STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 22 ARCHIBALD (ARCHIE) LAMONT SCOTT, PRIVATE MACHINE GUN CORPS, AGED 27.
The boy David is flanked by real Vickers machine guns encased in bronze.
“He was a fine fellow, a good worker, and never complained. I will miss him very much.”
From the letter of condolence to Archie’s father from his commanding officer, October 1917.
Archibald Lamont Scott was born on June 17 1890 at Boards, the farm perched on the Gowkstane track high above Blanefield. His father David, originally from Drymen, was gamekeeper on the Craigallion estate. His mother Anne Lamont hailed from Sandbank near Dunoon. The couple had married near there in Kirn in December 1887.
Archie was the second of their six children, three girls and three boys all born in Strathblane. Graham, their fifth child, died in infancy in 1895. By 1901, when Archie was 10, the family had moved to Khyber Cottage on the Craigallion estate. (It is the cottage inside the hairpin bend on the precipitous “Khyber Pass” road that passes Mugdock Park.) They were still there at the time of the 1911 census when Archie was 20 and a trained motor cycle mechanic, having served an apprenticeship with the Milngavie firm of Templeton Brothers, motor cycle manufacturers.
Archie must have known John McCulloch, a gardener on the Craigallion estate, (See 13) whose name also appears on the war memorial. (By a sad coincidence they would be killed within a month of one another in 1917 in the same offensive.)
When Archie was called up in September 1916 he was working as a motor mechanic with the firm of J. Russell & Sons, which hired out motor cars and buses at Stewarton Garage in Carluke. Templetons had gone into liquidation in 1912 and that may be why Archie had moved to Lanarkshire.
He began his war service in the Army Service Corps. Soldiers cannot fight without food, equipment and ammunition and it was the ASC that had the vital and complex task of getting supplies from Britain to the soldiers on the front line. These supplies were landed at a base port in France or Belgium and went on by rail to an Advanced Supply Depot or Divisional Railhead. They were then loaded on to some form of motor transport and delivered to a Divisional Refilling Point and from there horses and men completed the supply chain to the front line.
The ASC was organised into companies, each fulfilling a specific role and it seems likely that Archie with his skills as a motor mechanic would have been in one of the Mechanical Transport Companies. Each company had a variety of vehicles to maintain and a fully trained motor mechanic would have been a great asset to his company.
By the time of his death, however, Archie was no longer in the ASC but had been transferred to the 246th Company of the Machine Gun Corps (MGC), a company newly formed in the summer of 1917. In 1914 all infantry battalions were equipped with a machine gun section but the early battles of the war demonstrated that machine guns needed special tactics and organisation. In November the same year machine gun schools were established in France and also in England at Grantham to train new regimental officers and machine gunners. In September 1915 a definite proposal was made to the War Office for the formation of a single specialist Machine Gun Company per infantry brigade and the Machine Gun Corps was created by Royal Warrant in October 1915.
In his autobiography, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai, former machine gunner George Coppard writes:
“No military pomp attended its birth or decease. It was not a famous regiment with glamour and whatnot, but a great fighting corps, born for war only and not for parades. From the moment of its formation it was kicking. It was with much sadness that I recall its disbandment in 1922; like old soldiers it simply faded away.”
The MGC consisted of infantry Machine Gun Companies, cavalry Machine Gun Squadrons and Motor Machine Gun batteries. Archie’s company, the 246th infantry, trained at Grantham in the summer of 1917 before embarking on July 19 to join the 19th (Western) Division of the army at Bailleul in northern France.
The Division was then moved to Belgium in preparation for the Third Battle of Ypres which was in fact a succession of battles lasting from July to November of 1917.
Archie and his fellow gunners must have struggled to move and reposition their heavy guns in the deep mud that covered the area after record rainfall and constant shelling. The weather improved a little in September and the Battle of Menin Road from September 20 to 25 saw the British Army make some progress towards their goal of the ridge east of Ypres.
The battle of Polygon Wood began on September 26, though by now there were only blackened stumps where the wood had once stood. It was on the day after this that Archie met his death. By a sad irony he was not killed in action but was hit by a stray shell when he left the dugout for a few moments during a lull in the battle in the early hours of the morning. His commanding officer Lieutenant Samuel Smith tells the story of what happened in a touching letter of condolence to Archie’s father David:
“We took over an advanced position in the ground gained in the recent advance on the night of Wednesday the 26th September. We had heavy shell fire for some time, then it quietened down, and about two o’clock Archie and another man stepped outside the dugout just at the same moment as a stray shell landed a few yards away. The other soldier was killed instantly and Archie was severely wounded in the groin. We got him inside at once and I bandaged him as best I could and had him taken down to the first aid post without delay. The medical officer there sent me word that the wound was serious but he thought he would pull through, and that he had been taken off to the Field Ambulance. I was greatly buoyed up by the report and hoped the best, but next day received the sad news that he had succumbed before reaching the station.”
Archie had been Lt Smith’s batman and from his account of Archie’s death one can sense that a friendship of sorts had developed between the two men. His letter continues: “I sympathise with you in your great loss and know how heavy the blow will fall on all at your home, especially his mother, and feel how little we can do to ease the burden. He was a fine fellow, a good worker and never complained. I miss him very much.”
In fact, unbeknown to Lt Smith, Archie’s mother Annie had died of breast cancer in January of that year, aged 58, and so was spared the sorrow of her son’s death, but for his father David to lose both his wife and his son in the same year was a double blow. David lived on until 1945.
Archie is commemorated on his parents’ gravestone in Strathblane churchyard, along with Graham, the son who died in infancy. He is buried in the 19th Divisional Cemetery at Spoilbank, south of Ypres. In addition to the village war memorial his name appears on the war memorials in Milngavie and Carluke.
The Machine Gun Corps was disbanded in 1922. In 1925 a memorial was erected in London that now stands at Hyde Park Corner, honouring the men of the MGC who gave their lives in World War One. A life size bronze statue of the boy David is flanked on either side by a real Vickers machine gun encased in bronze and hung with laurel wreaths. The brutal inscription on the plinth below reads: “Erected to commemorate the glorious heroes of the Machine Gun Corps who fell in the Great War. Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.”