STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 16 DONALD JOHNSON MCNEIL, SERGEANT 1ST BLACK WATCH (ROYAL HIGHLANDERS), AGED 24.
“They [the Scots Greys and the Black Watch] went at the enemy as was done at Waterloo, the Greys charging and the 42nd clinging to their stirrup leathers. When they were well home the Black Watch broke loose and joined the wild work of the bayonet to the slashing flail of the heavy cavalry sabres, which completely surprised the enemy, who were broken up and repulsed with tremendous losses.”
from report of the death of Donald McNeil, Stirling Observer December 5 1914.
This description ill fits the common notion of the type of fighting that took place in France and Belgium during the First World War.
Today we immediately think of immovable lines of trenches and drawn-out battles in which inches were lost, gained and lost again over the course of months or years at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
But for those, like the 16th man on Strathblane War Memorial, Sergeant Donald Johnson McNeil of the Black Watch, who landed on August 14 at Le Havre, and was amongst the first British soldiers to arrive on French soil, the war unfolded in a very different manner.
It was only during the First Battle of Ypres, which claimed his life, that both sides began to dig in, leading to the long years of attrition that we normally associate with the conflict. (British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, had been one of the few to foresee this.)
In fact, Donald was the first Strathblane man to be killed in the First World War. And one of the most significant things about his story is that his service straddled the great change in warfare methods that has become a hallmark of the war. When he arrived in France, slashing sabres and valiant horseback cavalry charges still defined a style of warfare, little changed from the days of Napoleon. But by the time he was killed in Flanders a few weeks later, long range artillery bombardments from positions behind fortified trenches and a focus on defence were already coming to dominate military strategy.
Donald was born in Strathblane in February 1890 to tailor Daniel McNeil and his wife Jessie. The baby’s middle name, Johnson, was in recognition of having been the first baby christened in the United Free Church by its then new minister Theodore Johnson. Donald’s only sibling, Margaret (Peggy), was born three years later.
Unfortunately, the children were not to know their parents for long. By the time Donald was nine and Margaret six, the pair were orphans. Their mother died in August 1897 at the age of just 37 and their father passed away in September 1899 at age 48.
The 1901 Census shows the children were taken in by their widowed maternal grandfather. John Gardner had been a senior figure at the Blanefield Printworks, which had recently closed. He was living with four of his grown-up children at Alreoch, the large house beyond the top of the Cuilt Brae, opposite where the north-bound West Highland Way emerges on to the road at Carbeth.
Donald was educated at the High School of Glasgow. In the 1911 Census he was still living with his grandfather at Alreoch but had by now left school and was working as a clerk to a chemical broker. Margaret was listed as a typist.
He was probably living in Milngavie with his uncle, bank manager Willie Gardner, by the time he enlisted in the 1st Battalion Black Watch in 1912. However, with family members still living and working in Strathblane (the Valuation Roll of 1915-16 shows the family continuing to run a tailor’s shop at Edenkiln), his ties to the village remained strong.
Donald’s regiment was stationed in Aldershot and was one of the first into France after war was declared. He was twenty-four when he was landed there as part of the British Expeditionary Force, under the command of Field Marshall Sir John French. As such, he was a member of what was to become known as the ‘Old Contemptibles’ – a moniker later adopted by survivors of the British regular army of 1914 and taken from a (most likely apocryphal) order attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II to exterminate General French’s “contemptible little army”.
Upon their arrival on the Continent, Donald and the 1st Black Watch were thrown immediately into the action and by the end of August were taking part in the retreat from Mons.
Mons was the first British military action on European soil since the Crimean War and there was much uncertainty over how the army would perform. Despite being technically a retreat, the British forces acquitted themselves well at Mons and overcame a numerical disadvantage of three to one at one point, to retire in good order and inflict substantial casualties on their opponents.
Following the retreat there was little time to rest and Donald’s battalion was soon involved in heavy fighting once again, this time at the pivotal Battle of the Marne. Fighting took place between September 5 and 12 and it was here that the German advance to Paris was halted. The Allied victory was followed up by a counter offensive at the River Aisne, in which the 1st Black Watch was again involved and the Germans forced to retreat north east. Both sides were now beginning to form up in the now familiar positions along what would become the almost static 400-mile Western Front.
Even given the desperate need for men in these early stages of the war, it is doubtful that Sergeant McNeil would have been directly involved in all these battles. However, in the three frantic months of war he experienced, he probably took part in more actual fighting than most soldiers experienced in the following four years.
After Aisne, when neither side was able to claim a decisive victory, the Germans turned northwards in an attempt to seize the Allied seaports of Calais and Boulogne, a campaign known as “the race to the sea”.
The last natural barrier preventing German advances was around the Belgian town of Ypres. A strategically important location, there were five major battles over the course of the war in and around this previously sleepy, unsuspecting town.
The battle is notable both for completing the petrification of the Western Front and for witnessing the almost complete destruction of the “Old Contemptibles”, thus ending both the highly mobile early stages of the war as well as any hopes either side maintained of being “home by Christmas”.
Donald was killed on November 10, 1914. A colourful account appeared in the Stirling Observer under the heading Death of a Native at the Front: “Letters and cards received from time to time indicated that “the gallant Forty-Twa” were having their fair share of fighting.” [The 1st Black Watch had been formed in 1881 from the 42nd (Royal Highland) Regiment of Foot (The Black Watch). Hence the nickname.]
The report continues: “As at Waterloo on the field of St Quentin the Scots Greys and the Black Watch repeated history and made it afresh. They went at the enemy….., the Greys charging and the 42nd clinging to their stirrup leathers. When they were well home the Black Watch broke loose and joined the wild work of the bayonet to the slashing flail of the heavy cavalry sabres, which completely surprised the enemy, who were broken up and repulsed with tremendous losses.”
This is an interesting example of how, early in the war, the press felt compelled to create and embellish news stories to raise public morale and stimulate patriotism. The Stirling Observer’s report is almost certainly cut and pasted from an earlier article in the Illustrated London News about a real cavalry charge that took place on August 28. The scene is immortalised in a print by artist Richard Caton Woodville showing the Scots Greys charging with Highlanders hanging on to their stirrups. Though some Scots Greys did fight alongside the Black Watch around this time, this ‘stirrup charge’ was entirely mythical and looked back to an equally mythical incident at the battle of Waterloo in 1815.
So how did Sgt McNeil die? The answer personifies the dramatic change taking place in the style of warfare. The 1st Black Watch official war diary, now digitised and available online, contains the following entry for November 10: “Nr Ypres. Heavy shelling all day, especially on D Company’s trench. Casualties, rank and file: 3 killed, 12 wounded. Weather foggy.”
An appendix for the following day reveals that B Company’s trench was also largely destroyed by shelling during the night, prior to a surprise attack by the Prussian Guard.
As well as being commemorated on the war memorials in both Strathblane and Milngavie, Donald McNeil is among those who feature on a brass plaque from the former United Free Church in Blanefield (now a private house) and on the memorial in Cairns Church, Milngavie.
Daniel and Jessie’s lives, along with those of both their children, are remembered on the family gravestone in Strathblane churchyard, though Donald is buried in Belgium and Peggy in Balfron. Donald is among the names on the Glasgow High School war memorial as well as in their Book of Remembrance, which carries a portrait of a fine-looking lad with wavy hair and a flower in his buttonhole. It notes he was the first “Old Boy” to fall in the war. Of the “Old Contemptibles” who left Aldershot for France in August 1914, only 39 were still serving with the 1st Black Watch in 1918.
His family received his three medals. Along with the 1914 Star (known as the Mons Star), he was awarded the clasp, given only to those who faced the German guns between August 5 and November 22 1914.
The ruins of Ypres were one of the most evocative images of the destructive effects of the war and in the years after the Armistice, the town became a place of pilgrimage that continues to this day. The town’s Cloth Hall holds the In Flanders Fields Museum and the area around the town is covered in large graveyards commemorating the fallen from both sides.
In one of these, the New Irish Farm Cemetery two kilometres from the town, is the grave of Sergeant Donald J. McNeil. His name may be unknown to the many international visitors who pass by his resting place each year, but it is young men like him from villages like ours whose sacrifice they come to remember.