John Douglas Walker, Gunner Royal Garrison Artillery, aged 36
It is easy to imagine the wife and children of Gunner John Douglas Walker celebrating the news of the Armistice of 1918 and joyfully anticipating his return to Blanefield from the Front. It was a Monday morning and soon after 11am, the school was closed for the day, releasing his children, 13-year old Agnes and ten-year old William to help hang out flags and gather fuel for a great victory bonfire at Blaerisk. Periodically, peels of bells rang out from Strathblane Church. But Agnes and William’s father never returned to their tenement in Station Road. Having been wounded on virtually the last day of the conflict, he died five days after the Armistice.
John had been born in July 1882 near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, where William, his father, worked as a ploughman. His mother, Isabella Douglas, had been a domestic servant in Roxburgh when the pair had married in 1879. John was their second son. The 1891 Census found the family in Berwickshire at Westruther, where ten-year old William and eight-year old John were at school. By the early 1900s the family had moved to Blanefield and John and his father were both coachmen at Dunmullin House on the outskirts of the village, probably occupying Dunmullin Lodge.
In 1904 John met and married Jean Campbell, who was in service in Balfron. They then moved to Craigend Castle Stables in Mugdock where their first child was born. Agnes Campbell Walker arrived on May 1 1905. John’s father was also working there as a coachman and living at the same address. Craigend Castle (now a ruin in Mugdock Park) was owned by Sir Eric Buchanan and the Walkers would have been employed by the then tenant, James Kerr. This was around the time that wealthy families were swapping their horse-drawn carriages for motorcars.
John was probably conscripted in 1916 and joined the Royal Field Artillery as a bombardier but was transferred as a gunner to the 2nd/1st (Lowland) Heavy Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. The RGA fired the large calibre guns positioned behind the front line (see Chapter 6 of A Village Remembers). So John would have been working with 60-pounder (five-inch) guns to destroy the enemy artillery as well as roads, railways, stores etc. behind the enemy lines He appears to have been wounded at the tail-end of hostilities as the Allies made their final assault on the Hindenburg Line. He succumbed to his wounds less than a week after the guns fell silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, leaving the postman to break the news to Jean and the children at Maryfield in Station Road, while the rest of the community celebrated the end of hostilities in Europe and attended a service of Thanksgiving at Strathblane Kirk.
John Douglas Walker was buried in a Commonwealth War Grave at Premont British Cemetery, Aisne, near Cambrai in north-east France but there is no memorial to him in the village he had come to regard as home. Nor does his name feature on either of the two local rolls of honour. So let this brief biography be his commemoration along with the inscription chosen by his family for his headstone in France: “TO LIVE IN HEARTS WE LEAVE BEHIND IS NOT TO DIE.”
(Maryfield was a tenement in Station Road, demolished to make way for Cuilt Place. Blaerisk, later called Blue Risk, was an old house at the corner of Old Mugdock Road and Milndavie Road. Around 2021 it was demolished to make way for two villas.)