STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 3 JAMES COCHRANE CARTWRIGHT, PRIVATE ARMY SERVICE CORPS, AGED 35,
& 4 WILLIAM JOHN CARTWRIGHT, GUNNER ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY, AGED 34.
Churchyard. His age at death was actually 35.
“Every name on a war memorial represents a family tragedy but it is hard to imagine how a bereaved family could bear another dreaded letter or telegram, telling them that a second soldier son had been killed. Yet First World War memorials all over Britain, including Strathblane’s, bear witness to that double heartbreak, such was the scale of the slaughter.”
Rolls of Honour from local churches show that a number of Strathblane families waved off more than one son to war between 1914 and 1918. But in every case except one it seems, at least one of the brothers survived to return home. The exception was the Cartwright family. Scanning the names on Strathblane War Memorial, the eye is automatically drawn to “Jas. C. Cartwright Pte ASC” and immediately below it “Wm. J. Cartwright Gnr RFA”.
Like most of the men from the ranks, there is lamentably little detailed information about the pair and so we can only imagine the distress caused to the Cartwright family by their double loss, especially given the particular circumstances of James’s death.
The Cartwrights had a long association with what is now known as Glengoyne Distillery, which began life in the 1830s as Burnfoot Distillery. In his history of the parish of Strathblane published in 1886, John Guthrie Smith says it had been “recently renamed Glen Guin”, meaning valley of the wild geese. That is the address given on the birth record of James Cochrane Cartwright in August 1880. His father, Cochrane Cartwright, seemingly a clerk at the distillery, had married his mother, Linlithgow-born Elizabeth Duncan, in 1878. A second son, William John Cartwright, was born at the distillery in September 1883.
Cochrane was still a clerk in 1889 but by the time of the 1891 Census, the 34-year old was working as one of the distillery mashmen, managing the process of turning malted barley into wort. And there were four children, James and William, now ten and seven, as well as five-year old George and Marion (“Minnie”) aged one. All were born in the parish. A fifth and final child, Cochrane Campbell Cartwright, appeared later the same year. (Old names, like old habits, die hard it seems because the census enumerator uses the old name of Burnfoot in his record.)
By 1901 Cochrane Senior had died and Elizabeth was described as a 45-year old widow, living close by at Tilework House, Dumgoyne with all five children. By this time James, 20, was working as a joiner and William, 17, had followed his father into work at the distillery, while 15-year old George was a forester.
As a note in the log of Strathblane School in 1904 questions why Minnie Cartwright has been allowed to leave school when she should be attending, we can assume that all the Cartwright children were educated at the local school.
Sometime afterwards the family all moved to Benview St in Maryhill, facing on to Ruchill Park. In the 1911 Census, James, now 30, is still a joiner and both 27-year old William and his youngest brother, 19-year old Campbell, are working as storemen to a whisky merchant.
James and William both enlisted in Glasgow. James was attested (enrolled as ready for military service) on December 11 1915 and posted to his depot, the No 1 Reserve MT Depot of the Army Service Corps, on March 23 1916. These dates strongly suggest that James was enlisted under the short-lived Derby Scheme or Group Scheme. This was a half-way house between volunteering and conscription, used when the death toll rose and the flow of volunteers began to dwindle. In July men between the ages of 15 and 65 had been obliged to register and give details of their employment.
Three months later Lord Derby, Director-General of Recruiting, launched his scheme in which men aged 18 to 40 were told they could be attested, with an obligation to join the military if called up later. The deadline on recruitment posters was December 11. James clearly opted to defer service, suggesting that he was a reluctant recruit. Under the scheme, he would have been given a grey armband bearing a red crown, as a sign that he had volunteered and could continue working in civvies’ street until called up. That way, he would escape the label of shirker. But it would not be long before he was in uniform. As a single man born in 1880, James was officially mobilised on March 18 1916 under the Derby Scheme. This matches with his posting to an ASC depot five days later.
Then calamity struck. James never reached the Western Front. Instead he contracted pneumonia and was admitted to the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich, where he died aged 35 on April 5, less than a fortnight after his first posting. Cause of death is given as “bronchial pneumonia & oedema of lungs”. The obvious question this raises is whether he was fit enough to be called up in the first place. He may not have died in a hail of machine-gun fire or a devastating artillery attack but he was still a casualty of war.
He is buried in Strathblane churchyard. Today a neat modern Commonwealth War Graves Commission gravestone marks the spot but clearly visible at its base is the part-buried original stone “in loving memory” of Private James Cartwright, a man who perhaps should never have been enlisted at all.
(The Derby Scheme failed to attract the number of recruits hoped for, with 38% of men not in “starred” (exempt) jobs still avoiding recruitment. Given the scale of the toll in deaths and injuries in France and Flanders, their reluctance to sign up is understandable but it hastened the switch to full conscription.)
We know less of the fate James’s younger brother William John Cartwright. He too enlisted in Glasgow, possibly also under the Derby Scheme but lived to see active service. He was made a gunner in A Battery of the 307th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery. (Several guns made up a battery and several batteries made up a brigade. The 307th was first formed in February 1915, as part of the 61st Division under the command of the Territorial Force Second Line.)
The RFA was the largest of the three units making up the artillery. By 1916 a brigade consisted of four batteries, each with six guns. “A” battery were field guns that fired shells on a low trajectory usually at an enemy target in sight. Of course, this also made them vulnerable to incoming artillery.
William Cartwright survived his brother by less than a year and a half. He died on September 26 1917. We do not know where he was fighting, though, given the date, he was probably at Passchendaele (the Third Battle of Ypres). He was not killed outright. Instead he was brought to one of the ten field hospitals that had sprung up to cater for the injured and sick from throughout the Western Front around the town of Wimereux, about three miles north of Boulogne. The medical units at Wimereux used a communal cemetery for burials. The south-eastern half was set aside for Commonwealth graves of which there are 2,847, including William’s.
Unusually all the gravestones in this cemetery are laid flat. This is because of the sandy nature of the soil, which could not anchor them properly. By coincidence, one of the other graves is that of Lt-Col John McCrae, author of the poem “In Flanders Fields”, which did so much to establish the red poppy as the symbol of remembrance.
William Cartwright is also remembered on the City of Glasgow Roll of Honour. Every name on a war memorial represents a family tragedy but it is hard to imagine how a bereaved family could bear another dreaded letter or telegram, telling them that a second soldier son had been killed. Yet First World War memorials all over Britain, including Strathblane’s, bear witness to that double heartbreak, such was the scale of the slaughter.