STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 14 DONALD MCINTYRE, TROOPER LOVAT SCOUTS, AGED 23.
“Both as a civilian and a soldier he was much liked, being a young man of open and genial disposition.”
The Southern Reporter, Selkirk, December 24 1914.
Although Donald McIntyre’s name appears on Strathblane War Memorial and he is certainly a casualty of World War I, he was a soldier who never got to fight. He never even left Britain. There are other features that also mark him out. Of the 27 men remembered, he is one of only two who was dead before the end of 1914. Also, he is the only one to have joined the Lovat Scouts, a body with an unusual history and awesome reputation in Scottish military history.
Donald was the son of a sheep farm manager living at Cochno Hill in Old Kilpatrick. His father John was himself the son of a shepherd from Inverary in Argyll and he could speak Gaelic. His mother, Margaret Forsyth, was a farmer’s daughter. The couple married in June 1889 in Kirkintilloch, where Margaret had been working as a housekeeper. As their first child, William, (named after his maternal grandfather) was born less than three months later, Margaret must have been visibly pregnant on her wedding day.
Donald was born on the farm at Cochno in late December 1890 and named after his paternal grandfather, the Argyll shepherd. Some time between 1891 and 1893 the McIntyres moved from Old Kilpatrick to Blairquhosh, a sheep farm on the Duntreath Estate of Sir Archibald Edmonstone, outside Blanefield. They would stay there for the rest of their lives.
The McIntyres will have been aware of the many tourists who would visit Blairquhosh to see “the Meikle Tree” (sometimes called Rob Roy’s Tree), a huge ancient oak that stood by the roadside next to the farm. For generations it had been a favourite trysting place both for sweethearts and, in less peaceable times, for the local branch of the Buchanan clan.
By 1901 the arrival of another brother, named John, and three sisters, Mary, Jeannie and Maggie, must have made life in a three-roomed farm cottage rather crowded. A seventh child, Agnes, was born four years later. With no school bus service in those days, the McIntyre children must have kept very fit walking the three miles to school in Blanefield and back each day. As Blairquhosh is close to Glengoyne Distillery, the younger brother and sister of the Cartwright brothers (See 3 and 4) may well have accompanied them. It looks to have been a happy childhood, though one shadow fell across the McIntyre family in 1907, when 17-year old William, the eldest son, who was by then a railway clerk, died in Glasgow Royal Infirmary of a burst appendix.
By 1911 Donald, now aged 20, was far from home, working as a gardener on the vast estate outside Kelso belonging to the Duke of Roxburghe. The census finds him sharing the gardeners’ bothy at Floors Castle with seven other gardeners and tending one of the finest gardens in Scotland. As a subsequent newspaper account describes, during his three years at Floors he became enamored of the oval ball. Soon he was “a prominent playing member of Kelso Rugby Football Club and he also played cricket in the Floors Castle team”.
By 1914 Donald had joined the staff of another stately home, Keir House near Stirling. The move brought him closer to his family and also under the influence of Keir’s owner, Colonel Archibald Stirling, who took command of the 2nd Lovat Scouts in 1914. (He was the brother-in-law of Lord Lovat, who had founded the Lovat Scouts in 1899 as regiments of cavalry and infantry, recruited largely from the expert riders, experienced stalkers and crack marksmen employed by Scottish sporting estates.)
Doubtless with some encouragement from his employer, Donald volunteered for the 2nd Lovats soon after war was declared and headed off to Huntingdon for training. (The train journey to Cambridgeshire is responsible for an amusing urban myth. Hearing some of the men speaking Gaelic, a fellow passenger asked one of them where he was from. “Rossshire” was his heavily accented reply, which the passenger heard as “Russia”. Soon rumours were circulating that thousands of Russian troops had landed in Scotland to help the British war effort!)
From Huntingdon the Lovats moved to Alford in Lincolnshire for further training. It was here that disaster struck. Just as Donald’s parents must have been expecting to hear that their son was departing for Alexandria, instead they were informed that he had died at the training camp.
No report of this event offers any explanation. Was it an illness or an accident in training, perhaps involving live ammunition? Unlike modern deaths in British military training, such as the three deaths in the Brecon Beacons in 2013, there appears to have been no inquiry or inquest. One wonders if his parents were told of the circumstances or made to live the rest of their lives wondering how their son died.
We know that two of Trooper McIntyre’s comrades accompanied Donald’s body home from Lincolnshire to Strathblane, where he was accorded a full military funeral. It was the first such service ever conducted at Strathblane Parish Church, according to a report in the Stirling Observer. The weather was fine and the newspaper reported:
“A firing party of the R.F.A from Maryhill, under Sergeant Hooper (himself just home from the front) joined the funeral cortege at Blanefield School, where Colonel Coubrough, in uniform, and a large gathering awaited the hearse. The company then marched in slow time to the church, where Rev. Mr. Moyes gave an impressive address. After the coffin was lowered into the grave, the soldiers fired three volleys, and the solemn scene was over.”
We are left to imagine Donald’s heartbroken parents, his brother John and four sisters, including ten-year old Agnes, slowly walking up Glasgow Road behind the coffin, draped in the colours of the Lovat Scouts Imperial Yeomanry, and then standing at the graveside listening as the three shots rang out. To add insult to injury, Donald appears not to have qualified for any war medals, even the Allied Victory Medal, issued to 5,700,000 servicemen.
On Christmas Eve a short article appeared the Selkirk-based newspaper, The Southern Reporter. It rehearses Donald’s connections with Floors Castle and his sporting prowess, adding: “Both as a civilian and a soldier he was much liked, being a young man of open and genial disposition.” The Stirling Observer described him as “well known and esteemed in the Blane Valley.”
Perhaps wishing to for Donald, his brother John enlisted in the Highland Light Infantry and served on the Western Front. He survived the war and features with his brother on the Rolls of Honour of both Strathblane Parish Church and the former United Free church in Blanefield.
The Lovat Scouts fought in Egypt and at Gallipoli where they made good use of their great tracking and sniping skills to inflict heavy casualties on the Turks but suffered their own losses too, largely as a result of dysentery. This was the disease that almost claimed the life of Lord Lovat, who was forced to return to Scotland. There he set about raising more scouts, who would become valued sharpshooters on the Western Front. The remaining Lovat Scouts fought on in Egypt and Macedonia until June 1918, when they joined their comrades in France and Flanders.
Archibald Stirling was made a General in 1915. His son, David, was founder of the SAS.
Keir House was sold to a businessman from the United Arab Emirates in 1975. Floors Castle remains in the hands of the Roxburghe family. It is the largest inhabited castle in Scotland and both the house and its outstanding ornamental and woodland gardens are open to the public. Cochno Farm was sold to the University of Glasgow in 1954 and is used for both teaching and veterinary research. The Meikle Tree was declared dangerous and chopped down in the 1960s, though the stump survives as does Blairquhosh.
The McIntyre family bore one more tragic loss before the armistice. On February 15 1918, Margaret McIntyre died, aged 53. Eleven years later, her husband John joined her.
John, Margaret, William, and Donald are all remembered on the gravestone in Strathblane Churchyard. For Donald, perhaps there could be no better resting place than Strathblane, in the shadow of the Campsies, whose distinctive outline is often described locally as “the Sleeping Soldier”.