STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 17 ROBERT ROWLEY ORR

War Memorial

STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 17 ROBERT ROWLEY ORR, CAPTAIN ARGYLL & SUTHERLAND HIGHLANDERS/ROYAL FLYING CORPS, AGED 30.

Captain Robert Baird Rowley Orr
Robert’s Commonwealth War Grave at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Belgium

“This officer, who was one of two brothers who were both connected with the Stirlingshire Territorials, saw considerable fighting in France. Latterly he was attached to the Flying Corps.”

Milngavie & Bearsden Herald, July 20 1917.

Of the 27 men on Strathblane War Memorial, only one – Robert Rowley Orr – took to the air in the Royal Flying Corps, forerunner of the RAF.

Though he grew up in the parish, he comes from English stock. His grandfather, Captain James Orr of the Royal Engineers had married Maria Rowley of Portsmouth. Their son James Rowley Orr, Robert’s father, was born in Kent but Capt Orr brought his family north when he became Chief Constable of the Burgh of Greenock. James went on to take a degree in law and became a JP and solicitor in Glasgow. He married Annabella Baird in Airdrie in 1884. She was descended from the Bairds of Gartsherrie, a family of farmers renowned for their physical strength and intelligence. They went on to found William Baird & Company, a coal and iron dynasty which became one of Scotland’s most powerful families in Victorian Scotland.

James and Annabella’s first son, Robert Baird Rowley Orr, was born on March 14 1887 at 15 Lilybank Gardens, Hillhead but in the same year the family moved out of the city to Strathblane and became tenants at Leddriegreen, at that time quite a sizeable estate owned by the famous Law Lord, Lord Ardwall. (It included both the Kirkhouse Inn and the farm on the site now occupied by the Station Lofts.) James Rowley Orr eventually would buy the whole estate from Lord Ardwall’s Trustees in 1913.

The 1891 Census finds four-year old “Bertie” at Leddriegreen with his parents, two house servants and a groom. A second son, Eric, was born in September 1893. It must have been an idyllic place for the two boys to grow up. Robert attended the Glasgow Academy for two years, aged eight and nine and then was enrolled at St Ninian’s, a now-defunct boarding school in Moffat. (By an odd coincidence, it is best known as the birthplace of Air Chief Marshall Hugh Dowding, the son of the school’s founder and who went on to lead RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain.)

Robert followed his father into the Law, starting his studies at Glasgow University in 1907. To join the profession in those days involved your parents or a sponsor paying a substantial advance to a firm of solicitors who would agree to give your son training and experience. The young man would then work for nothing in return for the experience gained, whilst studying in the evenings to get the formal knowledge and degree required to join the profession. It must have been nearly all work and little play for Robert, though he found time for the occasional round at Milngavie Golf Club.

Robert graduated in November 1914 but he would never practise law. Instead he joined the 7th Battalion, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, a Territorial battalion raised in Stirling in August 1914 as part of the A&SH Brigade in the Second Highland Division and was sent to France on April 3 1915. At some point he transferred to the 9th Argylls, probably to make up for battlefield losses.

His younger brother Eric, who had also recently begun a law degree at Glasgow, had joined the 7th Argylls the month before his older brother, shortly after war had broken out.   

The Second Battle of Ypres in April and May 1915 was marked by the first large-scale use of lethal gas by the Germans. As the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald reported, though now serving in different regiments, by a ghastly coincidence both brothers were gassed in the same attack: “The Germans made an attack with poisonous gases about 2.30 in the morning. The brothers met after the action in one of the rest stations.” (Eric had been in the front line, while Robert was in the support trenches.)

Lt. Eric Yarrow (See 25), from Campsie Dene in Blanefield, was mentioned in despatches for his quick action in moving into and holding onto the ground that the gassed men had been forced to evacuate.

After the gassing, both Orr boys were sent home to Strathblane together to recuperate. The report recorded that “both are making good progress towards recovery and are able to be up and about.”  Although this must have given their parents some respite in their worry, the men’s injuries did not constitute the oft-coveted “blighty” (ie. a non-fatal injury, nevertheless serious enough to take you back to Blighty [Britain] and keep you out of the war permanently). Consequently, both were soon on their way back to the front.

At this stage in the war, the life expectancy of a junior officer in a front line infantry regiment could be measured in weeks rather than months. Officers and men alike lived in appalling physical conditions under intolerable mental pressure.

Before the war flying was just a hobby for wealthy amateurs but both the military and the navy came to appreciate the potential of flying for reconnaissance purposes. The fledgling Royal Flying Corps had been set up in 1912 with a handful of assorted aircraft and a few privately trained pilots. After the outbreak of war the RFC expanded rapidly, specialist aircraft were developed and formal aircrew training schemes set up.

Aircraft of that era were crude contraptions, built by eye rather than engineered, and constructed from wire, canvas and timber. Their build quality and aeronautical capabilities were variable to say the least, as demand far outstripped supplies of materials, manual skills and technical knowledge.

Robert transferred from the 9th Argylls to 4th Squadron RFC in April 1917 to fly as an observer.

This role required someone with experience and knowledge of trench warfare, able to interpret what they saw on the ground beneath them and report back to the artillery. By this time Robert, as an infantry Captain, would have had a wealth of suitable experience.

By contrast, the pilot of a reconnaissance aircraft was likely to have been a raw recruit who had been quickly trained up by the RFC with perhaps as few as twenty hours total flying time when he arrived at the front. (Skilled or experienced pilots would have gone to the fighter squadrons.)

Although the danger of death and serious injury remained the same as on the front line, it was a luxurious life in the RFC compared with the squalor of the trenches. Although only a few miles behind the lines, the RFC officers dined off linen, slept in beds and lived with a small army of supporting servants. Only when they went off to work did they come face to face with danger and this was as much from the inadequacies of their own training and machinery as from the enemy.

Having survived against the odds for more than two years as a junior infantry officer, Robert was killed in a flying accident near the Belgian town of Ypres on July 13 1917, just three months after joining the RFC. The plane in which he was flying as an observer was an RE8. Designed and built by the Royal Aircraft Factory and brought into service a year before, it had a notorious reputation for being a difficult and unforgiving aircraft to fly.  The pilot was 2nd Lt Frederick Moore. (A second lieutenant would have been the lowest ranking officer in the RFC and we can assume one of the least experienced.) There were neither primary nor secondary safety precautions of any sort for the aircrew – not even a parachute. (The powers that be considered parachutes to be bad for morale, as having them might encourage aircrew to desert their posts!)

The crash report reads: “Artillery observation patrol with RE8 A3438: stall after take-off, spinning nose dive, crashed and wrecked. Orr was observer, Second Lt. Moore was pilot, also died of injuries.”

Robert’s parents would have received a telegram at Leddriegreen informing them of their son’s death and, if they were lucky, a note from his commanding officer to accompany the return of his personal effects. Later they would be told where his body had been buried and although of small comfort, at least he had crashed in Allied territory, so there would have been a proper burial.  

A single paragraph in the local paper, noted that he had seen “considerable fighting in France” and was “latterly attached to the Flying Corps”. Robert is buried at Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Belgium, next to a military hospital. He is commemorated on the Strathblane War Memorial, the Glasgow Academy Roll of Honour, Milngavie Golf Club Roll of Honour and by a brass plaque in the balcony of Strathblane Parish Church, which reads: “Robert Baird Rowley Orr BL. Capt. 9th A&SH and 4th Sqn. RFC who fell near Ypres on 3rd July 1917”. He qualified for the 1914/15 Star as well as the British War Medal and Victory Medal.

A few months after hearing that Robert had been killed, the Orrs received another telegram at Leddriegreen to advise that Eric was “missing in action”. Not a good moment for them but Eric, having survived at the front for three years, had been taken prisoner uninjured and so survived the war intact, physically at least.

Eric returned to his studies, graduating Bachelor of Law in 1921 and becoming a partner in the firm of Baird, Smith, Barclay and Muirhead. It was he who applied for Robert’s medals, the 1914-15 Star, the Victory Medal and the British War Medal.

Their father James died in his 73rd year in 1931. His widow, with the strength of her Baird genes, lived on alone in Leddriegreen until she died in 1953, aged 93.

Although he married in 1926, Eric and his wife Mabel, who lived at Lednabra, Balfron Station, never had any children and so this line of the Orrs died out. When contacted for this project, Mabel’s nieces and nephews had no idea that their Uncle Eric ever had an older brother, let alone one that died in WWI. Old family servants and neighbours were the same. None had ever seen a photograph or heard mention of this young man whose life was so cruelly cut short.

Shorn of its estate, classically elegant Leddriegreen House survives as a silent witness. But with no wife, no children, and no descendants to mourn him, this brief biography might be Robert’s only lasting memorial.

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