Ian MacCabe - My Father a Scot, My Mother French: Before and After Two World Wars

This book depicts the origins of our two European families, (Scottish/Irish and French/Swiss) both affected by the great war of 19141918 and the events that followed. It is not an autobiography, but it expresses what I witnessed, my observations and my research results. It also explains how destiny provided me with a double culture.

Based on extensive research I undertook in Scotland and England, I have reconstructed my fathers family origins, and I have made a summary of the Scottish economic and social development as from the middle of the 19th century and described the environment of Nicks earlier years before giving full details of his involvement in the First World War and his subsequent career and family life.

There were nine children in each of my parents families. My father, Dominic, known as Nick in the family, was a Catholic, my mother, Jeanne, was a Protestant, but religion was never a problem in the house. My paternal great grandfather came from Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century at the time of famine and extreme poverty for the people in order to work in the Lanarkshire coalmines. Two generations later, my father began as an apprentice at the age of 14 in the Clydebank shipyards. The history of the family corresponds exactly to the general evolution included in the description of the social and economic environment of Scotland in the nineteenth century.

At the age of 19, Nick volunteered for the HLI (Highland Light Infantry Regiment) in August 1914. He fought in the Dardanelles in 1915 (July to October). Having found his battalions company, I have been able to trace and describe in detail the events involving him through the campaigns official War Diaries and other research. Dysentery led to his return to Scotland for treatment in Edinburgh until the latter part of 1916. Nick left an interesting set of poems, drawings and photos collected essentially from his fellow soldier patients and nurses from October 1915 until the autumn of 1916. On January 2, 1917, he was sent to fight in the Somme and I have detailed the official military movements and conditions in which he was involved. In March 1917, his injuries sent him back to the UK and demobilisation in April 1918. His elder brother, Peter, had enrolled in the Kings Own Liverpool Regiment and was killed at Ypres on November 16, 1914.

As for my mother, Jeanne, her grandfather, Jules Jacques Combe was Swiss and had spent 18 months at Heidelberg as Tutor for the children of the Grand Duke Heritor of Saxony. I show a testimonial and a letter in later years from the Grand Duke. In Belgium, Jules set up a printing company and worked also as a translator French/English/German. Later, he settled in Nanterre, France, where his daughter Juliette, who had married a Frenchman, gave birth to nine children, my mother Jeanne being the eldest. Jules Jacques Combe translated into French and published the French version of Andrew Carnegies book The Triumph of Democracy; he also wrote stories for the children of the family and long and interesting letters to his unmarried daughter, Jeanne Jacqueline (my mothers Tante Jeanne). He also had a great interest in scientific matters. For this reason, I have brought to light some of his achievements based on original documents I possess.