STRATHBLANE WW1 PROJECT: 26 PHILIP BINNIE, SECOND LIEUTENANT SCOTTISH RIFLES, AGED 27.
It was demolished to make way for local authority housing in Park Place.
“He spent a short holiday in the Strath a few months ago, and was a splendid type of a soldier, being tall and well built in proportion.”
Milngavie & Bearsden Herald, September 1917
Philip Binnie was neither born, worked nor lived in Strathblane and yet he appears on the War Memorial where his name has been appended second from the end, out of the alphabetical sequence. It was clearly a late addition.
After the closure of the Printworks in 1898 and the completion of the water pipeline from Loch Katrine, the population of Strathblane halved to 880 in 1901. As a result there were many empty houses that were promptly taken up by city people as holiday accommodation.
Philip’s mother seems to have done just that, renting a flat at Park Terrace, owned by A.S. Coubrough, former owner of the Printworks. This once fine terrace, built to accommodate the printworks foremen and their families, was demolished in the 1960s to make way for council houses in what is now Park Place, beside the meandering Raggie Burn and with a splendid view of the Campsie Hills.
There was much to occupy and amuse Philip during his sojourns in the community, with the a new bowling green, the public park, the Village Club and the tennis courts, all opened between 1907 and 1913. Together with the King’s visit in 1909 to Duntreath Castle, these facilities helped establish the village as a holiday destination. Holidaymakers and day trippers could visit Campbell’s or McGregor’s tearooms, or for those hoping for stronger refreshment, there were the Netherton and Kirkhouse Inns to quench their thirst. By 1910 with the demolition of the printworks’ huge chimney, the last traces of industry disappeared, restoring a quiet rural character to the area. It was the perfect spot to escape to by train or bus from the noise and dirt of Glasgow. Or indeed for Philip to visit, spending “a short holiday in the Strath”, as a respite from the squalor and terror of the trenches.
The arrival of visitors was not without controversy. By 1917 the Stirling Observer was reporting ever increasing numbers, so that accommodation was becoming a problem and the locals found that supplies of “confectionery and liquor” in particular were running low. Indeed, by 1920 there were many complaints that too many houses were in the hands of people who let them out and only came to stay occasionally. Consequently, notices to quit were served on several tenants.
Far from Strathblane, in February 1890, Philip had been born in Ashville Terrace, South Leith, to William Binnie, a grain worker from Eddleston near Peebles, and Mary Gilchrist Binnie (nee Henderson), a carpet factory worker from Glencorse outside Edinburgh. Philip was their fifth child, following three other boys and a girl, who had died of TB aged 18 months, three years before he was born. Two more girls arrived over the next few years.
The Binnies thrived. By 1901, the family had moved to the village of Brightons near Polmont, where William was now running Crossgatehead farm, with son Francis. But only two years later, disaster struck when the father suffered a stroke and died, aged only 49.
By 1911 his widow was living in reduced circumstances at Pollok Street in Govan, with two of her elder sons, William, 33, an engineer, and Robert, 29, a joiner, as well as 21-year old Philip, now employed as a clerk with Glasgow tea merchants Henry McKechnie & Co, and sisters Isabella and Mary.
Philip’s Christian faith was clearly central to his life. When he wasn’t at work, he was deeply involved in the Glasgow Foundry Boys’ Society. This religious organisation was established in the nineteenth century to spread the gospel and generally look after the welfare of lads working in Glasgow’s many iron foundries. The Foundry Boys’ Church moved to Tharsis Street in the Garngad area of north-east Glasgow in 1894 where it still stands, even if the foundry boys are long gone. The organisation was very active and would take up to a thousand children on summer outings before the First World War, perhaps venturing out to Strathblane. (Suspicions were often raised that parents only sent their children to the church in the hope of receiving preferential treatment for employment and promotion from the foremen and managers of local businesses!)
By the time Philip enlisted in the 9th Bn of the Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Highlanders) in April 1915, Mary Binnie had relocated to a comfortable stone-built terrace in Cordiner Street, Mount Florida on the south side of Glasgow where Philip had joined Battlefield East Church. Philip was soon a sergeant.
In 1917 he was transferred as a second lieutenant to the 5th Bn of the Scottish Rifles, known as the Cameronians. This in turn formed part of the 19th Brigade in the 33rd Division, which was involved in the 3rd Battle of Ypres, known throughout the world as Passchendaele. At least six men on the war memorial died in the second half of 1917 fighting for this small area of stinking mud, so coveted by Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig.
The Passchendaele offensive encompasses several individual attacks. The 33rd Division incurred heavy casualties in the Battle of Menin Road, which raged from September 20 to 25 that year. Philip may have fallen in the German attack on 25 September between Menin Road and Polygon Wood, which happened as 33rd Division was taking over from 23rd Division, or at the Battle of Polygon Wood, which began the following day. This certainly fits with the scant details we have of his death: that he died on September 26, aged 27, and was buried near the village of Zillebeke. (Gunner William Cartwright (Ch4) died on the same day and machine gunner Archie Scott (Ch22) the following day.)
Reporting his death a few days later, the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald noted: “He spent a short holiday in the Strath a few months ago, and was a splendid type of a soldier, being tall and well built in proportion.”
Today his grave is in the vast Hooge Crater Cemetery in Zillebeke, which was started in early October 1917 but was expanded after the Armistice when graves were brought in from smaller cemeteries in the area. There are now 5,923 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in this cemetery. More than half are unidentified but special memorials record the names of a number of casualties either known or believed to be buried among them, or whose graves in other cemeteries were destroyed by shell fire. (There are more than a hundred British and Commonwealth cemeteries in the area around Ypres.)
In Scotland Philip is not only remembered on the Strathblane War Memorial. His name appears on a family gravestone in Edinburgh Eastern Cemetery, on the City of Glasgow Roll of Honour and on a brass plaque taken from the former United Free Church in Blanefield, which he would have attended during his holidays in the Blane Valley. The memorial in Battlefield East Church also bore his name, though this has now been replaced by a plaque commissioned in 2013 in the amalgamated church at Clincarthill. Photographs of all 31 men from the congregation who “made the supreme sacrifice for King and country” were also displayed in the Battlefield Church. Philip’s shows a tall distinguished-looking young man in uniform, sporting a fine moustache.
Only a year after Philip was killed, Mary Binnie had to endure another death in the family, when her daughter Isabella succumbed to the Spanish Flu that was sweeping the world. The disease is estimated to have claimed up to 40 million lives, including 250,000 in Britain. The pandemic appears to have been inextricably linked to the conditions in the trenches where weakened men from many nations mixed in appalling conditions amidst unburied bodies and both wild and domestic animals: perfect conditions for the mutation and spread of a deadly virus.
Nevertheless, Philip’s mother must have found some peace during her visits to Strathblane in the knowledge that her son, who so loved the area, found a place on the local war memorial.