Memorial with a difference
Argyll has many fine war memorials but there is one in particular which is perhaps more appreciated in a practical way than many others.
It is a house in Morvern standing on a knuckle of rock overlooking the entrance to Loch Aline, where local ex-servicemen and their families can come on holiday at a reduced rate.
Opened in 1950, The Cottage with the Garden and the Boat by the Shore, was the inspiration of Mrs May L Cameron, a descendant of an old Morvern family and secretary of the Glasgow Morvern Association, who saw it as not only a memorial to the fallen from their own parish, but a place of peace and happiness to those who had come home from the wars, and their descendants.
Highlanders in faraway places, she felt, always hankered to get back some day to the place of their birth and with the building of the cottage this would now be possible.
On Saturday June 3, 1950, 500 members of the association, along with their friends from Oban, Lorn and Morvern, came off the steamer Loch Fyne at Lochaline Pier from where they walked along to the cottage to the strains of the pipes played by local piper John Scoular.
The opening ceremony was performed by Iain Macleod, brother of the late Duncan MacLeod of Skeabost, Skye, who had been a major donor. There were prayers by the Reverend Alastair Mackenzie, Blantyre, another Morvernite, Rev Alastair Campbell of Luss and Rev Hector MacSween, minister of Morvern. John Scoular played a lament, the Land of the Leal, in memory of the soldiers from the parish who died in battle.
The design of the cottage, bold and imaginative for the time, is by Glasgow-based architect Dr Colin Sinclair (1879-1957) from Glassary, Mid Argyll. He was one of the Scottish delegates to Unesco in 1947 and published The Thatched Houses of the Old Highlands in 1953. He was also a composer and an accomplished painter in both oils and watercolours.
He designed the Stag Hotel, Lochgilphead, the monument to Neil Munro, Glen Aray, the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College, Jordanhill Teacher Training College and many other fine buildings in the west of Scotland.
The builders were MacDonald and Coulson, Craigard Road, Oban; sub-contractors and masonry, John Donaldson, Oban; plumber, T Crawford and Sons, Oban; slater, plasterer and roughcast, J S MacDonald, Oban; painter H Walker and Son, Oban; electrical J F Maxwell, Stevenson Street, Oban; and William Carmichael, haulage contractor.
The appeal of the memorial cottage is its close proximity to the water and the views from every window.
And what views! From every room there is a panorama of the sea, up the loch to Ardtornish Towers and down to Duart and Ardtornish Castle – windows on past battles, clan and family feuds.
And from the kitchen, the top of the memorial cross, standing on Torr na h-Aire, now almost enveloped by trees and bushes, is a sad reminder of the men who died in the Great War in a hope that was never fulfilled.
Among the celebrities who attended the opening, were Sir Charles and Lady Maclean of Duart and Morvern, their daughter Janet, now the Dowager Maid of Morvern, and Gordon Jackson, the Scottish actor best remembered for his roles as the butler Angus Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs and as George Cowley, the head of CI5, in The Professionals. He also portrayed Flt Lt Andrew MacDonald, ‘Intelligence’, in The Great Escape and George Campbell in Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore!.
The memorial cottage is as popular as ever. Although soldiers from Morvern who fought in the Second World War are slipping away, the directors still encourage ex-servicemen and women from other parts of the world to use it.
Ian Greig, 96, from Dumfries and has family have been coming to the cottage for more than 30 years. Not only does Ian have a firm link with the parish through his daughter-in-law, Marion (nee Cameron), whose family have had a long association with the cottage as trustees, secretary and president, he is also a D-Day hero and a highly decorated and distinguished war veteran.
Ian, at the age of just 20, was among thousands of allied troops who landed in Normandy in 1944 to liberate France from the Germans. He had been called up to the Royal Navy as a teenager and joined the Forward Observation Unit as a telegraphist at HMS
Dundonald in Troon.
On June 5, his unit crossed the Channel, landing on Sword Beach at around 7.30am. ‘Most of the troops were sea sick, myself in much the same state,’ he said, ‘and that’s when all hell let loose.
‘My introduction to D-Day was seeing a soldier lying face up in the water, dead. He was quite peaceful, but quite dead – and that’s something you never forget.
‘Flak was flying everywhere, snipers were firing from the villas along the beach and yours truly got a sniper’s bullet which severed nerves and paralysed my left arm. It missed my heart by about five inches and fortunately my 16”
wireless set took the full force of the shrapnel but I was wounded in my lower back and arm.’
Ian spent months, and his 21st birthday, in hospital before being discharged in April 1945 when he returned to the job he left with the British Steel Corporation.
In October 2015, Ian was presented with the Legion of Honour, France’s highest award, by Emmanuel Cocher, Consul General of France in Scotland, and Rear Admiral Patrick Chevallereau, the French Embassy’s defence attaché, along with eight other veterans from across Scotland, at a special ceremony aboard the French Navy destroyer, Aquitaine, in Leith harbour, Edinburgh.
The medal joined many others on Ian’s chest, including the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal, the Operation Overlord Medal, and one for Loyal Service which he received for his injuries.
Ian said: ‘I was one of the lucky ones to come out of it only with a disfigured left hand and arm. It brings tears to your eyes thinking back to what happened, but life goes on and you’ve got to take each day as it comes. I’m quite happy to still be here to tell the tale.’
Every year he says to his many friends in Morvern that it will be his last visit but, judging by his strong handshake and his positive outlook on life, I am sure the memorial cottage at Lochaline will be welcoming him for many years to come.