Reasons to Remember

As has become a tradition, Dave Clarke of the History Department has provided a deeply moving piece about some of the young Melville College and DSC men who lost their lives whilst serving in the World Wars.

The 2020 Service of Remembrance was, needs must, rather an odd one this year- not least for its dramatic setting on an atmospherically foggy and floodlit Monday evening. Given the hundreds of names on the Stewart’s and Melville memorials, it is an automatic assumption that all the men thereon lie in some ‘foreign field’- that all our FPs were killed in battle and were buried where they fell in one of over a million Commonwealth War Graves Commission plots in 2500 cemeteries worldwide. It may come as something of a surprise (as it did to me) to discover that a significant minority of our FPs are either buried or commemorated here in the UK- 29 of them from the Great War, and 53 from WWII. Ten alone are either buried or commemorated in Warriston Cemetery and Crematorium here in Edinburgh- so let us uncover a few of their stories… Warriston is now a rather rambling and neglected site but is slowly being reclaimed from nature by a dedicated band of volunteers. Buried there is Stewartonian William Ross, a rising star in RBS whose career was cut short by duty and war. At the outbreak of the conflict, he enlisted as a private soldier in the 4th Royal Scots- he could easily have waited for a commission as an officer but divined (correctly) that the fastest route to the front was in the drab serge of an enlisted man. Dispatched to Gallipoli as part of the 52nd Lowland Division in May 1915, the 4th were nearly lost to a man when their troopship accidentally rammed a hospital boat in the dark of a Mediterranean night- but their luck held, and the 4th landed on the fated peninsula on 8th June. They had been in the Dardanelles less than three weeks when they were thrown into a hastily arranged attack on the Ottoman positions at Gully Ravine on the 28th of the month- an assault that was, paradoxically, disastrously successful. Launched at a series of enemy trenches with no preparatory bombardment, the Royal Scots were shot down wholesale but, against all the odds, swept into the Ottoman lines and, caring nothing for artillery and musketry, carried three lines of trenches and put all those who resisted to the bayonet. Casualties amongst our FPs were terrible- eight Stewartonians and five men from the Institution were killed that day, including James Henderson and Arthur Sanderson (both of 7th Royal Scots Majors) and John Peebles, B Company commander and brother to the commanding officer William Peebles, another EI FP. Badly wounded in the assault, William Ross was evacuated to Graylingwell Military Hospital in Chichester where he died on Boxing Day, 1915. His body was returned to his native Edinburgh for burial. Resting nearby is the Institution’s Robert Lamb- a Royal Naval Division officer who saw service on the Somme and also died of his wounds in 1919. It is easy to imagine how a wounded serviceman like William Ross might end up under a Commonwealth Graves Commission stone, but the sad tale of James MacNaughton (DSC) reminds us of how precarious life could be before the NHS and the medical advances we take for granted today. James was unusual in that he was

Alistair Leslie Eric Gibb Gus Hogg

Robert Waterson

Robert McCallum William Weir Robert Lamb

one of our very few Regular soldiers, enlisting straight from school on 23rd January 1914 into 1st Northumberland Fusiliers. It is clear that he had his heart set on soldiering, having completed his training with the Black Watch as a schoolboy. A strapping lad of 5ft 10ins, he was nevertheless retained in the depot at Portsmouth on the outbreak of war where ill health intervened. He reported sick in January 1915 with a persistent cough, which worsened to such a degree that in May 1915, he was found to be suffering from advanced tuberculosis- his left lung being almost completely destroyed by it. Though James was adjudged to having been suffering from TB before enlistment, the Army took responsibility for his condition on account that the illness should have been picked up in two medicals on his enlistment. On the 17th July 1915 he was honourably discharged to pension as permanently unfit. His medical records make for sobering reading- when asked to assess James’ chances of recovery, the colonel presiding over his medical board simply wrote ‘None’. He died at home surrounded by his family on 7th March 1916, aged 19, having never fired a shot in anger. It is sad to relate that Melville College’s Alastair Leslie died from the same illness in 1947, after contracting it in a POW camp. He is also buried in Warriston. To peruse the schools’ Rolls of Honour is to be forcefully acquainted with the truly eyewatering mortality rates suffered by our flying services in both world wars- especially so in training. On entering Warriston Cemetery and walking directly south from the gateway, one is quickly arrested by the imposing granite Celtic cross of the McCallum family. Robert, a very promising cricketer and a junior staff member in the Leith office of the North of Scotland, Orkney and Shetland Steam Navigation Company, he went up to Edinburgh University OTC from Stewart’s for basic training in May 1916, before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps four months later. Accepted onto the pilot training course in the final month of the year, his progress to active service was derailed somewhat by his transfer to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, presumably with a view to his eventual acceptance into the Royal Naval Air Service. It mattered not, as in April of 1918, the two forces merged, and Robert found himself as a flight cadet in the newly fledged RAF. By October of that year, and no doubt feeling dreadfully frustrated as the war was drawing to a close, McCallum was posted to 37 Training Depot Station in Yatesbury, Wiltshire. As a finishing school for pilots, it operated a rag-bag of training and ex-service types- none with a worse reputation than the RE8. An ungainly two-seater used for reconnaissance, in the words of one pilot, it ‘flew like a steamroller’ and had a nasty reputation for irrecoverable stalls. With an upper wing of much greater span than the lower, the long wing extensions were structurally suspect if the aircraft was pressed into a dive, so much so that a squadronmate of McCallum’s, Richart St.J Hartley, confided in his diary of the terror he faced going aloft in ‘those deathtrap REs’. Though docile enough in level flight, RE8 pilots were also required, when needed, to intervene to help the infantry on the ground with divebombing and strafing attacks on enemy positions. On the afternoon of the 8th October 1918, McCallum took C2677 aloft to practice such an operation. Predictably for our Stewartonian, the inherent weakness of the RE8 wing struck and in a steep dive, the whole top plane collapsed, bearing the 19-year-old to his death. His distraught family established the R.P.F. McCallum Trophy for Cricket in his honour. A few paces away from Robert’s grave is the last resting place of a bona-fide Melville College hero, Eric Fawns Gibb- his valiant life marked by a very unprepossessing recumbent stone. Strikingly handsome, he was apprenticed to Rosebank Ironworks before joining the RAF and qualifying as an observer. At this stage of the war, Air Observers were tasked with navigation, photography and dropping the weapon load, and were, in some quarters tacitly accepted as being more skilled than pilots! Joining 35 (Madras) Squadron on twin engine Wellingtons in June 1940, Gibb immediately embarked on a service career that would see him rack up 225 hours of operational flying over an incredible 33 missions. In November of that year, the elite 35 Sqdn (which was staffed by Bomber Command legends such as Leonard Cheshire VC) was nominated to bring into service the Handley Page Halifax, a veritable leviathan and the second of the RAF’s four engine bombers to see action. Gibb continued to take the fight to the Nazis, ranging out in broad daylight to bomb Scharnhorst at anchor in La Pallice- the sort of operation an insurance salesman wouldn’t look twice at. His mettle was tested on June 30th, 1941 in another dreadfully risky daylight operation to strike at harbour installations at Kiel. Gibb had just released the bombload and was setting a course for home when an anti-aircraft shell turned the fuselage of the Halifax where he was stationed into a colander. Worse was to come- they were attacked by three Me.110 fighters which shredded the aircraft’s wings and reduced the starboard outer engine to a flaming wreck. Still- Gibb got them home. It was only after landing that he revealed that he had been hit by shrapnel but had carried on regardless. This incredible work was immediately recognised by a commission to Pilot Officer and the award of the Distinguished Flying Medal, his CO opining that he was ‘an observer of outstanding ability, possessed of a high order of courage’. Rested after an overlong operational tour, he was posted to 28 Conversion Flight at Leconfield to pass on his skills. The events of 22nd December 1941 are still as murky as the weather that day. Officially slated

as a flight to deliver Halifax L9522 to Handley Page’s HQ at Radlett, possibly for refurbishment, the aircraft took off with- unusually- a full crew and an extra passenger. Whether there was any intention to visit Radlett (due well south and on the outskirts of St Alban’s) is unknown- and can never be known. L9522 collided with the high ground of the Terrace Hills to the north of Melton Mowbray in thick fog, with the loss of all onboard. Rumours persisted to make the loss doubly sad and poignant- though officially bound for Radlett, the plan had been to visit RAF Grantham, to the east, to collect turkeys for the station’s Christmas lunch, just 72 hours later. Christmas in the Gibb household that year does not bear thinking about. Nearby the cemetery is Warriston Crematorium, and a handsome war memorial with no less than five Melville College FPs remembered on it, all of whom were in the flying services. Both William Weir and William Taylor were killed in training accidents before they ever reached operational squadrons- or their potential. Tom Ainslie’s death was particularly cruel- after completing four peril-fraught missions as the second pilot of a 75 Squadron Wellington, he lost control of his motorbike near Cambridge on the night of 26th February 1941. Also remembered here is the redoubtable Fleet Air Arm ace, Gus Hogg. Posted to 806 Naval Air Squadron at the tender age of 17, he could little know that his unit would become the Navy’s ‘top guns’ of WW2, and he himself would go on to carve a swathe of destruction through the enemy above the Mediterranean with twelve confirmed victories and the Distinguished Service Cross and Bar. His war started inauspiciously- defending the Orkneys with an outdated Gloster Gladiator biplane! Converting onto the Blackburn Skua divebomber, he took part in the legendary raid which saw the sinking of the Konigsberg in Bergen harbour, though Hogg commented with habitual modesty in his journal that his 500-pounder fell well wide of the mark! Posted south into the heat of the Battle of Britain, he had the misfortune of being shot down over the Channel by RAF Hurricanes- his gunner being killed. Shipping out to the Med on Illustrious and ditching the lumbering Skua for the sleek eight-gun Fulmar, Hogg and his squadronmates made short work of the Italian seaplanes, flying boats and bombers menacing Malta. Further success in the air came with the conversion onto the even more potent Hurricane. Posted back to the Deck Landing School at HMS Condor at Arbroath to train new pilots, he, by pure chance, found himself a passenger on an Avro Anson on a short hop from Prestwick. The Anson, never overburdened with power, lost a Cheetah engine on takeoff and gravity rapidly reasserted itself. Staff at Ballochmyle Hospital did all they could for the 20-year old- which was nothing more than to make him comfortable. He died the day after the accident on the 18th March 1942. Thus, fate accomplished what the entirety of the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica could not- dared not- do. Also remembered on the memorial is one of that immortal band ‘The Few’- an RAF fighter pilot who defended these isles during the Battle of Britain- Robin ‘Bubble’ Waterston. Like Gus Hogg, he was another fine Melville lad and a pre-war Volunteer Reserve pilot in the socially exclusive 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, based at RAF Turnhouse, the site of today’s airport. Initially a bomber squadron, in the run up to war the unit’s Hinds were swapped for Gladiators, and then, joy of joys, for brand new Spitfires. Posted to Dyce, on 20th June 1940, Bubble Waterston shared in the destruction of a Dornier 17 bomber, which his patrol dismissed headlong into the sea off Aberdeen. Moved south into the heat of the battle, he could little know he had just 72 hours to live. On 30th August high above Canterbury he attacked a Messerschmitt 109 at point blank range and tore his opponent out of the sky for his first credited solo kill. The next morning RAF Hornchurch was the target of a devastating attack. Bubble amazed his pals by coolly sitting in a slit trench as the bombs fell all around, joking and generally unfavourably comparing his chances on the ground with those in the air! He flew three gruelling sorties that day- his last in the late afternoon. Nobody is sure what occurred in the air above Woolwich that early evening of 31st August 1940, but a memorial today marks the spot where Waterston’s Spitfire came to earth. He was 23. There are over 2500 Commonwealth War Graves burials in Edinburgh- men and women claimed by illness, accidents, or simply just broken by their war service. Taken from the context of the battles they fought in, the people they served with and dotted around our civilian cemeteries miles from the seat of war, it can take some digging and a lot of time to uncover their stories. This rather begs the question- does a man need a story to be remembered? Is it not what he was willing to do when called, not what he did, that really counts? Irrespective of what their service and sacrifice had on the outcome of the war, it is with great pride and real affection that we remember each of our FPs. It goes without saying that their spirit of willingness to put service before self runs in no less a vein right down through the years to the incredible young men of today who have the pleasure and privilege to call Stewart’s Melville College their home.