STRATHBLANE FIRST WORLD WAR PROJECT: 6 GEORGE DON, GUNNER ROYAL GARRISON ARTILLERY, AGED 35.
“It was George’s wretched luck that married men under 41 were conscripted into the British Army on May 25 1916, less than three weeks after the birth of his daughter Martha in Blanefield. He can barely have seen her before the First World War swept him off to the Western Front, never to return.”
Unlike many of the men featured on Strathblane War Memorial, George Don was living in the community at the time he enlisted, though he was not born there. And unlike many of the younger men, he was already married and the father of two small children when he was conscripted.
George was one of nine children born to Robert and Catherine Don. Robert hailed from Dunblane. The couple married in Coatbridge Lanarkshire in 1863 but George was not born until nearly two decades later in November 1882 by which time his father was listed as a boat carpenter and the family was staying at Bailliesbridge in Old Monkland, his mother’s birthplace.
By 1911 the family had moved to Cambuslang. Robert and Catherine were both still living, aged 77 and 71 respectively, and three of their seven surviving offspring were still living at home, including George, by now a 28-year old coal merchant. (In different documents he is listed variously as coal agent, merchant and clerk.)
However, the following year he married 23-year old children’s nurse, Mary Montgomery, in her home town of Hamilton. At first the couple lived in Blantyre (David Livingstone’s birthplace), where their first child, Robert, was born in May 1913. But by the time their second child, Martha Russell Montgomery Don, was born in May 1916, the family had moved across Glasgow and was living in Maryfield Place, Blanefield.
Maryfield features in some old photographs of the village. Later demolished to make way for Cuilt Place, it was a block on Station Road, next to and similar to Lorne Place, which is still standing. It is possible that Mary was working in the Children’s Home Hospital, which had moved to Strathblane from Aberfoyle in 1913.
It was George’s wretched luck that married men under 41 were conscripted into the British Army on May 25 1916, less than three weeks after the birth of his daughter Martha in Blanefield. He can barely have seen her before the First World War swept him off to the Western Front, never to return.
It was the first time in British history that conscription had been universally applied (except for Ireland).
At this stage in the war, it is hard to know if George chose the artillery or the artillery chose him. Suffice to say, the man described as a clerk on his new daughter’s birth record, was a few weeks later a gunner in the 193rd Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery. The battery travelled to France on November 23 1916.
The RGA had been born in 1899. It had grown out of the coastal defence, siege and heavy batteries of the Royal Artillery, big guns that worked from fixed positions. In 1914 the army possessed very little heavy artillery but it became a crucial part and a large component of the struggle on the Western Front. The RGA used heavy, large calibre guns and Howitzers, positioned behind the front line. Unlike the smaller guns, used by other parts of the artillery to fire at targets that were in sight, these guns lobbed shells high into the air so that they dropped down on a target that could be behind obstacles or over the horizon. Their destructive power was huge.
Military historian John Terraine, in his book, White Heat – the new warfare of 1914-18, argues that World War One was an artillery war: “Artillery was the battle-winner, artillery was what caused the greatest loss of life, the most dreadful wounds and the deepest fear.”
The RGA was popularly known as “the Gambardiers”, which is probably a contraction of “Garrison Bombardiers”.
In the run-up to war, Major Herbert Musgrave of the Royal Flying Corps had worked out how pilots could use wireless telegraphy to help artillery hit specific targets. By May 1916 around 850 ground stations and planes were fitted with wireless. Working from the same maps as the gunners, divided into marked squares (A4, B5 etc), the wireless operator could then use Morse code to communicate the location of an enemy target to the battery.
We do not know the detailed movements of George Don’s RGA Siege Battery. (Most of the World War One artillery records were destroyed during the Blitz.) However, 1917 was a momentous year for the RGA as a whole. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig believed the Central Powers could be broken by a major battle. A massive attack from the Ypres Salient (the bulge in the British line near the eponymous Belgian town) began with an artillery bombardment of unprecedented brutality on July 18. More than 3000 guns got through a mind-numbing 4,250,000 shells. The German defence depended on their network of ferro-cement strong points. Nothing could shatter them except the heavy guns of the Royal Garrison Artillery. But the combination of shells constantly pulverising the ground and unusually heavy rain turned the entire area into a sea of deep mud, which frustrated the British attack. Such little progress was made on the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres and such were the casualties that Haig was advised to call off the assault but he refused. The fighting dragged on through August, September and October. Throughout October the incessant shelling continued. Only when British and Canadian forces captured what was left of the village of Passchendaele in November did Haig agree to call off the offensive and declare the mission accomplished.
The offensive had taken more than three months and won barely five miles of stinking corpse-filled mud. George Don was mortally wounded at the very end of the offensive and died of his wounds on November 28 at the Duhallow Advanced Dressing Station in Belgium, just north of Ypres. He is buried in the graveyard there, among many graves of the artillery and engineers.
George’s will, written in June 1917, leaves all his belongings to his wife and two children in Blanefield “with the exception of £10 to be divided amongst my sister’s children Cathie, Robert and Maisie Stewart [at] Dunston, Stonefield Road, Blantyre for their mother’s kindness to me while I have been at the front.” By the time his widow claimed his war medals, Mary and the children had also returned to Blantyre.
George is also commemorated there on the Livingstone Memorial Parish Church War Memorial, as well as the brass plaque from the United Free Church in Blanefield.
The Third Battle of Ypres still casts a black shadow over British attitudes to World War 1 because of the sickening scale of slaughter on both sides. Apologists for Haig argue that the offensive led indirectly to the Germans suing for peace the following year and without it the war might have dragged on for longer. Critics point to the failure to achieve a decisive breakthrough and the unacceptable human cost of prolonging it into November.
It is not hard to guess on which side of the argument Mary Don would have been. Had the offensive been halted earlier, her husband and many thousands of other soldiers on both sides would have lived to fight another day and probably survived the conflict. George could then have returned home to dandle the little daughter he barely knew.
The RGA ceased to exist in 1924 when it was re-amalgamated into the Royal Artillery.