STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 21 JAMES ROBB, TROOPER, LIFE GUARDS (HOUSEHOLD BATTALION), AGED 21.
“Having gone into this action 498 men strong, the Household Battalion suffered 348 casualties. 13 officers were also hit. The majority of these men have no known grave.”
Official war history of James Robb’s battalion for October 8 to 12 1917.
By a cruel coincidence two families from the Parish of Strathblane suffered the same tragic loss in a single day: October 12 1917. A little over three weeks after celebrating his 21st birthday, Trooper James Robb died from wounds received whilst serving with the Household Battalion approximately four miles north east of Ypres in Belgian. On the same day, less than a mile away, 34-year old Private John McCulloch (see Ch 13) of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was killed in action close to the village of Poelcapelle.
In fact, around a quarter of the men on Strathblane War Memorial died in the mud of Flanders during the autumn of 1917, in what was referred to as the 3rd Battle of Ypres. Subsequently, it was better known by the name of a ravaged village that came to epitomise the brutal horror and futility of the war: Passchendaele.
James Robb was the only son of Alexander Robb and Margaret Hutchison, who had married in 1892 at Ballagan, the mansion on the eastern edge of Strathblane, where the bride’s father worked as a gardener as well as acting as church officer at Strathblane Parish Church. Today Ballagan is divided into flats, although then the estate was owned by John Stephens, a West India merchant. At the time of their wedding Alexander was living with relatives in Grove Street, Milton, Glasgow and his employment is given as “spirit salesman”. The 1891 Census indicates that both families had links with Killearn, where Margaret and both her parents had been born.
How Alexander and Margaret met and married remains a matter of speculation. Was it the Killearn connection? Or, did Alexander’s work, in the spirits business bring him to the village and occasion a meeting? Or, perhaps, Margaret moved to Glasgow looking for work as a domestic servant? We know that she was not living at home at the time of the 1891 census, a year before their wedding.
After their marriage, Alexander and Margaret stayed on in Milton. Their first child, a daughter named Jane after both her grandmothers, was born two years later. She would later be known as Jeannie. When James arrived, in 1896, we know that Margaret was still in service. (The new baby was named James after both his grandfathers.) When a second daughter, Charlotte (Lottie) Hutchison, completed the family in 1899, the Robbs were still living in Glasgow.
However, by 1901 the family – parents Alexander 36 and Margaret 31, seven-year old Jane, James aged four and two-year old Lottie – were living in Strathblane at 13 Park Terrace, where Park Place now stands. By now Alexander was working as a stone mason employed by Glasgow Corporation, probably in connection with the water pipeline from Loch Katrine.
James and his sisters attended the local school. The school log reports that James and Jeannie were sent home from school on September 22 1902 because James had chickenpox. James won the Bible Knowledge prize in June 1906 and Lottie won the same prize in 1910. Perhaps these achievements are not unrelated to having a grandparent who was also a church officer. However, James Hutchison did not live to witness the achievements of his grandchildren, having died in April 1903.
School prizes aside, 1906 must have been a particularly traumatic and harrowing year for the Robb children. On March 5 their grandmother, Jane Hutchison, died at the age of 61. Worse was to come when their mother, Margaret died very suddenly after collapsing at home a few days before Christmas. She was only 37. The cause of death given by local GP Dr Walter Rankin was “syncope – a few minutes” (fainting), which gives little clue as to the underlying cause. Her death left Alexander Robb on his own to bring up three children aged 12, 10 and eight. From the relative security of our 21st Century perspective, we can only guess at the challenges and privation faced by the family.
The next census return indicates that Alexander and his three children were still living in Park Terrace in 1911 when James, now aged 14, was recorded as a Railway Clerk
Incomplete war records mean uncertainty about the exact date when James Robb joined up but he gave his Strathblane address when enlisting in Hamilton. He apparently joined as a trooper in a prestigious cavalry regiment – the Life Guards. This would have entitled him to slightly higher pay than an infantryman and to wear a distinctive cavalry uniform and cap badge on leave.
By the time he fought at Ypres, Trooper Robb was a member of what was known as the Household Battalion, which has an unusual history because it existed for only 17 months from September 1916 to February 1918.
By 1916 two years of trench warfare, with barbed wire, machine guns and previously unimaginable loss of life, had challenged established ideas. In particular astronomical casualties in the infantry and limited opportunities for cavalry action forced some rethinking regarding manpower. One consequence was the formation of the Household Battalion, as an infantry battalion, at Knightsbridge Barracks in London, on 1st September 1916.
If, as seems likely, James Robb enlisted before September 1 1916, he would have been in one of the reserve units of the Life Guards from which men were drawn to form the new battalion. If he enlisted after that date, he would have entered the Household Battalion directly.
Following what was described as the extensive ‘training and re-equipment’ that was necessary to convert cavalry troops to infantrymen, the Household Battalion, totalling 900 officers and men, landed in France on November 9 1916. According to the battalion history, it saw action towards the end of the battles in the Somme between December 1916 and February 1917; at Arras in April and May 1917; and, in the autumn of 1917, at Passchendaele.
A report in the Stirling Observer indicates that James was on leave in Strathblane in early May 1917, and so must have missed one of the bloodiest actions undertaken by his battalion. In fighting close to Roeux Cemetery in northern France, during the first week of May, the Household Battalion had nine officers killed and a total of nearly 500 casualties, more than half of the original strength of the battalion. At Ypres, later in the same year, he would not be so lucky.
By the summer of 1917 the war was reaching a critical stage, with public and political opinion wavering, especially in light of the atrocious human cost of the war. British and French commanders were apprehensive, anticipating German divisions being redirected to the Western Front from the east, where Russia was less and less effective as a military force. Whilst America joined the war in July, no American troops arrived on the Western Front until 1918. In addition, it was feared that German submarines operating from Belgian ports would close all sea lanes for vital supplies to Britain if they were not prevented from operating by recapturing the ports.
In Flanders, despite lines of defensive trenches ravaged by heavy artillery shells and record rainfall, eliminating all chance of rapid advance by either side, it was decided that a ‘big push’ was required ‘to end the war’. The 3rd Battle of Ypres started with allied forces aiming to break through the German lines in what was known as the Ypres salient – a bulge in the front line north and east of that Belgian city. The most optimistic scenario was that the attack would press on forty miles to the coast and, also, to the north and east. If so, allied commanders – guided more by hope than experience – believed that the resolve of the German forces would then be broken and finally the war would come to an end.
In the event, advances were measured in yards not miles and the offensive became one of attrition. Success was judged on both sides not by ground gained or lost but on the numbers of the enemy killed. The battleground was a treacherous quagmire. By the time Canadian forces captured the ruins of the shattered village of Passchendaele in November 1917, best estimates suggest that the Germans had suffered around 260,000 casualties and the British and Commonwealth forces over 300,000.
In early October the Household Battalion was engaged in a number of actions near the villages of Pilckem and Langemarck. It was relieved for a short time but was back in the battle area on the evening of October 8. In moving further forward on October 10, before reaching the frontline, it suffered 45 more casualties from shell fire. The battalion was ordered then to renew the attack before dawn on October 12. Presumably because of the terrain and German positions on higher ground, it was said to be impossible for any movement to take place during daylight. The battalion was therefore forced to move under cover of darkness to its planned jumping off point. It suffered a further 50 casualties to shell fire whilst in the assembly position – ‘while an extra rum ration was made’ – before the actual attack began at 5:25am.
In the most appalling ground conditions, attack and counter attack meant that small amounts of territory changed hands between attackers and defenders a number of times throughout that day. The battalion was eventually relieved by the 25th Northumberland Fusiliers during the night of 12/13 October but by then James Robb had died of his wounds. The official war record vividly demonstrates the stark horror of the reality faced by the young trooper between October 8 and 12, when he met his death: “Having gone into this action 498 men strong, the Household Battalion suffered 348 casualties. 13 officers were also hit. The majority of these men have no known grave.”
The life and sacrifice of Trooper James Robb is commemorated in Flanders, in the famous Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Tyne Cot, which contains the remains of nearly 12,000 of the Allied dead of World War One, making it the largest in the world.
As neither James Robb nor John McCulloch was an officer, their families heard of their deaths, not through one of the famous War Office telegrams but an impersonal pro-forma letter B104-82, sent through the ordinary mail. (Because of the number of men on war service, two young local women had taken on the uneviable job of delivering the post.) As both men died on the same day, it is likely that both letters arrived in the village together, bringing anguish both to the Robb family in Park Terrace and to Emily McCulloch and her three little children, by now seemingly living in Station Road.
Alexander Robb lived on at Park Terrace until his death from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1925, aged 61. He shares a grave in Strathblane Churchyard with his wife Margaret, who predeceased him by nearly 20 years. The gravestone is also “in loving memory” of “only son James, killed in action north east of Ypres 12th October 1917, aged 21 years”.