The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 989

So Daisy, along with many other anxious mothers, wives, and children, waited for concrete information

On March 5 1943 Captain Frisby, who had served in Malaya with the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force (FMSVF), wrote to the War Office from Sydney, Australia. Having escaped from Singapore on the Celia, he was only able to offer a comprehensive list of his own battalion, the Volunteers, but not Paris’s staff.

“I’m afraid I can’t help much,” he wrote. “I made a note of them at the time, but somehow or other, this note has disappeared.” He added that as Paris’s brigade major, Angus was put in charge of the British other ranks on board the motor launch until he deputed Frisby to take over.

Frisby and most of his colleagues in the FMSVF boarded ships bound for Australia via Java.

The problem was that much of the official documentation and papers were destroyed or lost. A nominal roll of all who had embarked on the Rooseboom was handed to the British troops’ headquarters at Padang, but within a couple of weeks, Padang fell to the Japanese and only a list from memory could be submitted to Ceylon Command, the Rooseboom’s intended destination. Captured Angus’s name appears on this list with Brigadier Paris and a number of other senior officers from a variety of regiments. The problem of identification and knowledge of who had boarded which vessel was heightened by the fact that so many Allied ships were sunk by the enemy.

Those who survived were invariably captured so they were, in the main, unable to offer information on what had happened until after the war.

Towards the end of hostilities, when the tide of the war was turning against them, Japan allowed internees and POWs to make humanity broadcasts. Much of their content was information on the fate of civilians and service personnel in the Far East. One such broadcast was made by the sole British survivor of the Rooseboom, Corporal Walter Gibson.

On June 15 1944, he divulged on Tokyo Radio the names of a number of British personnel who had perished after the ship went down. These were Brigadier Paris, Angus, Captain Blackwood of 12th Indian Infantry Brigade and several other soldiers.

The broadcast, transmitted between 0400 and 0430 hours GMT, was picked up by a monitoring station in Western Canada, Vancouver’s Point Grey area. Stations such as this intercepted enemy wireless traffic and by 1943, Vancouver’s Point Grey had started to crack Japan’s KANA code.

Undoubtedly, the station passed Corporal Gibson’s message to an interested British War Office department. Was Daisy aware of the broadcast and if she was, did she believe it was authentic? After all, it could have been a hoax. Information about the war in the Far East was scant, unreliable, and confused.

Added to all the uncertainty was the poor physical and mental state of the returning POWs. It would have been grossly insensitive to grill them for news of missing servicemen the moment they reached British soil. So Daisy, along with many other anxious mothers, wives, and children, waited for concrete information. Comfort On December 5 1945 a service of thanksgiving was held in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, to commemorate the end of the war in the Far East and the homecoming of prisoners and civilian internees. On that same day the Macdonalds’ long-standing friend Archbishop Lang died and his funeral took place five days later in Westminster Abbey.

Lang was always a trusted friend of Daisy and had officiated at her marriage to John Moreton Macdonald. He had been a comfort to her when, 15 years later, her husband died after a short illness and conducted the burial service. He baptised several Macdonald children including Angus and, in the castle chapel, married Douna to Henry Rogers in 1932.

Most of all, Lang was a support to Daisy during the last three years of the war, when she had needed it most. I like to think that the reason for his visits to Ballure in the summers of war was that he wanted to give Daisy, younger than him by 15 years, his support. His archbishop’s duties had ceased on his retirement.

Finally, on January 3 1946, an Argyll soldier offered information on Angus to staff at the War and Colonial Office in London. This was the aforementioned Walter Gibson. After his humanity call in June 1944, the War Office had suspected there was at least one British survivor from the ship. The difficulty was in ascertaining who had boarded it when the only record they possessed was a list made from memory.

Almost two months after Walter Gibson gave his testimony, a gentleman named Mr Stuart, who was an employee of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, confirmed that Angus had indeed embarked on the SS Rooseboom at Padang and therefore, in his opinion, must have drowned.

Now that these fragments of evidence were known, Daisy could no longer hold out much hope for Angus’s return, and on April 13 1946 she inserted an announcement in The Times in the On Active Service column: “Missing after the fall of Singapore and now officially presumed killed in action at sea, in the sinking of SS Rooseboom.” Still the words suggest equivocacy. Angus was “presumed” killed but not known to have been. Daisy was now able to state that officialdom had deemed her son was dead. Gesture They say that the population increases after a war. Certainly, the Macdonald family helped swell what we now term the “baby boom” generation. The first Macdonald baby born in peacetime was to Caitriona and Daisy’s youngest son, Simon, on August 17 1946. Like many other grieving families such as Mrs Wainwright, sister of Captain Michael Blackwood, the couple named their son after his lost uncle.

In Simon and Caitriona’s case, it was a gesture, not only of fond remembrance, but recognition that one day, this boy would inherit the property that Angus would have possessed. This was the Lockhart land of Lee and Carnwath in Lanarkshire.

After two world wars, it was quite common for property designated for older sons killed in war to be passed to their younger brother. Henry Rogers’ inheritance would have gone to one of his two halfbrothers had both not been killed in the Great War. In a similar manner, when Angus was lost, it was expected that Simon would become the owner of the Lockhart estate. (More tomorrow)