REMEMBRANCE

Since the armistice that ended the First World War, the names of the soldiers that died in the service of their country have been honoured. For a century and more, the names of the fallen have been read out in churches throughout the United Kingdom on Remembrance Sunday. It is always a sad list of names of men and women who had lives, who laughed and who loved. Their names are remembered with solemnity and care, but the act of remembrance in itself may be insufficient. Men and women have continued to die in conflicts across the world, an indictment of our ability to live with each other without war.

For me, the process of writing biographies of the 40 men on the Bothkennar Memorial has inescapably brought not only a notion of the men themselves but also of the friends and family who were part of the men’s lives, the folk left behind. The names need to be read, to honour those who gave their lives and who were lost to their families and to feel the loss of what the men could have been had they not fallen in the service of their country.

Researching the archives has meant that so often a window has opened, revealing a sense of the person behind the name, a glimpse of person not just name. There has been a sense of the families left behind, and the meaning for families of the deaths of the men, a some sense of the loss of those men, and the sorrow of those left behind, of bugles calling them from sad shires.

I hope that the stories of the men who died will help us see the reality and context of Bothkennar as it was then, and to better understand the lives lived by these men.

The focus on the men themselves is necessary, but the folk the men left behind are needing to be seen in the background of family and folk, perhaps telling us something about the men that died and how it was then. Our views of the past are conditioned by a stewing pot of facts, rumour and stories. The men and women who lived in Bothkennar can be seen through the written word, by stories told (or not told) by people long dead. Their descendants are still around with surnames still traceable but always there is something missing. Inevitably the stories that are attached to the men and their families who experienced life, love and death can only be seen through a glass darkly, illuminated by flashes of light allowing glimpses of understanding. We cannot call back the people lost, but telling their stories may allow us to have, at times a fuller understanding of how things were there then.

Possibly because it is the way of things, such insights can happen, and can persuade us to look closer at things which were a given which chance forces a closer look and sometimes those insights that fill in the blanks.

This site is really not about merely listing and reading out names but about trying for some understanding of the past, to grasp some understanding of how it was. It is also about adding colour to the black and white pictures of our past.

Russ Edwards

13 May 2021 (Revised 03 Jan 2022)

As ever, the writing here is indebted to the work of Russell MacGillivary and Iain Scott