274 July 2017 - Gryffe Advertizer

@GryffeAds www.advertizer.co.uk july 2017
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July
Summer is progressing
This is often one of the hottest months of the year and a great time to
sit out and enjoy your garden. Keep plants looking good by regularly
dead-heading, and you’ll enjoy a longer display of blooms. Make
sure you keep new plants well watered, using grey water where
possible, and hoe off weeds, which thrive in the sunshine.
Top 10 jobs this month
1 Check clematis for signs of clematis wilt
2 Care for houseplant while on holiday
3 Water tubs and new plants if dry, but be water-wise
4 Deadhead bedding plants and repeat-flowering perennials, to
ensure continuous flowering
5 Pick courgettes before they become marrows
6 Treat apple scab
7 Clear algae, blanket weeds and debris from ponds, and keep them
topped up
8 Order catalogues for next year’s spring-flowering bulbs
9 Give the lawn a quick-acting summer feed, especially if not given
a spring feed
10 Harvest apricots, peaches and nectarines
Supreme Sacrifice Bridge of Weir and the Great War
100 years ago May 1917
Private Robert Burns, 10th Lancashire Fusiliers
Captain W Speirs Barr, 18th Highland Light Infantry
The Battle of Arras had claimed four men from
the village in April, and it wasn’t done yet.
Although the French offensive on the Aisne had
been disastrous and was finally abandoned
on 9th May, Haig asked more of the British
forces, mainly to encourage the French to keep
fi ghting. On the morning of the 12th May the
17th (Northern) Division launched an attack
on “Charlie” trench to the east of Arras. Three
companies of the 10th Lancashire Fusiliers
stood ready on a clear summer morning, the
massed troops readily visible to German aircraft
patrols. At 0630 a creeping barrage was laid down by British guns, but the
Germans put down a counter-barrage immediately, turning no man’s land
into a dense fog of smoke and dust. One company made it as far as the
German trenches, but their fl anks were exposed and they were driven out
within twenty minutes. Of the 600 or so men who attacked, the war diary
reports 13 officers and 226 other ranks killed or wounded, one of whom was
Robert Burns from Bridge of Weir.
Robert was born in Glasgow, the son of a coachman James Burns, and
Margaret Jaffray. Robert and his brother James were later living in Gryfe
Castle Cottage, probably as chauffeurs, and both enlisted in the Army
Service Corps as drivers. Robert was later transferred to the battalion that
lost so heavily that day.
To the south of Arras, in early 1917, the Germans had completed a managed
withdrawal from an exposed salient to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line.
The new British front line was still being established in May, when the 18th
HLI took over a sector near Villers-Guislan. The 18th had been established
as a “bantam” battalion of men under the regulation height of 5ft 3in. What
they lacked in height they made up for in the ferocity of their brawling and
indiscipline, and were nicknamed “The Devil Dwarfs”, a tough unit for their
raw second lieutenant from Bridge of Weir, Speirs Barr, in April 1915, but
he coped well, and gained two promotions, achieving Captain by early
1917 by which time the bantam project had been abandoned, the condition
of volunteers having deteriorated from tough, pugnacious “little-uns”, to
under-developed or sickly specimens from the towns.
The 25th May war diary reports “the attitude of the enemy in this sector is
quiet with little artillery fi re. At night there is considerable M.G. [machine
gun] & Rifl e fi re”. But a bullet is a bullet whether fired in the pitched Battle of
Arras or a quiet sector further south, and Captain Barr was fatally wounded
that night, the sole casualty of his battalion.
He was a Glasgow Academy boy, youngest of the Barr family, and an
ironbroker to trade. A territorial, he was mobilised as a private and served
in France from November 1914, returning in April 1915 for his commission,
and again in September 1916, this time to marry Isobel Gilmour at Glencloy,
Montrose Terrace. He was 22 years old, and the third Barr brother to be
killed. His mother Mary died at Rockcliff, Manse Lane the following year.
His widow Isobel never re-married. The village had now lost 36 young men,
but they were grieved by many more.
100 years ago July 1917
Private Henry Strang, 16th Highland Light Infantry
Private James Pollock, 15th Highland Light Infantry
Sapper Walter McWilliam, Royal Engineers
Despite 150,000 casualties at Arras, some
territory was gained, especially on the
first day, and Haig, reinforced by fl awed
intelligence reports, convinced himself
that Germany was about to crack and that
one more offensive could win the war.
This was planned for the Ypres salient,
with naval support through an amphibious
landing on the Belgian coast combined
with an army breakout from Nieuwpoort,
the only Belgian port in Allied hands. It
had been flooded in 1914 to prevent the
Germans taking it. The 32nd Division
replaced French forces there in June
1917, but the Germans read the signs
correctly and launched a pre-emptive
strike, Operation Strandfest, on 6th July.
Two young lads from Bridge of Weir were
in the front line.
Henry Strang had joined the Boys Brigade Battalion and James Pollock the
Glasgow Tramways Battalion. Henry was the son of Peter Strang, a bank
clerk from St George’s Terrace, and Janet Scobie. James was a railway
clerk, son of James Pollock, a gardener living in Cooperative Terrace, and
Elizabeth Kerr. Although in the same Division of 18,000 men, they were
in different brigades and unlikely to have met. Henry was the fi rst to die,
victim of a shellburst (possibly British) on a night-raid on enemy trenches on
6th July. Nine days later James was killed in another night-raid attempting
to retake a section of trench lost a few nights earlier. James was 21 and
Henry, who had probably concealed his true age when he volunteered in
1914, was just 19 years old.
That same month, 5,000km away in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), Sapper
Walter McWilliam was in the Army Signals Company attached to GHQ of
General Maude’s British Army in its campaign against the Turks. Walter
was 33, married to Jessie Urquhart, and an inspector with the National
Telephone Company in Glasgow before enlisting. It seems the McWilliam
family moved from Dennistoun to Windsor Place, Bridge of Weir in 1916.
By July 1917, a British force had reached the town of Ramadi on the
Euphrates. “Our column was in touch with the Turk early on the morning of
the 11th, and had made some progress in the assault, when, on account
of a dust storm which interrupted communications, both wire-less and land
line, the order for the attack was cancelled. The day marked the beginning
of an abnormal heat wave, abnormal even in a land where the sun is an
habitual scourge. Men in camps and officers leading sedentary lives were
struck down with sunstroke or heat exhaustion; to march or fight under these
conditions was to invite disaster.” The assault on Ramadi was abandoned.
It was finally taken in September 1917, but without the help of Walter who,
like several hundred fellow soldiers, had died of heatstroke in the fearsome
Mesopotamian heat of July 1917.
Due a technical, then human, error the May article was missing from the last 2 months. We apologise to the readers & Gordon.