Dr Ross Cameron’s tribute to the fallen
Amongst the many pieces of rugby memorabilia belonging to Hawick Rugby Club is a hand written Roll of Honour created in 1919 and given to the club in memory of the players and committee who served in what they knew as The Great War. Over 160 names appear on that piece of paper from the club president, to office bearers and committeemen, to first fifteen regulars, to young teenagers who had played a game or two in the second fifteen.
Regardless of their status within the club, all the names have equal prominence with just name, rank and regiment. About a quarter of the names have one difference though – a small cross signifying those who died during the conflict. This horrific casualty rate of 25% is far above the average for the nation as a whole and underlines the sacrifice that this club, this town and Scotland generally made before the guns fell silent 105 years ago today. It also speaks of the ferocity of the fighting that about half these men have no known grave.
Of the forty Greens lads who died during the war, a few were famous during their own lifetime, most were known only to their family and friends but all were treated equally on the club scroll and we do so again today.
Two of the most famous, Wattie Forrest and Wattie Sutherland were widely regarded as the best players in the country in their heyday, feted in the national newspapers. Sutherland fell to a stray shell behind the lines in France shortly before the Armistice. Forrest died in 1917 in Gaza, then Palestine, leading his battalion of Borderers against Turkish trenches. When writing this, I was struck by the tragic irony that people are still being killed in exactly the same place as Wattie Forrest over a century later – we never seem to learn from history.
But most were not famous – just ordinary Borderer lads: Robert Scott, the son of a local vet, was fatally wounded on his 20th birthday whilst having his breakfast in Ypres in April 1915, before he had even reached the front-line trenches. He had played for the Hawick second fifteen before the war.
The only civilian ex-player, John Thomson, lived at 18, Buccleuch Street, and helped the Greens second team to win the Border Junior league in 1912. He had trained as an engineer with James Melrose and Sons. He joined the merchant navy and, as the Third Engineer on the SS City of Glasgow, was drowned with 10 crew mates when his ship was torpedoed in the Irish Sea in 1918.
Tom Wilson, one of three brothers lost in the war and known universally as “The Bottler” was one of Hawick’s most famous uncapped players and one of the best sevens players the club has ever produced with 25 gold winners medals including in the famous 1912 side that swept the board. Tom was in the Royal Engineers and lost his life clearing booby traps and mines amongst captured German trenches in August 1918.
The Blackest Day for both Hawick and the rugby club was 12th July 1915, when on a lonely hillside in Gallipoli, and in glorious summer sunshine, the 4th Battalion, The Kings Own Scottish Borderers went over the top and were destroyed in little more than 30 mins with over 90 men from the town including 5 Greens players being killed. The effects of that morning on Hawick have never been forgotten and in an act of remembrance and respect and witnessed by several people here today, exactly 100 years later another Greens player kicked an inscribed ball into no-mans-land where it may yet lie alongside those men.
Despite the unbelievable sacrifice and loss of that terrible conflict, the world erupted in a new, even more terrible war only twenty years later, and again, players from this club stepped forward in their turn. Mercifully, the death toll for our country was less, but despite there appearing to be no single comprehensive list comparable to the Roll of Honour from 1919, we know there were at least 15 players who never returned from the Second World War.
There is a tragic parallel to the loss of so many from the 1914 team in that no less than 4 players from the Greens side that played Heriots on New Year’s Day 1942 were destined not to survive the war. Ex-Cornet Vivian Grieve was killed in action at El Alamein, Carl Anderson, whose brother Darcy Anderson was retrospectively added to the Greens internationalist tally just last month, died in Italy in 1944 and Fred Butler and Adam Crozier, both serving in the 6th Battalion of the KOSB were killed on the same day in ferocious fighting near Caen in Normandy in July 1944. These two teammates now lie a few feet apart in a French cemetery.
There are two sad family connections between the two conflicts and the club: Anthony McKie, a Scots Guardsman and a popular pre-war player was killed in Italy in 1944. His father, Samuel McKie was an early Greens player in the 1890’s who served throughout the First War and died in 1918. Alec Farmer, who grew up in the Wilton Cemetery Lodge was killed in Italy in 1944 fighting for the Canadian Army. Alec was the youngest brother of Thomas Farmer, one of the Hawick five killed in Gallipoli.
These men are just a few typical examples of the people for whom this memorial has been created – all of them, famous or not, were brothers, fathers, sons and husbands of families just like those living in our town today. Looking at their grainy faded photographs it is unnerving how easily one can imagine these lads running out onto the pitch this afternoon. It may well be over a century ago, and perhaps there is no one left who remembers them personally, or who remembers their tragic stories, but I think that it would be doubly tragic if they and their stories were forgotten now.
There will be many members of the club – ordinary supporters who served and died in both world wars that we must remember with respect and thanks even if we will never be able to name them. In addition, it mustn’t be forgotten that many came home again permanently disabled, either physically or mentally, at a time when rehabilitation and treatment of trauma was poorly understood – they also deserve our gratitude.
All of this is why we are so fortunate as a community to have people amongst us of artistic talent, practical skills, and perhaps most importantly, an innate feel for what these events meant and still mean to this town. Bernie Armstrong is one such person and those of you who have seen his work will know exactly what I mean when I say that he puts his heart and soul into it. He has created something here which symbolises what these men gave, and of their fate never to return to Mansfield Park. Bernie, I speak on behalf of Hawick Rugby Football Club and I’m sure the whole town when I say that we are delighted and grateful that we are able to site your memorial at Mansfield Park today.
It merely remains for me to thank you all for coming here to witness this unveiling and to repeat that above all, We will Remember Them!
Rev Michael Scouler’s Prayer of Dedication
Dear Lord. Here at this vantage spot we’ve gathered, mindful that the young men we remember and honour today, also knew this spot, this place, this ground. Like so many before and since, they would have loved it; and for the same reasons.
It’s a place to shake off the shackles; to escape the humdrum means of earning a living. A place of pals, friendship and teammates, of freedom and fresh air in the lungs, the scent of grass in the nostrils. Of youth and energy, contest and confrontation. Lining up in formation against others; the cheers and jeers, the mud and the beers, the bruises, the wounds and occasional breakage and all that for a ball and a story at the bar. It’s all just play of course – but such play! If anything told you it was good to be alive then this place, Mansfield Park, has convinced many people of that down the years.
But the winds of war, as winds do, gathered themselves and carried off these lives we remember today, to foreign soils and unfamiliar seas; peace and play was all blown away. And those guys, far too many of them still just boys, were swept away, as pals and mates, by the seductive pull of a much more manly challenge.
From touchline to front line, from the soil of recreation to that of their possible destruction, they were taken; to places that defied description, while dealing out loss beyond measure.
And while a peace would finally return, far too many of those lads never did: they would never get to cast their eyes sentimentally upon the grass before us, to remember their own days and deeds, games played and friends made.
So in humble recognition of their loss, the loss also to family, community and to this club, we pray in dedicating this seat, that it might fittingly serve as a place from which to enjoy the sport these lads treasured, while equally honouring the fact that their ultimate sacrifice has, in superseding money, made it the costliest seat that this beloved arena has ever provided.
May it always do honour to their memory, we pray. AMEN.
They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them”
“When you go home, tell them of us and say –
For your tomorrow we gave our today”
