STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 10 ALEXANDER MITCHELL, PRIVATE CAMERONIANS (SCOTTISH RIFLES), AGED 36.
“12 April. Second attack by 9th Div. at Arras – attack was a costly failure. Staff planning at Corps was bad. The troops never had a chance.”
War diary entry by fellow Cameronian Archibald Gordon MacGregor.
When Alexander Mitchell was killed in action, serving with the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) in Northern France, on April 12 1917, he left a wife and two young children in their home on the Duntreath estate near Blanefield. At 36, he is the second oldest of the 27 men on Strathblane War Memorial.
Like several local men who died in the war, Alexander (Sandy) had earned his living as a gardener. From the time of his marriage to Georgina Bruce, on November 29 1912 until he enlisted, he worked at Duntreath for the Edmonstone family.
Sandy had been born at Bogenjohn, a farm near Strichen, Aberdeenshire in November 1880. He was the fourth of eight children. (Another died in infancy.) His parents had been married, according to the rights of the Free Church, at Strichen in April 1874. His father, William, had been a crofter and farm servant and his mother had been in service at Aberdour House in Fife.
Although it seems likely that Sandy was a domestic gardener all of his working life, employment opportunities were limited and young men often had to move around to find work. Even by contemporary standards, the accommodation provided for single men working as gardeners was primitive. Indeed the 1901 census records 20-year old Sandy living in the ‘Gardener’s Bothy’ at Fetteresso, near Stonehaven. A decade later, he was in another gardener’s bothy but now significantly further south, at Norwood in Alloa, where he was working as one of two gardeners employed by John Thomas, a jam maker.
It must have been while there that Sandy met Georgina Bruce, employed as a 23-year old domestic servant at Howiegate, Markinch. They were married in St Stephen’s Church, in Royal Circus in Edinburgh New Town on November 29 1912 and soon afterwards moved to Duntreath where Sandy appears on the 1915 Valuation Roll.
The couple had two children, Margaret (Bunty), followed by William, who was born in June 1915. Sandy must have barely known his son as he joined the 9th Battalion, Scottish Rifles, enlisting in Glasgow.
By April 1917 he was serving with his battalion in Northern France as part of the 9th (Scottish) Division. The spring of 1917 was a crucial juncture in the conduct of the war. The casualty lists, the unremitting drain on human and material resources and the human traumas of major battles such as Gallipoli, the Somme and Verdun were exhausting combatants on both sides. Lloyd George, openly sceptical of the exaggerated claims and over optimistic proposals of military leaders, had replaced Asquith as British Prime Minister in December 1916.
In America, public opinion was hardening against Germany, largely as a consequence of the torpedoing of American merchant shipping. Finally, on April 6 1917, the USA declared war on Germany. In the east, the overthrow of the Czar was not the triumph for democracy that some had hoped for. When the German high command facilitated Lenin’s return from exile – in a closed train through Germany – to Petrograd in early April 1917, in effect the ongoing revolution in Russia disabled the Russian war effort and enabled Germany to redeploy troops to the Western Front.
Meanwhile a new French Commander in Chief, General Robert Nivelle, persuaded the French and British Governments – even Lloyd George – that a quick decisive breakthrough on the Western Front, at the Aisne River between Soissons and Reims, was possible and that such action could bring a swift and successful end to the war. Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, a little reluctantly, agreed that British and Empire forces would launch a separate attack approximately eighty miles further north, partly to distract German forces from the French offensive. Hence, at the beginning of April 1917, Sandy Mitchell and his Cameronian comrades gathered as part of the larger force preparing to attack the German lines around the city of Arras.
There was some optimism before the action. The geology of the region around Arras is chalky with a network of natural caverns and underground galleries. Engineers devised a plan to add new tunnels to the network, enabling troops to move to the front line in safety and security. In addition, important lessons were said to have been learned from the costly failures of 1916, in respect of coordinating a ‘creeping’ artillery barrage with an advancing infantry. And the fledgling Royal Flying Corps was making a significant contribution to improving reconnaissance and the accuracy of the artillery.
In heavy snow on Easter Monday (April 9) 1917 the 9th Scottish Rifles attacked, as a part of the 27th Brigade, and despite the wintry conditions achieved a significant breakthrough. The artillery barrage had done its job, destroying the barbed wire and new types of gas shells had fallen behind German lines, killing transport horses, thus making the further movement of guns and counter attacks impossible. The German lines had been penetrated by up to 2 miles. In addition Canadian troops, on the extreme left of the attack, had a conspicuous success in taking the high ground at Vimy Ridge.
Sandy Mitchell and his comrades in the 9th Scottish Rifles attacked along a line between Point du Jour and Athies, north of the River Scarpe.
In the event, however, apparent initial success on all fronts was misleading. British commanders were slow to press on with the advance, the initiative was lost and a stalemate of entrenched positions ensued. Sandy Mitchell was reported “killed in action” on April 12, three days after the first attack. The Cameronians had been ordered to take the village of Rouex and a chemical works, which lay approximately 1000 yards to the north of the Scarpe River. This engagement saw some of the fiercest fighting of the whole battle with the village changing hands several times. A war diary entry by fellow Cameronian (Archibald Gordon MacGregor) pithily summarises events: “12 April. Second attack by 9th Div. at Arras – attack was a costly failure. Staff planning at Corps was bad. The troops never had a chance.”
The Battle of Arras continued for more than five weeks. By the time it was finally halted by Haig on May 16, British and British Empire forces had suffered more than 150,000 casualties, including 11,000, Canadians. German losses were estimated in the region of 130,000. The Arras Memorial to the Missing has 35,000 inscribed on it.
To the south, the Nivelle Offensive, for which the Battle of Arras was to provide an initial distraction, was also a conspicuous and costly failure. Nivelle was sacked in May. Morale crumbled among French troops, thousands quit frontline duties and there were widespread mutinies. Death sentences were passed on 500 “ringleaders”, although less than 50 executions appear to have been carried out.
At Point du Jour a memorial cairn was erected in 1922 to commemorate the part played by the 9th Scottish Division in the Battle of Arras on the April 9 1917. It bears the somewhat understated inscription: “Remember with honour the 9th Scottish Division who on the fields of France and Flanders 1915-1918 served well.” The memorial was relocated, stone by stone in 2006, to accommodate a new dual carriageway for the D950 auto route
Sandy Mitchell’s remains, along with many Cameronians, are buried at Brown’s Copse Cemetery, in the village of Roeux, approximately five miles east of Arras. His life and sacrifice are also commemorated on the family gravestone in Strichen Parish Churchyard Aberdeenshire. And there is a stirring memorial to the Cameronians in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park. (Lance Corporal Colin Rankin of the HLI (see Ch 19), son of the long-serving village doctor, died in the same offensive, less than two weeks later.)
Although Sandy Mitchell lived in the village for a relatively short period, his two children and granddaughter gave the Mitchell family a continuing presence in the community. Daughter Bunty worked in the school meals service at Strathblane School for many years, before marrying and moving to Denny. Sandy’s son William Hood Mitchell, who was only two when his father was killed, was apprenticed to Strathblane joiner Andrew Scott, who had also lost a brother in the war. He eventually became general foreman for the well-known local builders WS Gordon.
Whilst singing in the church choir, it seems that William met and married Margaret, a nurse at the Children’s Home Hospital at Milndavie. After living in Edenkiln and a prefab in Dumbrock Drive, they moved into Milndavie Crescent. Their daughter Sandra was headteacher at Netherlee Primary School in East Renfrewshire when it became the first in Scotland to achieve an “excellent” rating from inspectors. She retired in 2012.
Sandy’s wife Georgina was remarried in 1921 to a local man, William Jolly (probably a cousin of Daniel Morrison, another man on the war memorial – see 11). They had a son, named William Ferguson Jolly but known as Sonny (presumably to distinguish him from his older brother) and a daughter, Betty. Georgina lived in the village until her death in 1972. She is buried in Strathblane Cemetery.
It is appropriate to finish by focusing on the lives of the families and survivors of the war because the men in the front line believed that they were fighting to preserve the freedom and way of life of their nearest and dearest. However, it is a cruel reminder of the sheer brutality and trauma experienced by all those living in the second decade of the twentieth century, that along with the family of Sandy Mitchell, each day in the five weeks of the Battle of Arras, from early April until mid-May 1917, more than 4000 families in Britain and the Empire, as well as 3,500 families in Germany, received the devastating news that a family member had been killed or wounded or was missing in action.
Though none of Sandy’s letters home to Georgina survive, Sandra Mitchell treasures three novelty silk embroidered postcards, which reached Duntreath from northern France. One features purple flowers and the simple legend “To My Dear Wife”.