Trevor Royle - The Flowers of the Forest: Scotland and the First World War

On 15 January 1917 Captain J. C. Black, the convener of the British Services Committee of the St Andrew Society of Glasgow wrote a long and impassioned letter to the Scottish secretary, Robert Munro. His message was clear and simple. Reminding Munro that his society contained some of the greatest names in Scottish public life, Black got straight to the point. He understood that an official history of the war was being planned by the Historical Branch of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and, that being so, the St Andrew Society of Glasgow wanted to ascertain that great care would be taken to ensure that correct national names and terms be used throughout in these histories and to ask your valuable assistance in obtaining this most desirable result. Lest anyone should have thought that this was a case of being over-sensitive, Black hoped that Munro would not view this letter as a premature protest, but as an earnest appeal on behalf of the Scottish nation to make certain that, in the forthcoming histories, justice will be accorded, and due credit given to Scotland for the part which she has, and is, so nobly playing in this great war. In other words Black and his committee did not want to see Scotlands contribution to the war being under-played nor did they want English to be used in place of British as a generic national description.

It was not the first letter that Black had produced on the subject. Three months earlier, on 14 October 1916, he had written in similar vein to the Hon. John Fortescue, the Royal Librarian at Windsor, who had been engaged as the first official historian in February that year. Whatever else it did, Blacks letter clearly nettled Fortescue, a patrician military historian who was the author of a number of highly rated titles, including a monumental History of the British Army. His

It would take until 1925 before the first of the fourteen volumes of the official history of the First World War on the Western Front was produced, under the title History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Military Operations, France and Belgium. By then the compilation had passed into the hands of Brigadier-General J. E. Edmonds, a career soldier who had served on Haigs staff on the Western Front. It was a huge achievement, involving a team of writers and researchers who based their evidence on 25,000 boxes of wartime papers and all the campaign maps produced during the war. Other official histories were published for the wars main fronts and also for naval and air force operations. By the time they appeared Fortescue had long since relinquished any role in their compilation. From the outset he had been reluctant to accept the task and by 1919 he had taken the history as far as May 1915. Even though he had written 1,800 pages he was increasingly frustrated by the absence of key documents and by a growing suspicion that they would never be produced. Matters came to a head when Field Marshal Sir John French published 1914, his account of the first months of the war: Fortescue produced such a highly critical review (one of the most

Any reading of the Official History (as it is generally known) would show that Black and his fellow St Andrew Society members need not have been concerned about nomenclature. The authors make scrupulous use of the term British, and although they did not single out Scottish regiments or names, other than as a matter of record, it is possible to understand the role, say, of the 9th and 15th Scottish Divisions at the Battle of Loos in 1915 or the part played by Scottish contingents at Gallipoli. Quite rightly, this is a British reading of a British military experience and, while they have been criticised for their interpretation of events, the volumes did succeed in achieving the aims of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence, namely, to produce a reasonably impartial narrative based on primary sources. However, that thorough approach means that with the notable exception of Catriona M. M. Macdonald and E. W. McFarlands collection of essays, Scotland and the Great War, based on a conference held in November 1997, Scotlands history of the First World War remains largely unwritten. In the field of oral history both Ian MacDougall, Voices from War, and Derek Young, Forgotten Scottish Voices from the Great War, have done sterling work in recording and memorialising the testimony of individual Scots and making sure that their contribution has not been overlooked. There have also been sizable examinations of the period in recent histories of twentieth-century Scotland, most recently by Richard Finlay and Christopher Harvie, but, ninety years after the Battle of the Somme in which so many Scottish soldiers lost their lives, the time might be ripe for some deeper digging and reassessment.

First things first: this is not a history of the First World War as seen through Scottish eyes or an attempt to wrap the home front and the main battle-fronts in a kilt. Rather, it is the story of the role played by Scotland and Scots in influencing the British management of the war and of how the country was changed irrevocably as a result of the experience of over four years of warfare. Within the United Kingdom Scotland supplied a greater proportion per head of population of the assault troops that engaged in the great battles of attrition in 1915 and 1916; half of Scotlands male population aged between eighteen and forty-five was in uniform. Casualties were correspondingly high and consequently disproportionate. Industry too suffered. From being the workshop of the British war effort Scotlands heavy industries went into decline and while there were innovations in the workplace, such as the rise of trade union influence and the employment of women, these turned out not to be the breakthrough hoped for by many idealists and dreamers. Home rule was also a casualty: it was almost on the statute books in August 1914 but disappeared as a result of the collapse of its sponsors, the Liberals, and the failure of Labour to offer it any realistic support.

No book of this kind could have been attempted without a thorough reading of the many works that have helped to inform my thinking. The titles are listed in the bibliography but I would like to place on record the following authors names in thanks for the keen insights provided by their work: Jack Alexander, John Baynes, Eileen Crofton, Tom Devine, Richard Finlay, Christopher Harvie, Diana Henderson, I. G. C. Hutchison, Billy Kay, William Kenefick, Clive H. Lee, Leah Leneman, Catriona M. M. Macdonald, Ian MacDougall, Arthur McIvor, Iain McLean, Hugh Peebles, Gary Sheffield, T. C. Smout, Hew Strachan, John Terraine, Ian S. Wood and Derek Young. I am particularly grateful to Ian S. Wood for lending me material on Scottish labour history and to Lindy Ogilvy Maclean for guiding me through Glen Prosens muster roll.