Missing Men – John Kennedy

John Kennedy, Private Royal Scots Fusiliers, aged 32

Several of the men of Strathblane who died in the First World War left behind children so young that they may never even have held them in their arms.
Private John McCulloch of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who features in A Village Remembers (Ch13) is one of them. Another is Private John Kennedy of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, whose daughter Janet was born barely six months before he was killed in the Arras offensive. But while John McCulloch finds a place on Strathblane War Memorial, John Kennedy does not. The likely reason is that the Kennedy family had long since left the village by the time their eldest son went off to war, while John McCulloch, though not born here, lived and worked here during the war.
John Kennedy began life in Edenkiln, Strathblane on August 31 1884, the eldest child of six children born to Irishman William James Kennedy and his wife Mary Lawson.
In 1881 William was living in City Row, Blanefield, working in the local printworks where several of his family had already settled from their native home in County Antrim. Two years later he met and married Mary Lawson (nee Cochrane), a young widow living in Auchineden. There was quite a Kennedy clan living side by side in City Row (now known as New City Row). William’s sister Margaret, the widow of James McKenzie, was living there with her brother-in-law, son, two daughters and a grand-daughter plus four lodgers. At that time many of the houses in City Row were inhabited by Irish workers at the printworks or employed on the water pipeline being constructed through the village from Loch Katrine. It was not unusual for already large families in these small terraced cottages to have another three or four lodgers.
William Kennedy’s family was expanding rapidly, so they later moved to Edenkiln in Strathblane where John was born in 1884, followed by William Moyes, James Cochrane, Andrew, Mary and Margaret. William Moyes Kennedy was registered simply as William in October 1886 but at his baptism in the local Parish Church in November he was re-registered with the new Minister’s surname added. It was the custom for the first baby baptised by a new Minister to take his name. (The Revd William Moyes would stay in the parish for another 47 years and lose his own son Wilfrid in the First World War. See A Village Remembers Ch 12.)

In 1898 the Printworks had closed and along with many others who had lost their jobs, the Kennedys moved into Glasgow to find employment. By 1901 William Senior was giving his occupation as mechanical engineer while John, now 16, was a railway clerk and his brother William, a grocer’s assistant.
On September 25 1910, John married Janet Scott Law, a typist, at St Mungo’s Halls in Glasgow. He had become a mercantile clerk by the time his first son William Cochrane Kennedy was born the following year. The family had settled in Allison St Govanhill. A second son, John Law Kennedy, was born in 1913 but war was approaching and by the time their daughter, Janet Weir Kennedy was born in late September 1916, John was a Private in the 4th Battalion Highland Light Infantry.
It is doubtful if he ever met his new daughter, as barely six months later on the April 23 1917, he was killed in action.
He had transferred to the 2nd Bn. Royal Scots Fusiliers which formed part of the 30th Division. In 1917, they were involved in the pursuit of the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line, and in the Arras offensive. In what became known as the Second Battle of the Scarpe, the British launched an assault towards Vis-en-Artois on April 23. Some elements of the 30th Division made modest gains. The attack was called off by high command the next day because of the strength of German resistance and the scale of Allied losses. But by then Private John Kennedy was dead.
John is commemorated at Bootham Cemetery, Pas de Calais, situated about 3km from the Arras to Cambrai Road. It is a small cemetery with only 186 burials of which 71 are unidentified but John does have a named gravestone there. He also appears on the City of Glasgow Roll of Honour.
John died aged 32, while barely seven months later his young cousin James McKenzie aged 19, whose families had lived side by side in Blanefield, was also killed. Both families had moved to Glasgow many years before the start of the war and these men do not appear on the Rolls of Honour or on the War Memorial.
One is left to wonder if John’s daughter Janet ever visited Strathblane or saw the pleasant valley where the father she never knew drew his first breath. As far as one can imagine from the muddied bloodied wasteland of northern France where he drew his last.