The second week of November has been set aside traditionally for remembering the fallen of the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts, writes Mhairi Livingstone.
Armistice parades, ceremonies of wreath-laying and the playing of pipe laments have been organised annually for as long as anyone can remember. Gatherings around cenotaphs and memorials, great and small, in cities, towns and the smallest clachan, have been regularly held to commemorate the sacrifice made as the price of freedom. And crimson poppies, everywhere in evidence, still recall the bloody fields of Flanders 100 years on.
This year will be no different and, in Oban, and mirrored across the country and beyond, we will walk solemnly along the Esplanade, bow our heads and shed a few tears. 2023 will hold a special significance, however, as the powerfully evocative war memorial, created by the eminent sculptor, Alexander Carrick, will have stood above the plateau in our town for 100 years.
In the spring of 2022, a small group of local folk felt the centenary warranted a special commemoration and set about the task of doing justice to the names on the memorial. Every month, the Oban Times supported our work by allowing access to their archive and publishing the roll-call of the dead from Oban, year by year.
Research and collating information are time-consuming activities and the project’s success would not have been possible without the help and generous support of many people, in particular the community organisations, groups and individuals who have rallied round this project and who are acknowledged on our leaflet, which can be picked up at various shops and organisations around the town. We thank all of them wholeheartedly.
Initially, we were very fortunate to have access to a detailed database of all those recorded in The Oban Times as having died during the First World War – this collection having been collated by Eleanor MacKay and her team of Argyll and Bute librarians to mark the centenary of the end of the Great War. Without this meticulous piece of research, our task would have been considerably more difficult.
One of our group had already carried out many visits to battlefield sites in France, Flanders and beyond, and had carefully recorded burial and commemoration records from first-hand observation and photographs. His depth of knowledge and diligent attention to detail provided a reliable framework on which to build.
Our military historian complemented family and social profiles with a regimental context in which to set them, providing in-depth, personal knowledge and useful contacts in the armed forces.
We were fortunate, also, to have a photographic expert with a keen eye for presentation, considerable computer skills and a tireless determination to see this project through.
Architectural expertise, design and artistic flair were well represented by two further colleagues, who developed ideas for display and exhibition.
And every group has to have a member who, if she doesn’t know the answer to a question, knows someone who does. We were lucky to have ours in the redoubtable Jessie.
Constant support and interest was also provided by our local councillor, Jim Lynch.
Every committee, often with different individual viewpoints, benefits from a strong and focused chairperson and we were so fortunate with ours. She showed patience, endless encouragement and readiness to follow through on difficult decisions, which meant that this project was kept on track, met deadlines and is finally nearing completion.
I offer a sincere thank you to them all.
For me, the primary focus was to change the names listed on the memorial into people – the young men they had been before war claimed them. They were all someone’s son, someone’s brother – and many left wives and children behind. All left a void that could never be filled. The youngest was 16 and the oldest 66, proving that war was no respecter of age, class, rank, religion or ethnicity. Death proved to be the great leveller.
Some access to the public records held in the National Records of Scotland could be found online but this proved laborious and costly. Therefore, frequent visits to Scotland’s People centres in Edinburgh and Alloa furnished me with the starting points of birth, marriage and death records. Cross-referencing with appropriate census returns and information from Valuation Rolls, In Memoriam intimations and death announcements in newspapers helped to fill some gaps. Verification of some casualties was sought from a range of Regimental Museums and the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle. As word got out of the progress of our research, local families began to contact the group with anecdotes, further information and family-held beliefs, which occasionally had to be balanced with factual accuracy.
As in all research, the road was strewn with dead-ends, false turnings, brick walls and endless roundabouts. Surnames were not always spelled correctly, Macs and Mcs were interchangeable, ages inaccurate, regiments were often erroneously allocated, dates of death recorded incorrectly, and the duplication of names in the same regiment had to be carefully disentangled and verified.
But luck was also on our side. A chance remark by a slater on a roof pointed us in the direction of a hitherto unknown sailor; and a vague memory from a friend of a story recorded as part of a history project in 1996 gave us the lead to finding our last unknown casualty, a boy of 16, who drowned in Oban Bay while sailing in the dark to supply the convoy ships anchored in the Firth of Lorn, enabling us to honour him in a fitting way. We also made the discovery that one of our boys, born in George Street, went on to lose his life, aged 21, in the suicide mission, Frankton, immortalised in the book and film The Cockleshell Heroes.
The thrill of finding missing details was, however, tempered with a profound sadness when it became clear that some families had lost their only child, many had lost two or three sons, and one recently-widowed mother had lost two sons within two days of each other – and after cessation of fighting had been declared in October 1918. Each death, whether of a Private or a Lieutenant-Colonel, would have been felt just as keenly by his bereft family.
Some 247 names are recorded on Oban’s War Memorial. We found them all, wrote about their short lives and hopefully paid tribute to them by recording their names and stories for posterity in Books of Remembrance.
All we can do for them now is never to forget what they did for us.
Mairidh an Cliu agus an Ainm gu Siorruidh.
Their renown and name will live forever.