The McIntosh Family The price paid by the Parish of Scone in The 1st World War and by one family in particular.
In a few months time it will be 100 years since the start of The First World War, the war to end all wars.
It began on a hot summer’s day – on the 28th of July 1914 – and, in a surge of patriotism, recruiting offices were besieged by men of all ages, desperate to sign up to “do their bit”. The British Empire was at its height, the map of the world was a sea of red and the war was seen as a noble and just cause. Before it ended four years later, it would have had tragic consequences for every family in the land, including that of my mother’s grandmother, Isabella McIntosh, who lived in the parish of Scone just north of the City of Perth which lay on the opposite side of the River Tay.
My mother never really spoke to me about her two uncles who were killed in France and it’s my belief that she knew little or anything about them. However, in this document, I have pieced together the limited information that I have been able to glean from various sources about the lives and deaths of George and Thomas McIntosh and it is my hope that it will give the members of my family and subsequent generations a link to connect them with the First World War.
At the outbreak of war, Isabella McIntosh was a widow with five children at home – her husband, Joseph, had died twelve years previously, in 1902. Her son, Thomas, was aged fourteen and had just left school and the only wage earner in the house was his older brother George who was aged eighteen and a farm worker. Scone was a rural parish where most of its male inhabitants worked on the land and whose main claim to fame was that the ancient kings of Scotland had been crowned there. At that time, the minimum age for joining the army was nineteen but such was the national mood of euphoria that thousands of young lads enlisted who were considerably less than this age – no evidence of age was requested and, if you were big enough, you were old enough. George McIntosh would have had no problem joining up in the initial rush but, in the event, he didn’t. I’m sure that he would have liked nothing more than to join the flood of potential recruits making their way to Perth to join the Black Watch but I also suspect that he would have been constrained by being the breadwinner of the family.
I am fortunate that my mother, Kathleen McIntosh, wrote in her memoirs about those members of the McIntosh family that she knew. She was born in 1929 in the village of Balbeggie, lying three or four kilometres north east of Scone and she recounts how, on Sunday afternoons, she and her two sisters would be put on the bus for the short journey to Scone to visit their Granny McIntosh. The girls were still very young – Helen would be about ten and Mum and her twin sister, Isobel, only about five or six.
My mother spoke with great fondness about her Sunday trips to see “Granny Mac” at Stormont Road. However, there was no mention of her uncles, George and Thomas, and it would be many years before she would find out that they had been killed in The First World War.
She developed genuinely strong bonds with her aunts and uncles,making regular visits to Perth to visit Jean and Meg, both spinsters who were in service and going further afield to see her Aunt Nell who lived on the Bonnygate in Cupar. Uncle Joe lived at Burrleton, half way between Perth and Dundee and she would drop in to see him on the way to visit her Dad either in Blairgowrie or Coupar Angus. My mother took me to see all of them and I can honestly say that there was a genuine bond between them all. I have no doubt in my mind that, had George and Thomas survived the war, she would have had a similar relationship with them.
So, how best can I sum up the contribution of the Parish of Scone to the First World War? Well, from a male population of around 400 who would have been eligible for military service, I have estimated that just over 200 were killed or wounded. Nineteen of the dead were members of the Black Watch and five of this number were killed on the same day.
The names of the dead are gradually slipping into oblivion and, even now, are becoming no more than lists on war memorials. It is for this reason that I hope my account of the short lives of George and Thomas McIntosh will be kept in my family and ensure that their memory will be preserved.