ANNIE MABEL GURNEY (1868-1953) AND THE INJURED OF GALLIPOLI

My cousin Mabel Gurney graduated from Edinburgh University’s school of medicine in 1903, an early woman doctor following in the footsteps of the campaigning pioneer Sophia Jex-Blake. I wrote about Mabel’s training in a previous post; but her career after qualification was no less impressive.

Edinburgh Medical School,pictured in 1906, three years after the graduation of Dr Mabel Gurney 

Her widowed mother Phebe Gurney née Whitchurch, who had supported her medical training at a time when most widows expected their youngest daughters to stay at home looking after them, died soon after she graduated. By 1911 Dr Mabel Gurney was a school medical officer employed by the Cambridge Education Committee.

No doubt that was considered an appropriate job for a woman doctor; but it can hardly have challenged Mabel, for whom the decision at the age of 30 to enter medical school must have been a brave and bold one. She won a bronze medal in her first year for practical anatomy, and had proved then that she was not squeamish about the human body; but far greater challenges lay ahead.

 Australian and Ottoman dead at Lone Pine, Gallipoli, 1915

Mabel came from a Baptist family, for whom duty to God and public service were intertwined. Although she never knew her grandfather William Brodie Gurney, a leading Baptist of his day, his influence illuminated the family for many generations after his death. But she may have been guided even more by the example of a string of strong, active Gurney women.

Among them were her great aunt Martha, a pioneering campaigner against slavery, her great grandmother Rebecca Gurney née Brodie who started a school for local children, and her aunt Emma (my 2x great grandmother) who founded women’s groups. In her own generation her cousin Catherine was awarded an OBE for her work in establishing the first Police convalescent homes and orphanages in Britain. The great social reformer Elizabeth Fry was also a distant Gurney cousin.

Louisa Aldrich-Blake, the first British woman to graduate with a Master's Degree in Surgery

Consequently, when in the spring of 1916 Miss Louisa Aldrich-Blake appealed to the country’s female doctors, Mabel was one of 80 who stepped forward. Miss Blake was surgeon at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women (founded by Sophia Jex-Blake), and she realised just how overwhelmed the Royal Army Medical Corps was by the scale of injuries being incurred by British forces in the First World War. Indeed, the RAMC itself was suffering heavy casualties – nearly 7000 RAMC medical personnel died in the course of the war.

The notoriously disastrous campaign in Gallipoli was responsible for many of them – a quarter of a million dead and injured on each side of the conflict. Wounded survivors from the allied forces were evacuated to field hospitals in Malta and Egypt, and it was to Malta that Mabel and 47 of her colleagues were shipped in October 1916. There they were joined a month later by a further 33 “lady doctors,” none of them given the rank, uniforms, or ration and billeting allowances granted to every male doctor. 

Soldiers recuperating at Valletta Military Hospital

The women were attached to the RAMC and served principally in four Maltese hospitals – St David's Hospital, St Andrew's Hospital, St George's Hospital, and the Valletta Military Hospital. There they treated the injured of Gallipoli and the unsuccessful Salonika campaign; but they also had to contend with several outbreaks of disease including malaria, dysentery and enteric fever. Mabel’s main role was probably as a surgeon, but she is known to have attended in January 1917 the funeral of one of her colleagues, Isabella Tate, who was in charge of the bacteriological unit in the Valetta Hospital.

Soon after the funeral, Mabel was transferred to Egypt where she remained in service until 1919. Perhaps she administered to my cousin Will Piper of the Imperial Camel Corps, which had been formed there from the remnants of several Gallipoli cavalry units. Will died of pneumonia in an Egyptian field hospital in February 1919, two months before Mabel finally returned to Britain and resumed her post with the Cambridge Education Committee.

I know nothing (yet) of Mabel’s later life. She never married, and died in the same Norfolk parish of Runton in which, apart from the war years, she had lived all her life. 136,000 men were treated on Malta by Dr Mabel Gurney and her colleagues. Women accounted for 80 of the 245 doctors who treated them.

HUGH PIPER (1885-1917), THE TRAMS AND THE RUNAWAY TRAIN

“Chum” isn’t a word you see in print very often. But there it is in the Ayrshire Post’s report of the funeral of Hugh Piper, my grandmother’s distant cousin. “Lance-Corporal Haswell, a chum of the deceased” broke the news to Hugh’s parents, and accompanied the coffin on its procession from church to cemetery.

My Piper line’s origins are in Ayrshire in southwest Scotland. Although my grandmother’s branch had migrated to the capital, Edinburgh, most had stayed in the area. It was Hugh’s father who brought his branch from its rural roots into Ayr, the county town. There, by 1901 and aged 16, he had a job as an apprentice coach painter with the newly established Ayr Tramway Company. It was a steady, secure, respectable job and four years later Hugh married an Ayr mill-worker, Sarah McConnachie. 

An Ayr Corporation Tramcar, 

probably painted and driven by Hugh Piper;

Trams ran in Ayr from 1901 to 1931. 

Over the next nine years they had six children, the last two – twins – born in May 1914 just two months before the outbreak of the First World War. Hugh had just turned 29. With a large family and good employment prospects with the town corporation, where he was now a tram driver, Hugh was in no hurry to volunteer to fight. Indeed, the rush to enlist nationally was so great that there was no shortage of soldiers to send to the front.

But as the number of dead began to soar, volunteers became thinner on the ground. Britain was running out of cannon fodder and in January 1916 conscription of men aged 18 to 41 was introduced. At first only single men were called up, but the new compulsory enlistment failed to solve the problem. There was soon a huge backlog of appeals by men seeking exemption on the grounds of conscientious objection, health or employment in civilian occupations essential to the war effort. Running the trams did not fall in any of those categories. In May 1916 conscription was extended to married men; Hugh did not immediately receive his papers, but in due course he joined the 4^th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

 Carriages and engine heading downhill from Catterick Camp 

(photo taken in 1950s)

He was not alone, and many of his chums at the tram depot went off with him to their basic training at Catterick Army Camp in North Yorkshire. When their training was complete in September 1917 they were allowed home on leave before being sent off to war. They marched up from the camp to its railway station at 3.30am on 15^th September, where their carriages (not yet hitched to an engine) were waiting. In his letter to Hugh’s parents, his chum William Haswell takes up the story:

“We had some time to wait. I spoke to Hughie as we were sitting on our kitbags together – little did we know it was for the last time. Hugh got into No. 1 carriage, and just as I was about to climb into mine the carriages began to move, and I slipped off again until the train would stop.

“But it did not stop, and some of us were left standing, hoping there would not be an accident. We waited in suspense until the sergeant came back and reported that the carriages had overturned and many were hurt. A party set off at once. I was one of them, and we met two men walking back with bandaged hands. It was a dreadful scene. When we got there the carriages were in all positions, some right over with their wheels in the air, and others smashed to matchwood.

“I asked people if they had seen Hughie, but no one had. The first man I saw was Donald Hogg, and he had been helped out of the debris. He was cut about the head and body, but able to walk. Then I met Aitken, his face cut and covered with blood. Neither had seen Hughie.

“Later, I saw some men take someone from underneath the carriage and carry him to a wooden hut. I went with an officer to see if it was one of the men from my platoon. When they removed the coats, I saw the back of his head. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘is it Piper?’ Then the next thing I remember was the officer saying, ‘Come away old chap, we can do no good.’ Hughie must have been killed instantaneously.”

Lance Corporal Hugh Piper (1885-1917)

Four men died in the accident, and at least two of Piper’s and Haswell’s Ayr tramway colleagues – Hogg and Aitken – were injured. An inquest into why the brakes of the carriages had not been applied that night could only guess that escaped German prisoners of war might be to blame. The weight of the men boarding the wagons had been enough to send them on their way down the steep incline which led away from the platform, until, travelling at over 60 miles an hour, they came to a curve and derailed.

The route of Hugh’s last journey was lined by thousands of Ayr citizens. It followed the tramline which Hugh himself once drove. Mourners including his chum and his father went either on foot or in a heavily draped Ayr Corporation tramcar which followed the cortege. Hugh’s coffin was accompanied by the brass band of the Royal Scots Fusiliers and a funeral party of his military colleagues, who fired three volleys at the graveside before sounding the Last Post. He was, reported the Ayrshire Post, most popular and highly esteemed by all who knew him.

HUGH PIPER (c1818-1886) AND THE LATE START

I began this blog as a way of preserving my family history research for a time when my young nephews and nieces became interested in it all. But one of the great pleasures of Tall Tales from the Trees has been the new cousins who emerge from the eCloud to follow up on mutual ancestors. Sometimes whole new branches of my tree have come to light, as in the case of two Piper cousins, Billy and Sally, who got in touch recently. From them I have learned of my first cousin four times removed, Hugh Piper.

Hugh was the son of my 4x great aunt Janet Piper and an itinerant farm worker called Abraham Edward who was passing through Ayrshire at harvest time in 1818. Edward, who judging by his name may have been from Wales, may not even have known that he and Janet had produced a child. There is no official record of the birth, and no sign of a father at any point in the boy’s life.

The River Ayr at Woodhead – Woodhead was the Piper home for generations, and Hugh, his mother Janet and grandmother Jean lived nearby in the early decades of the nineteenth century 

(photo © Stuart Brabbs and licensed for reuse)

Instead, like so many dutiful daughters, unmarried Janet and her young son lived with her widowed mother Jean. I’ve written here before about the obligation of nineteenth century maiden aunts to stay at home caring for a parent when often they would rather be off getting married or having a career. So far so normal for Janet and Hugh.

But when Jean died in the 1840s, Janet – on her own, without a husband – effectively became the widowed parent herself. Hugh, already about 30 and her only child, a son without a father figure, stepped into the role of maiden aunt. He continued to care for her until her death at the great age (for the time) of 76 in November 1859.

By then he was 41. One senses that a certain amount of frustration may have been building up over the years: within four months of his mother’s death, Hugh had married 23-year old Jane Kay, almost half his age. He then, as my cousin Sally puts it, set about making up for lost time. Over the next fourteen years Hugh and Janet began a family of eight children, the last born when Hugh was 56.

Slaters were indispensable tradesmen when slate roofs protected all goods, livestock and human inhabitants from the wet weather of west-coast Scotland

Hugh blossomed in other ways too. Until his mother’s death he had been confined to the farm they lived on, where she was a washerwoman and he was a simple agricultural labourer. But in later life he branched out and got a skilled trade as a slater. Perhaps he was encouraged in this by his young wife, and by the large family he now had to provide for – then as now a tradesman commanded higher rates of pay than a general labourer.

The lack of a father as role model must have made his own fatherhood problematic, I imagine. Although he carried his mother’s maiden name, and passed that on to his descendents, he was certainly aware of the absent Abraham, and at one point adopted a sort of double barreled surname for himself and his children, who are recorded for a while as the Piper Edward family.

Hugh’s wife brought something to the family too – the twin gene! There have been twins in every generation  of his line since, where as far as I can tell there were none before. Hugh himself lived to watch all his children growing up, including my cousins Billy’s and Sally’s great grandfathers. In 1886 at the ripe old age of 68, he died of pneumonia, perhaps caught slating a roof in the Scottish rain. He was a late starter but a busy and hard-working one.

JANE FARQUHAR REID (1833-1920) AND HER SERVICE AT GILMILNSCROFT

In a terrific example of sucking up to the local gentry, my 3x great grandfather William Reid named at least two and arguably four of his eleven children after the incumbents of the local Big House, Gilmilnscroft House in Sorn, Ayrshire. His eldest girl and boy were named after his parents Mary and Robert. (Luckily for him his resilient wife was also called Mary.) But thereafter, until he finally ran out of options, his children were all called after Gilmilnscroft’s inhabitants, James Farquhar and his wife Margaret née Baillie, or the nearest sounding equivalent.

Gilmilnscroft House, Sorn, in 1964

16^th/17^th century tower house with 19^th century additions

William’s second daughter was my 2x great grandmother, whom he named Jane Farquhar Reid. Jane not only sounds like James, but was also James Farquhar’s mother’s name. Next came Jane’s sister, Margaret Baillie Reid. Then came a fourth daughter, called - the name Jane now no longer being available - Janet; and finally another son, christened James. Only with his third son did William feel free to bestow his own name onto the next generation. (Thomas, Helen, Grace and John completed the brood.)

Margaret and Jane were also the names of James and Margaret Farquhar’s daughters, so William Reid must have been pretty confident that he had done everything he could to express his allegiance to the Farquhar family. He was a coachman at Gilmilnscroft, and sure enough at least five of his children successfully found employment there.

Some 19th century Farquhars of Gilmilnscroft

(servants not pictured)

His eldest, Mary, was a housekeeper and sick nurse there. Second daughter Jane was maid to Margaret Farquhar. Third daughter Margaret was a domestic servant in the house. Eldest son James was like his father a coachman and domestic servant, until he married and moved to Glasgow. William junior was a gentleman’s nurse, until he caught tuberculosis and died. (They definitely held these posts, although I don’t know for certain, except in Jane and Margaret’s cases, that they all held them in the Big House; but such situations were not available anywhere else in the immediate area.)

Jane Farquhar Reid and Margaret Baillie Reid both eventually married and left service, Jane to John Piper in 1857 and Margaret to a Mr Kirkland in 1866. About 60 years later, Margaret’s grandson James Kirkland married Jane’s granddaughter Agnes, whom I knew as my great aunt Nessie. Nessie’s sister was my grandmother, Jean Farquhar Reid Piper. They had all by then moved up in the world: Nessie married a solicitor, and Jean married a doctor!

WILLIAM PIPER (1891-1919) AND THE IMPERIAL CAMEL CORPS

Most of my paternal ancestors are elsewhere – if not actually overseas, then certainly in corners of the United Kingdom not immediately accessible to me. Like me, they wouldn’t stay put, always moving on to new opportunities – in fact, I live in Scotland because my London father took a job here and relocated, eventually meeting my Scottish mother.

Her roots are therefore much closer to what for the time being I call home. Many generations of them, the Piper family, lived and died in a small area of Ayrshire. Many lie buried in a quiet country churchyard in the tiny village of Sorn there, just a morning’s drive away from me. Amongst the graves is a memorial to “Pte William Piper, Imperial Camel Corps.”

William Piper (1891-1919)

c1914 in the uniform of the Ayrshire Yeomanry

Sorn’s population may have fluctuated over the years, but today it is no larger than it was in the 1790s – around 300. Everybody has always known everybody else. When war broke out in 1914, many young men who had grown up together at Sorn School queued together to enlist with the Ayrshire Yeomanry – among them my Piper-born grandmother’s cousin William Piper.

The Ayrshire Yeomanry on manoeuvres at Sorn, c1914

After some basic training, the still-raw Yeomanry recruits were shipped off, literally, to one of the worst theatres of the war. They were attached, as the 1/1^st Lowland Mounted Brigade, to the 52^nd (Lowland) Infantry Division, fighting at Gallipoli.

The Gallipoli campaign was a disastrously unsuccessful attempt by the Allied Powers to capture the Ottoman capital Constantinople and secure a sea route through the Bosphorus to the Black Sea and Russia. Casualty rates on both sides ran to around 60%, nearly half a million men in total. Although only two further Allied soldiers were wounded by enemy action in the mass evacuation which followed in December 1915, many more died in the rain and snow which accompanied it. Disease in the unsanitary trenches also took its toll. Will Piper survived.

The evacuated Allies were ferried south to British-occupied Egypt, where they regrouped. Will, who had spent all his life working with horses, volunteered to join the new camel mounted units being formed to deal with local rebellion and the threat of Ottoman attacks. These units eventually coalesced as the Imperial Camel Corps. Three of the Corps’ four battalions were drawn from Australian and New Zealand light horse, which had suffered very high attrition at Gallipoli. The 2^nd Batt. however was composed from the remnants of the various British Yeomanry regiments who had fought there.

Members of the 2^nd Battalion, Imperial Camel Corps, c1917

As a force composed largely of antipodeans the Corps had a reputation from the start for disrespect for authority, an attitude derived also in part from its exclusively male camels. Male camels were used because they were cheaper than the female of the species; and they were cheaper because they were noisier and less docile. The roaring from a large group of male camels could apparently be heard for miles. What they presumably lost in the element of surprise by this behaviour, they made up with their ability to go nearly three times as long as a horse without water.

Although losses were still high, the Camel Corps were successful in their role throughout 1917, particularly at the battle of Maghdaba and the third battle of Gaza. In May 1918 many troops were redeployed from Palestine to the Western Front, including what was left of the Ayrshire Yeomanry, now part of the 12^th (Ayr and Lanark) Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Their redundant camels were given to Maj T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

Winston Churchill (left) challenged T.E. Lawrence (3^rd left) to a camel race in Egypt in 1921, perhaps on surplus camels of the Imperial Camel Corps. Lawrence won.

Will however remained in the Middle East, serving in the Cavalry Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Machine guns had proved their value on the Western Front earlier in the war, and by now a machine gun squadron was attached to every brigade of cavalry including those of the Imperial Camel Corps. The Machine Gun Corps had a reputation for heroism, and being often deployed in advance of front lines suffered such high casualty rates that it was known as the Suicide Club. By 1918 however, Egypt and Palestine were relatively stable, and Will Piper saw the war out in Cairo.

Four camel ambulances of the Imperial Camel Corps

Having survived Gallipoli and seen further front line service in Palestine with the Imperial Camel Corps and the Suicide Club, it is a cruel twist of fate that Will caught a cold after the end of the war, while on patrol in the cold desert air of Winter 1918. He died of pneumonia in an Egyptian field hospital in February 1919, so very far from his family and his Ayrshire home.

 Sorn members of the Ayrshire Yeomanry at training camp c1914

(for the record, back row: Smith of Smeathston, Hugh Sloan of Blairmulloch, S Ferguson, A Thomson, Templeton, S Kennedy; front row: W Mair, R Strathearn, J Alston (Visitor), J Eccles)

FREDERICK JAMES PIPER (1920-1943) AND THE EPONYMOUS LAKE

I was lucky enough to visit Toronto on a couple of occasions in the 1980s when I was the stage manager for a Scottish theatre company. On both visits I was told proudly by (it seemed) almost every Canadian I met that they were Scottish. There has certainly been a substantial exodus from here to there over the last couple of centuries, prompted by the Highland Clearances and other periods of economic hardship.

In 1910 Archibald Piper, a great grandson of my 3x great grandfather William Piper, joined the list of exiles. He lived first in Pincher Creek, about 70 miles west of Lethbridge in Alberta where his brother John had settled via Nebraska and North Dakota. At about the same time his sister Catherine had emigrated to Melbourne in Australia. All three really were Scottish, born in Sorn, the tiny Ayrshire village where generations of their ancestors and future cousins lived and worked as farmers and blacksmiths.

Frederick James Piper (1920-1943)

In time John moved a little east of Lethbridge to Bow Island (now known as the Bean Capital of the West, 2007 population 1868) and Archibald moved a little further east to Tuxford in neighbouring Saskatchewan. These days Tuxford’s population is under 100, but back in 1919 it was a thriving trading post of around 300 people. It was there that Archie’s youngest son, Frederick James Piper, was born.

Fred’s mother died in October 1940, and in January the next year Fred enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, the RCAF (which had coincidentally been founded in the year of his birth). The RCAF was expanding rapidly to assist in the British war effort, and a great many Canadians then as now retained strong links of loyalty to the Old Country. Frederick, a pilot officer, was posted to an airbase in Wales and took advantage of being in Blighty for the first time to visit his Scottish relatives.

Crew of a RCAF Lancaster bomber, 1944

He was probably attached, like many RCAF men, to No.6 Group, RAF Bomber Command. His father remarried in March 1943. In August that year no.s 5, 6 and 8 Group were assigned to Operation Hydra, part of a campaign to disrupt Germany’s development of V-weapons. Hydra was aimed at the Peenemünde Army Research Centre in northeastern Germany, where the V2 bomb was being developed and manufactured. The threat from such weapons was such that Churchill ordered that the facility be attacked “on the heaviest possible scale.”

The attack, by 596 bomber aircraft, took place on the night of 17^th/18^th August 1943. It was successful only inasmuch as it delayed the V2 programme by about two months, the time it took the Germans to move the project to a safer location in the mountains to the south. The raid killed two key scientists and several hundred civilian prisoners who had been forced to work at Peenemünde and were housed in a neighbouring concentration camp.

Bomb craters surrounding a V2 testlaunch site at Peenemünde after Operation Hydra – but many craters were mock-ups placed by the Germans to deceive allied reconnaissance flights checking the effectiveness of the raid

Allied losses were relatively slight considering the scale of the assault. 40 bombers were lost, with 215 personnel, of which about 86 were Canadian airmen. One of them was Pilot Officer Frederick James Piper. He is buried nearby in Kiel War Cemetery.

After the war, Canada honoured its fallen by naming some of the myriad lakes in the north of the country after them. Piper Lake, in northern Saskatchewan, is the rather beautiful memorial to my southern Saskatchewan cousin.

Piper Lake, northern Saskatchewan

Photo by Doug Chisholm of Woodland Aerial Photography

(www.woodlandaerialphoto.com)

JAMES FREW (born c1900) AND CHELSEA F.C.

I have precious little to brag about in my family tree when it comes to sporting achievement. But, clutching at straws, I can claim a great great uncle by marriage who got pretty much to the top of his game.

James Frew (born c1900)

James Frew’s father was a miner in the Ayrshire coalfields, and naturally he too started down the pits as a young man. In 1919 he married local girl Jean Piper of Sorn. Like most lads he played football in his spare time, and demonstrated such a talent for it that he played regularly for Nithsdale Wanderers down the road in Sanquhar (pronounced Sanker, if you’re not from round here!).

Nithsdale was a club on the rise. In 1920 they moved to Crawick Holm, a new ground with a stone grandstand just outside the town, and in 1923 they were invited to join the new Scottish League third division. In 1925 they won the championship (and promotion to the second division) with an 8-0 victory over Montrose in the last match of the season.

If Jimmy Frew played a part in the momentum which led to these successes, he was not around to enjoy the results themselves. In 1922 he was spotted by a talent scout from no less a club than London’s Chelsea FC. It is hard to believe that they were keeping an eye on teams like Nithsdale, but nevertheless Jimmy made his debut at Stamford Bridge, the Chelsea ground, on St Valentine’s Day 1923 in a 3-1 win over Everton.

Chelsea FC, 1925-26 season

(Jimmy Frew, new father, back row, second from left)

Although his professional football career is quite well documented I can’t find any record of what position he played. I am guessing it was defensive because in 43 games with Chelsea and 58 with his next club, Southend United, he never scored a goal. If such things are genetic, it’s worth noting that his son Billy (born during his last season at Chelsea in 1926) was himself a good amateur goalkeeper.

Jimmy played his last match for Chelsea on 24^th April 1926 and moved to Southend in Essex for two seasons from 1927 to 1929. He finished his pro days back up north as captain of Carlisle United, playing his part in the club’s triumphant double trouncing of Barrow, the local derby rivals, in the 1929-30 season (2-0 away, 7-1 at home). Not bad for a miner’s son from Kilmarnock.

Where it all began -

Nithsdale Wanderers and the Crawick Holm stand, c1921

(Jimmy Frew back row, second from right)

ANNE DOUGLAS GAVINE (1870-1940) AND THE PASSING ZEPPELIN

I couldn’t help but notice after my recent blogpost that not one but two of my ancestors have had their whisky premises bombed out of existence in time of war. There was the Bristol Whisky Distillery, destroyed during the blitz on that city in December 1940 (admittedly some 113 years after the death of its former owner my 3x great grandfather Thomas Castle). And in an earlier conflict, the blended whisky warehouse in Leith part-owned by my great grandfather James Piper received a direct hit during the First World War.

I wrote a while ago about the reminiscences of one sailor in port at the time; he made the most of the gallons of “stagger juice” released by this explosion, which were flowing along the gutters of Leith like rain. Last week I came across some old notes I’d made from conversations with my grandmother in the 1980s, and they include a reference to the attack from a very different perspective.

I’d quite forgotten I’d made them – they date from an earlier and false start on the trail of my family tree and ended up as things do in a box of unrelated items buried at the back of the attic. Although my wife despairs, I thank goodness sometimes that I am a keeper and hoarder of archives – you just never know when they may throw up something worth the keeping and hoarding …

James Piper was very much alive at the time of the Leith bombing. After that event he got out of whisky and into farming; but at the time, he and his family were living in Cluny Gardens, a genteel street south of Edinburgh city centre and some distance away from Edinburgh’s northeastern port of Leith. Some of the grand houses of the area had been built by a Mr Gavine, the father of James' wife, Anne, including other houses in Cluny Gardens and in nearby Midmar Avenue.

Anne Douglas Piper nee Gavine (1870-1940)

On the night of 2^nd April 1916, when their youngest daughter my grandmother Jean was nearly eight years old, Anne came into Jean’s bedroom and gently roused her. “Jean, wake up! I want you to see something.” My Granny stirred sleepily. “Come over to window and look outside. Something you’ve never seen before.” Jean was wide awake now and curious. “What, mummy?” And Anne replied, “There’s a zeppelin at the window!”

Zeppelin L14, one of two which carried out the raid on Edinburgh

on the night of 2^nd/3^rd April 1916

(pic from Edinburgh’s War)

Well that got Granny rushing across the room and, with the lights out to preserve the blackout, opening the curtains onto the bright moonlit night. The scene is so vivid, and that must be because of the way Granny told it to me 25 years ago. Sure enough, there was a dirigible in sight over Edinburgh – an unforgettable sight, and made all the more memorable the next day when Granny’s father James came home with a piece of melted glass two inches thick from the burnt ruins of his warehouse. The bomb which fell there had caused £44,000 of damage.

The zeppelins also targeted Edinburgh Castle,

hitting Castle Rock and nearby streets

including this spot in the Grassmarket outside the White Hart Inn

Repelled from the port by naval batteries the zeppelins turned towards Edinburgh itself and dropped several more bombs including one which plunged through three storeys of a tenement building in Marchmont Terrace very near Cluny Gardens, but failed to detonate. (The Edinburgh Evenings News has an excellent article about the raid.)

I met an astronomer last night who talked of how he works back from the known to the unknown; from evidence present in the universe now he and his colleagues can find their way back by deduction to how things must have been only a few million years after the Big Bang which started it all. I feel the same way about Annie Gavine. I never met her and can never know her. But through conversations with my mother and grandmother who did, I can imagine.