
George Douglas Wilson, Lt Royal Field Artillery, aged 45
The country edition of the Stirling Observer of September 23 1916 contains a simple stark sentence in its war news: “Lieut. Col. Douglas Wilson, Royal Field Artillery, late of Drumquhar, Blanefield, has died as a result of shell shock”.
This man’s story raises more questions than it answers. He was born around 1871 on Merseyside at Rock Ferry, then an upmarket community on the Wirral Peninsula. He was the son of George Wilson and his wife Jane. He was christened George Douglas, though he seems to have been known as Douglas, presumably to distinguish him from his father, who was an established ship owner and export provision merchant in Liverpool trading under the name Wilson, Coltart & Co.
The 1891 Census finds the family living at The Hermitage, a large house in Oxton, Birkenhead, and it reveals that both of his parents were Scottish. It also shows that Douglas, now 20, had an elder sister Jane, aged 23, as well as a 13-year old sister Annabella.

It would appear that Douglas joined the family business as a partner and was soon dispatched to Scotland to run the company’s Glasgow office. In August 1897 he married Elizabeth Harpin Harrison in the Wirral. They settled in Strathblane, renting Napier Lodge on Milndavie Road. In October that year Douglas was awarded a diploma by the Royal Humane Society for having saved a man from drowning in the River Wharfe in Yorkshire. Their two daughters, Jean Gilroy Wilson and Elizabeth Madeleine Wilson were born in 1898 and 1901 respectively, both in Strathblane. At this time Napier Lodge is described as a 12-roomed house and the family employed a cook, a nurse and a waitress. Mr Wilson’s office was at 22 Oswald Street.
At the end of 1903, Douglas and his father dissolved their partnership by mutual consent as reported in the London Gazette of January 22 1904. The business was carried on by Douglas and Frank Forbes Wilson in co-partnership.
In 1904 Douglas commissioned architect Alec Hislop of J Archibald Campbell Hislop, who studied under Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to build an impressive Arts & Crafts-style house which he called Drumquhar. Here the story has a twist. We know that George Douglas’s son, Douglas Edward Wilson, was born here in July 1906 and his father signed his birth certificate as being present at the birth, and yet it is reported in the village history A Century of Change that George Douglas Wilson emigrated to America and died during the San Francisco earthquake in April of that year. Not so.
He may indeed have been in San Francisco around that time and may even have been missing for a short while. Post Office Directories list offices for J & R Wilson as it was now known, in Glasgow, Liverpool, New York, Sydney, Newcastle in New South Wales and at 117 Steuart Street in San Francisco. However, the 1911 Census finds him alive and well living with his family in Eltham Court, Kent with his wife, three children and six servants. (By this time the Wilsons had sold Drumquhar to Clyde shipbuilder Sir Alfred Yarrow who gave it the name by which we know it today: Campsie Dene House.)

The London Gazette of May 1911 announced that George Douglas Wilson was to become a 2nd Lieutenant of 2nd London Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. As it was then part of the Territorial Army, he was not at this stage a full time soldier. It was a part-time unit formed in 1908 as part of the so-called Haldane Reforms from the 3rd Kent, Royal Garrison Artillery, who were all volunteers. In 1914 it was assigned to the 1st London Division and mobilised immediately on the outbreak of war on August 4. That must be how Douglas ended up in the 1st/2nd London Brigade of the RFA, one of the first parts of the Territorial Force deployed to the Western Front in 1915 with the London Division. We believe that as part of the 47th Division, it fought in the Battle of Aubers Ridge, Festubert, Loos and at the Somme between July and September 1916. (More information would be welcome.)
At some point Douglas appeared to have lost his nerve but exactly how he met his death on September 13 1916 remains a mystery. In the official list of those who died in the Great War, he is designated as a Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, 2nd (London) Brigade and reported simply as having “died of wounds”. By contrast, the Stirling Observer of September 23 erroneously gives his rank as Lieut. Col. and states that he “died of shell shock”. He was 45. (Perhaps the compositor made an error and typed “Col.” Instead of “Geo.”.) Shell shock was a relatively new term, the symptoms of which were still not fully understood, so it is a mystery as to what actually happened to George Douglas Wilson. How do you die of shell shock? Had he lost his mind and deliberately run out in front of enemy guns? The term had been minted only the year before in a paper by a medical officer called Charles Myers. It was at first thought to be either the effect of nearby exploding shells on the brain or dismissed as signifying a lack of moral fibre. At first soldiers displaying symptoms of trauma were quickly evacuated but by the Battle of the Somme in 1916 around 40% of casualties were displaying signs of the condition. It was four times more common among officers, perhaps because they were required to repress their emotions so as to set an example to their men.
The war poet Siegfried Sassoon, himself a victim of shell shock, described “dreams that drip with murder” and “stammering disconnected talk”.
Given his strong business and family connection to the area, it is odd that his name appears on neither Strathblane War Memorial nor either of the local Rolls of Honour. However, he is commemorated at the St Sever Cemetery south of Rouen with a Commonwealth War Graves stone bearing the insignia of the Royal Field Artillery and these words from an Ode by the Roman poet Horace, chosen by his family: “Dolce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and right to die for your country”).