the British on the morning of September 25 the wind changed direction. It didn’t reach the German lines and began to drift back towards the Scots. In his book, The KOSB in the Great War’ Captain Stair Gillon described the suffocating effects of the gas masks and dilemmas faced by every soldier on whether to keep wearing them: “It was Hobson’s Choice – to be half choked for want of air, or wholly choked in the attempt to get it.”
6th KOSB’s attack faltered until a 60 year old Pipe-Major called Robert Mackenzie played George and his comrades over the parapet. The piper was eventually shot in both legs, only to die two days later of his wounds. A Lieutenant Waller was to write of him, “He was the finest and grandest old man in the regiment, and we are justly proud of him.”
Further down the line it was another regimental piper who inspired 7th KOSB at Hill 70 by playing ‘All the Blue Bonnets over the Border’. Forty year old Daniel Logan Laidlaw, later christened ‘The Piper of Loos’, was to become the first Scottish Borderer recipient of the Victoria Cross in the Great War, also receiving the Croix de Guerre from the French for his bravery.
George Gardner and 6th KOSB were surprised by how little early resistance they faced, but this was not to last. Not only was the gas hanging thick in the air, but the British shelling had failed to break the barbed wire, leaving his battalion stalled, trapped and exposed to crossfire from the German machine guns. In his book, The British Campaign in France and Flanders, Volume II (1915), Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes) highlighted the “tragic fortunes” of 28th Brigade at this juncture, especially 6th KOSB and the 10th Highland Light Infantry, which encountered a covered trench “invisible until one fell into it, studded with stakes and laced with wire”. Many of the KOSB “lost their lives in this murderous ditch”. It was in these horrific conditions that George, aged 26 years, was killed.
6th KOSB suffered 630 casualties in this action. 358 were listed as killed or missing, another 272 wounded or gassed, with an additional 20 officers as casualties. Only 46 survivors, under the command of a corporal, were mustered to march back to the reserve lines. Between September 25 and October 16 9th(Scottish) Division lost 6,058 men in total, including 190 officers.
Despite the huge losses incurred by the KOSB on that first day, the Battle of Loos was regarded as an initial success, one that was eventually to get bogged down in attritional warfare for minor gains, with reserves too far back to exploit early advantage. Shortly afterwards Field Marshall Sir John French was replaced by General Sir Douglas Haig as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). This was no doubt due to major differences of opinion over strategy and the deteriorating British relationship with France’s General Joseph Joffre.
Corporal George C Gardner was posthumously awarded the 1914-15 Star, Victory Medal & British War Medal.
He is commemorated on the Loos Memorial (Panel 53 to 56), which lists the names of over 20,000 officers and men with no known grave who fell in the area from the River Lys to Grenay. This Memorial forms the rear section of Dud Corner Cemetery, which stands on the site of a German strong point captured by the 15th (Scottish) Division on the first day of the Battle. He also features on the monument in Milngavie, Jordanhill Teacher Training College and Glasgow City Council Education Department War Memorials, as well as the City of Glasgow and Evening Times Rolls of Honour.
One can only imagine the thankless task faced by the Head Teacher of the Sir John Neilson Cuthbertson School when informing George’s pupils of his untimely death; the sad truth being that this was no doubt happening throughout the land as the grim reality of the Great War began to hit home. In Govanhill that night many a child went home with sorry heart, another inspirational teacher lost to the conflict.
(Muirhouse Farm: Around 1900 George’s uncle Walter Cumming operated a buttermilk run to St George’s Cross in Glasgow with a distinctive horse and cart, which was replaced after the First World War by a Model T lorry.
Muirhouse Farm was later to become a quarry when quartzag sand, very much in demand for the building trade at the time, was discovered. This operation finally closed in 1995 but the site was subsequently converted to, and still continues as landfill.)