CWGC Mobile app

Did you know the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has an app? It's available for Windows, Android and iOS, and can be downloaded from the link below.

It primarily can be used for finding burials near you, but at the moment it seems you can't see the list of those buried in a particular cemetery (although that might just be the ones near me that I've looked at). It also seems to only show those very close to you. I scrolled around the map and it still only had pinpoints for the two cemeteries in Carluke where I'm currently located. Wishaw and Lanark (the two nearest towns to Carluke) both have CWGC burials and nothing showed up for them. I also scrolled to France and Belgium and nothing showed up there either!

Some cemeteries are "featured" - you get a little more information, and a cemetery plan, but again no list of those buried. There is a further "featured" option in the page for these cemeteries, but that takes you to a page on the CWGC site with some selected casualties. Still no option to help you find a particular casualty. If you plan to use this app to find where your relative is buried, I wouldn't bother.

The search facility could use some work - I searched for "Airbles" and it came up blank, but "Dalziel" brought me up Dalziel (Airbles) Cemetery in Motherwell. Given that the cemetery is commonly known as Airbles Cemetery, that's not a particularly useful search. Searching "etaples" found Etaples British Cemetery with no problem. It seems it might simply search for the first word in the name - a wildcard search option would be of more use.

To sum up - could do better. It's reasonably useful for finding a cemetery you might not know about, but it needs a little work. It needs to show you more on the "nearby" map, and to make it REALLY useful it needs to give the list of those buried in each cemetery, or at the very least provide a link to the relevant page on the CWGC website.

Hopefully they'll get similar feedback from others and make some amendments.

http://www.cwgc.org/app.aspx

Celebrating Scotland's disproportionate WW1 deaths

The Commonwealth Games is now upon us, and whilst that means one countdown is now finished for Glasgow another one is entering its final days. On 4^th August 2014 the Commonwealth Heads will gather in Glasgow Cathedral for a service of commemoration to mark the centenary of the start of the Great War. There will also be another ceremony later in the day in George Square at the City’s Cenotaph.

A week later on 10^th August, the Scottish Government’s own commemoration will take place in Edinburgh - at the Castle Esplanade and then Holyrood Park.

Around both dates I’m sure we can expect social media, online comments and letter pages to be filled with an indignant section of the Scottish population complaining about us celebrating the start of war in which the number of Scots killed was disproportionally higher than the other parts of Britain (26.4% compared to 11.8%).

I guarantee you will see these words and you will see these figures trotted out repeatedly over the next few weeks. With that in mind it’s worth having a look in some detail about the facts behind them.

Celebrating the Start of the War

Some people, and to be fair this isn’t just a Scottish trait, seem to find it highly offensive that the start of the First World War should be commemorated. They consider no centenary event before 11^th November 2018 is worthy of commemoration. None of the battles where Scots fought so bravely to defeat the Germans should be marked – The Germans remember were the ones who had invaded and occupied parts of Belgium, France, Poland, the Baltic states, Russia and Ukraine. To some it is only the end of the “futile war” which should be remembered and nothing else. That is nonsense. If we are to learn anything from this  - and Scotland WW100, the Scottish Government’s First World War centenary programme, uses as its tagline “What do we learn from all th1s” (the 1 is their choice, not my typo)  - then we must commemorate the war’s events from August 2014 onwards.

For a list of the events being officially commemorated by the Scottish Government between 2014 and 2019, under the direction of Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop’s Scottish Commemoration Panel, there is a Scottish Government webpage.

Notice I have repeatedly used the words “commemorated” or “commemoration” and not used the words “celebrated” or “celebration”. The use of “celebrate” has been seized on by many with an agenda after a comment by David Cameron, at a speech in the Imperial War Museum in October 2012 after a very successful summer of celebrations across the UK for the Olympics and the Jubilee.

“Our ambition is a truly national commemoration, worth of this historic centenary.  I want a commemoration that captures our national spirit, in every corner of the country, from our schools to our workplaces, to our town halls and local communities.  A commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrated this year, says something about who we are as a people.”

It was ill-judged analogy, and Jeremy Paxman amongst others has criticised its use. Since that time, anyone involved in organising official events for the First World War centenary have been preparing for commemorations and certainly not Diamond Jubilee-like celebrations.  

The number of Scots killed in WW1 was disproportionally higher than the other nationalities in Britain

Thanks to two prominent Scottish academic history professors – Niall Ferguson and Sir Tom Devine – we have incorrect figures being quoted as fact by many Scottish commentators and our media. Because the good professors have quoted these figures it must be true. Even Trevor Royle, the Scottish Commemorations Panel’s historical advisor, has recently quoted the incorrect total for our war dead, even though he has been on record as quoting more accurate figures in the past, and admits on page 529 of his First World War chapter in A Military History of Scotland, published in 2012, that “it is impossible to get absolute agreement on the exact number of Scottish war deaths”.

Niall Ferguson first quoted the figure of 26.4% as a total number of Scots killed as a percentage of those who mobilised, on page 299 of his book The Pity of War in 1998 . On the previous page of his book he also said the following:

"The Scots were (after the Serbs and Turks) the soldiers who suffered the highest death rate of the war"

Ferguson cites American historian Professor Jay Winter’s 1986 book The Great War and the British People as his source of data. He compares Scotland’s 26.4% with the figure of 11.8% for the same numbers of dead for Britain and Ireland as a whole.  Winter’s book shows a table on page 75 – Table 3.4, Some Estimates of Military Losses Among Combatant Countries in the 1914-1918 War. The table includes the 11.8% figure for Britain and Ireland, and Serbia and Turkey, but there is no mention of Scotland.

Winter’s figures in his book are based on the statistics in the publications Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War 1914-1920; General Annual Report of the British Army 1913-1919; History of the War, Naval Operations and History of the Great War. War in the Air. In none of these publications is the figure of Scotland’s war dead quoted. Ferguson seems to have come up with that figure himself but does not explain his calculations. Some fact!

Sir Tom Devine’s figures are in his book The Scottish Nation 1700-2000. (published 2000) on page 309.

"Of the 557,000 Scots who enlisted in all services, 26.4 per cent lost their lives. This compares with an average death rate of 11.8 per cent for the rest of the British army between 1914 and 1918. Of all the combatant nations, only the Serbs and the Turks had higher per capita mortality rates”

This looks quite familiar. 26.4% versus 11.8% and references to Serbia and Turkey.

Unfortunately, Devine does not cite his sources for these statistics and compares the number of Scots in all services - army, navy and air-force - against a figure for British Army deaths.

With neither professor providing the detail behind their calculations we will have to make some assumptions on where they got their figures from.

Devine gives us a figure of 557,000 of Scots who enlisted in all services in WW1 as a basis for his statement.  On page 740 of Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War 1914-1920, published by HMSO in 1920, we get a figure of 557,618 as the men and women recruited (or “mobilised” as Ferguson would say) in Scotland during the war. This is presumably where Devine gets his 557,000 figure. If anyone knows differently, please let me know.  

So where does Professor Devine get 26.4% from? If you compare the figure of 147,000 - which was the total number of WW1 dead recorded in the rolls in the Scottish National War Memorial (SNWM) in the 1990s - against 557,000, you get 26.39%, or rounded up, 26.4%.

This SNWM total will also give you Ferguson’s figure:

Total number of Scots killed (147,000) as a percentage of those who mobilised (557,618) equals 26.36%, rounded up to 26.4%

Two eminent historians, two ostensibly collaborating statistics and both complete tosh. We can discount the statistics from both men because:

1. Both professors have derived their figures from the same data. Devine’s statistics do not prove Ferguson’s are true and vice-versa.
2. The Scottish National War Memorial figure of 147,000 includes many non-Scots serving in Scottish regiments and the double and triple counting of entries. We’ve covered this subject in a bit more detail before in another Blog post.  The gist of it is this; the number of Scottish war dead is likely to be nearer 100,000 - 110,000 than 150,000. One hundred thousand Scottish war dead is the figure Trevor Royle used in his Flowers of the Forest (published 2006) and was also used by Doctor Catriona M.M. McDonald and Professor Elaine W. McFarland in their publication Scotland And The Great War (published 1998).
3. 557,618 is the total number of Scotsmen and women recruited by the British Army – from 1914 to 1918. On page 740 of Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War 1914-1920 it clearly states at the top of the list (e) that the figures represent “The provision of men for the armed Forces of the Crown (as far as the Army is concerned)”. It does not include tens of thousands of pre-war Scottish recruits to the regular army, the reserve and the Territorial Force, which is only given as a UK-wide total at the top of the table. It also does not include the Scots who served in the Royal Navy and later the Royal Air Force. It is also missing the Scotsmen in the armed services of the Dominions – Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and India. Trevor Royle in A Military History of Scotland (2012) says that 690,235 Scots had been mobilised in the First World War but does not give any detail on where he got this figure. I think it’s safe to assume this figure is for Scots in UK forces only and does not include the Scottish diaspora's service. 

So if Devine and Ferguson are wrong and 26.4% of Scots mobilised didn’t die during the First World War, what is the correct number?

Using Royle’s figures of c.100,000 dead and 690,235 served, gives a percentage of 14.4%. Still higher than 11.8%, but nowhere close to 26.4%. 14.4% also compares a total of the dead which includes the Scots diaspora serving in Dominion and Imperial units against a mobilised total for UK units.

If the mobilised figure includes the Scots who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Australian Imperial Force and other overseas forces, the total number of Scots who served in the Great War might be as high as 800k. This would give us a Scottish dead compared to mobilised percentage of 12.5% - less than half Ferguson and Devine’s statistic and much closer to the UK total of 11.8%. It’s worth remembering at this point that the 11.8% doesn’t include English, Welsh and Irish diaspora numbers, so by factoring that in would there actually be any difference between Scottish and UK war dead percentages? Personally, I doubt it.

As a founder member of the Scottish War Memorial Project I have seen thousands of war memorials over the last few years and take a close interest in memorials wherever I go. If I’m in Caithness the First World War memorials certainly don’t have twice as many names as ones I see on memorials in similar sized towns and villages in Cumberland, Carmarthenshire, or County Down.

Devine and Ferguson’s calculations don’t stand up to scrutiny, and they certainly don’t add up when you are standing in front of any tragically long list of names carved in stone.

Sending My Laundry Forward: A Review

Sending My Laundry Forward: A Staff Officer's Account of the First Gulf War is based upon author Stuart Crawford's diary, which he wrote for the duration of the conflict. While his unit as a whole was not sent to the Gulf they did make up the numbers in other regiments, and for various admin tasks.

Stuart Crawford was assigned as a staff officer based in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, and while his time in the Gulf was not spent in the thick of combat in the front line his account is no less interesting for this.

Instead of an account of modern-day combat, you instead get a glimpse of a side of a British military campaign that some might not be happy to let you see. It is clear from this account that there was a large element of making things up as they went along, of improvising and figuring out things on the hoof.

The supply situation in particular makes for interesting reading, as the tank regiments remaining in Germany are stripped of every serviceable part and engine, leaving them with tanks which were nothing more than empty hulks. Copious amounts of supplies are ordered but never reach their destination, and units send men on scavenging missions which further confuse the supply situation. Crawford makes clear in his book that one of the lessons which had to be learned from the first Gulf War was to take a leaf from private businesses and sort out some kind of inventory system.

The situation at headquarters appears confused and disorganised, taking time to get into any kind of routine, but it remains clear that communication between the front line troops and headquarters is patchy at best. Once air superiority is gained the flow of information becomes a deluge, often leading to an overload of information of little use to those who need it.

Being written from a staff perspective actually makes this a more refreshing read than some modern-day combat memoirs – this gives a different viewpoint from that which you would normally expect to read and it is all the more enjoyable for that. Having said that it would be unfair to say that this was a story of a cushy position well out of danger – with regular missile attacks this was in no way a danger-free position, and you do get a sense of concern for the well-being of himself and his colleagues. Despite this it is clear that the end result of the war was never in doubt, and you can feel the sense of distaste as the killing continues beyond the point where it might have been necessary.

I must admit to not having read many books on the first Gulf War – Bravo Two Zero being possibly the only other memoir I have read, but Sending My Laundry Forward joins the engaging Gulf War One by Hugh McManners on my Desert Storm reading list, and it has made me determined to seek out others like it. Truthful, humorous and enlightening; I recommend you seek out a copy.

Sending My Laundry Forward can be purchased direct from the publisher or through Amazon.

 

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

It was interesting to see two articles in Scottish newspapers today about the commemoration of the First World War. One was by Joan McAlpine MSP in the Daily Record and the other was by Alex Massie in The Scotsman

Both writers came to different conclusions but in both cases they used incorrect and widely quoted statistics about Scotland and the Great War.

The first is the number of Scottish WW1 war dead. This is often quoted as 150,000. This figure is taken from the total number of war dead recorded in the rolls of honour in the Scottish National War Memorial. Researchers are still finding names to add so the current total is just over 147,00 names.

This figure is based on all the names in all the rolls. That means the men of the Lovat Scouts who died in Salonika after December 1916 are recorded in two rolls - The Lovat Scouts and the Queens Own Cameron Highlanders - because between then and the end of the war they were the 10th Bn Cameron Highlanders. There were several other yeomanry regiments in the same situation; Black Watch battalions of Scottish Horse and Ayrshire Yeomanry in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. All these men died once but are recorded twice.

Many men served in more than one regiment during the war for a variety of reasons. A man may have enlisted in the Highland Light Infantry, transferred to the Royal Scots and by the time of his death be serving in The Northumberland Fusiliers. One soldier, one death but three entries in the rolls of honour in Edinburgh Castle.

There is a roll specifically for Scottish soldiers serving in English regiments but there is no roll for Englishmen serving in Scottish regiments. Each bay in the Scottish National War Memorial for a Scottish infantry regiment records the men who served in them irrespective of nationality. The men from Manchester who served in the Royal Scots, the Dubliners in the Black Watch, the Leicester men in the Seaforth Highlanders are all counted as Scots in the SNWM. If they happened to serve in two regiments they are double-counted too.

So if there weren't 150,000 Scottish war dead in the First World War how many did actually die? There is no accurate figure but it's probably around 100,000 - 110,000. However until all the post-war dead who died of wounds into the 1920's are found and counted an accurate figure is still impossible to determine.

We now come onto the second statistic. The five thousand war memorials which the Scottish Government have set up a £1m fund to help restore is based on a figure taken from Wikipedia.

A civil servant tasked with a press release must have gone onto Google, typed in "Scottish War Memorials" and got this Wikipedia page. At the time the figure of total Scottish war memorials was given as between 5,000 and 6,000. This had been based on one-tenth of the estimated UK total of war memorials provided by the Imperial War Museum's United Kingdom National Inventory of War Memorials (UKNIWM). I know this because I wrote the Wikipedia page when that number was 55,000.

In the last couple of years the UKNIWM has revised its figure to 100,000 and the Scottish War Memorials Project has estimated that there are 8,000 to 10,000 war memorials in Scotland based on the comprehensive recording work done in Dumfries & Galloway. This figure includes all Scottish war memorials, not just the ones erected after the First World War.

In the SWMP we categorise our memorials as civic, church, unit, school, individuals and others. There are just over 1,400 civic war memorials in Scotland, the memorials paid for and erected by locals and used as the focus of remembrance by communities each November. Of that figure 1,200 are on high streets and in prominent locations in our towns and villages across Scotland. These 1,200 Celtic crosses, obelisks, cairns and statues are the ones the First Minister had in mind when he launched the War Memorial Restoration Fund but they are only a fraction of the memorials in our country.

There will be many more newspaper articles about Scotland in the First World War in the months to come, lets hope that as the centenary approaches we see a little less reliance on Wikipedia and a lot more accuracy.

Ancestry supporting the Royal British Legion

For each view of the video below, until 20 November Ancestry.co.uk will donate £1 (up to a maximum of £10,000) to Royal British Legion Trading Limited which gives its taxable profits to The Royal British Legion (Charity no. 219279).

Please share the video with your friends and family.

How the Scottish won the English Civil War

Book review by Adam Brown

A bugbear of the SMRG is the use of the term English Civil War to describe the wars of the mid-seventeenth century which ranged from Cornwall to Caithness and from Dundee to Duncannon. It wasn’t one war and it wasn’t just the English. The accepted description is now the War of Three Kingdoms.

That being said, Alisdair McRae can be forgiven for its use for the title of his latest book How the Scottish won the English Civil War because his main focus is on the Scottish intervention in the three English Civil Wars of 1644-46, 1648 and 1649-51 (and he classes the three wars as one).

 McRae uses an unusual angle to take us through that history. He follows one Scottish cavalry regiment – Colonel Hugh Frazer's Dragoones - from their raising in 1643 to their disbandment in 1647. By using their story he explains the impact of the war on ordinary Scottish soldiers, and since Fraser’s Dragoons were involved in the Scottish Civil War it explains the presence of those battles in a book about the English Civil Wars. But what piece about Scotland in this period could not mention Montrose?

McRae’s book pivots on Fraser’s Dragoons from 1643-47 and the greatest value from this book is explaining in clear terms how battles like Marston Moor – seen today as very much as an English Royalist Cavalier vs Parliamentarian Roundhead battle - and one of the key battles of the First English Civil War - was decisively influenced by the presence of Covenanting blue bonnets from over the border. In fact he likens the Scottish intervention at Marston Moor, and the North of England, as akin to the US entry into the two World Wars. He also points out that where Englishmen might have baulked at killing fellow Englishmen, battle-hardened Scots felt no such qualms.

 This work isn’t just about the First English Civil War though. McRae goes back to the late sixteenth century as a prologue to give the political and military situation of mid-seventeenth century Scotland some context. He also covers a most important factor which may often be overlooked in our more secular times – the religious fervour of the Covenanting army which was whipped up by the Kirk’s ministers accompanying the Scottish army. He writes about the professionalism of the Scottish troops in the early stages of the English Civil War – thanks mainly to many experienced Scottish mercenaries who returned home to fight in the Bishops Wars in 1639 after being blooded in Europe. The Thirty Years War (TYW) had been raging across the continent since the 1620s and tens of thousands of Scots found employment in the armies of Poland, Sweden and France. McRae calculates that during one period of the TYW, one in ten of the adult males of Scotland were European mercenaries. Colonel Fraser, who raised and led his Dragoons, had been four years in Swedish service for example.

The bulk of the book is about the Scots in the North of England and their war with Charles I; once Fraser’s Dragoons were disbanded McCrae still continues his history of Scottish soldiers in the War of Three Kingdoms, and covers the dark days of defeat at Preston, Dunbar and Worcester.

 It is clear McRae has done extensive research on the subject and his comprehensive End-Notes, giving short biographies on many soldiers mentioned in the book amongst other interesting snippets, is a very useful appendix.

 I am still not entirely convinced by the title, given the coverage of Scottish affairs and the fact we were ultimately trounced by the New Model Army in the 1650’s. Perhaps it should have been titled “How the Scottish won the First English Civil War” - but it is a very valuable and well researched addition to the historiography of this neglected period, from an author who is obviously passionate and knowledgeable about the period.

 How the Scottish won the English Civil War by Alisdair McRae is available from The History Press.

Registered Scottish Charity, No. SC043826

Several years ago something called the Scottish War Memorial Discussion Forum was set up online. This was to allow anyone to share their photographs and information about Scottish war memorials.

Over time our little group of volunteers has turned the discussion forum into a war memorial recording project, added another project recording war graves and dipped our toe into other work such as publishing rolls of honour transcriptions and giving talks.

Recently we’ve worked with Edinburgh University’s Edinburgh’s War project and are partners  in their new project  - Scotland’s War 1914-1919 - which has been set up to commemorate the First World War centenary.

A couple of years ago we formed ourselves into an association called the Scottish Military Research Group  to manage all our activities.

Our two databases are of national importance; no other organisation has recorded so much information on so many of Scotland’s war memorials and war graves and we need that data to be hosted on a more stable platform. However stable platforms need to be paid for and we currently have no money!

So, at the end of last year we applied to the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator to become a charity, because with charitable status we can apply for funding (and accept donations from anyone kind enough to give us some money) to help us run the projects and achieve our goals.

Today we reached another milestone in our little group’s own history when OSCR accepted our submission and entered us onto the charity register as Registered Scottish Charity, No. SC043826.

It’s taken us a while to reach this point. We are a small team who manage our projects, Blog, twitter account  and Facebook page  in the precious spare time between work and family commitments so achieving this status means a lot to us.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far and we hope you’ll now see some exciting developments from us in the next few months.