The banner header above shows the site Longdyke now, looking towards the motorway bridge to the remains of what was "“The Garibaldi” pit byng. The road bridge over the motorway is just off to the left'.

Private Thomas COWAN M.M.

4th Battalion, Royal Scots

Service Number: 47903

Date of Death: 26 October 1918 Age at Death: 27

Husband of Catherine Richardson Cowan, 25 Grange Street, Stenhousemuir; father of “wee” son Jackie; son of Isabella Forsyth Cowan and the late John Cowan.

The details of Thomas Cowan’s involvement in the war have been transcribed below from the work of Russell MacGillivary and Ian Scott. Some minor details have been changed but in most senses, this section is the work of Russell MacGillivary and Ian Scott, and is acknowledged as such.

Russ Edwards

Thomas Cowan enlisted on 13 January 1916 but was placed on the Army reserved list: the unprecedented casualties resulting from total war meant that industry was unable to cope with the loss of so many men. Men such as coal miners like Thomas Cowan were vital to the war effort, providing the munitions required to provide the means with which to prosecute the war, and many men found themselves back down the pit rather than being on the battlefield.

Thomas Cowan was born in Letham and prior to joining the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion, HLI in April 1917, worked as a miner at Letham Pit. Thomas lived at 38 Letham Cottages. Thomas Cowan lived at 28 Longdyke, the miners’ row close to the Carronhall Colliery William (or Garibaldi) Pit owned by Carron Company . Like his father, Thomas was a coal miner. Thomas was a married man, married to Catherine formerly Richardson and with a young son, John.

The 3rd (Reserve) Battalion was a depot and training unit, which moved on mobilisation to Portsmouth and subsequently moved (May 1915) to Malleny Camp, Currie, near Balerno, and in July 1918 to Haddington where it remained as part of the Forth Garrison. The role of the depot was to ready drafts of new men enlisted or called up largely to replace casualties on the Western Front.

In December that year Thomas arrived in Egypt to serve with the British forces in Palestine. Thomas had been on the Army Reserve list for over a year.

In February 1918 Thomas applied for a transfer to the 1st/4th Royal Scots so that he could serve with his younger brother. This transfer was allowed. Thomas was said to be of “good character, 1st Class Shot, 1st Class Signaller”. In April 1918 his battalion was recalled from Egypt and sent to the Western Front in the wake of the heavy losses as a result of the German Spring Offensive, the Kaiserslacht.

A month later, Thomas was taken ill with influenza and was in hospital for four days.

The MacGillivary/Scott narrative describes the operations that involved the battalion on the Western Front in 1918 which took place between August 23 and 27.

“There was considerable difficulty getting to the assembly line “owing to the great congestion of military traffic”. Zero hour on the 23rd was 4.55 a.m. The battalion followed a creeping barrage and “gained their objectives without great opposition”. A second attack wave with three tanks advanced the battalion line 400 yards. During the night one battalion company was sent forward to fill a gap of 1200 yards between the two neighbouring brigades. The battalion war diary reported: “This area was severely shelled with gas shells and being low-lying there was heavy gas concentration necessitating the Coy to wearing their masks for the greater part of the night.”

“The next objective of the battalion was to move into part of the Hindenburg Line north of the River Cojeul. This was accomplished in an attack which was carried out between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on August 27, despite the troops on both flanks not making anything like the same progress as the Royal Scots had. The battalion captured the village of Fontaine-les-Croisilles, which “in former years… would have been a tough nut to crack, but it fell into the hands of the 4th Royal Scots with astonishing ease; many Germans threw down their weapons with a readiness that was almost indecent and gladly surrendered in order to get out of a war from which they longer expected profit or victory”.

Four German officers and 340 men were taken prisoner as well as 25 machine guns and “an immense quantity of ammunition”. These two attacks caused the battalion five casualties among its officers and 240 in the other ranks. It is likely that Thomas earned his Military Medal during one of these attacks.

Thomas was subsequently taken ill with influenza again and was hospitalised.

Thomas Cowan almost certainly suffered from the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-19. This was an influenza pandemic – it affected perhaps up to half of the world’s population, and killed about 50 million people, many more than the total number killed in the world war. In May Spain was the first European country to be severely affected by this outbreak - hence the name. But the main countries fighting the war were also suffering and were keeping it secret! The virus probably emerged first in the USA.

Thomas Cowan, having suffered from influenza in May, died during the second and more virulent phase of the pandemic in the autumn of 1918.

It is not known how many British soldiers died from the “Spanish” flu, but half of the American Army’s deaths in 1918 were due to the disease. Conditions in the trenches helped the spread of the disease. But what made the flu so deadly was that it affected healthy young adults much more than any other group of people; about half who died were young adults aged between 20 and 35. Its symptoms were sudden and severe. Within hours of feeling unwell, the victim would experience extreme fatigue, fever, and headache, and, in fatal cases, the disease would progress rapidly to multi-organ failure and death. In the UK the outbreak caused 230,000 deaths.

The description of the 1918 influenza epidemic is similar to the COVID-19 outbreak first identified in in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Coronavirus disease 2019 is a contagious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The disease has since spread worldwide, leading to an ongoing pandemic.