Somme soldier remembered
A CAMPBELTOWN teacher who went to war after being enraged by a Zeppelin bombing his school outside London died in the worst battle of the conflict.
AMONG the many Campbeltown casualties of the Battle of the Somme, few have a story more poignant than that of Professor George Stewart.
Born in Kirk Street, Campbeltown, in 1878, George was the second of Mary and John Stewart’s nine children. Mr Stewart senior was, between 1879 and 1906, Inspector for the Poor, Collector of Rates and Registrar for Campbeltown.
Originally from Stornoway, George’s father bought a home in Witchburn Road sometime after 1895 and named it Arnish, after the region of Lewis from which he came.
This house, which still bears the name today, is where George was born.
Life was difficult for the Stewarts. In 1890 their sixth-born child succumbed to the scourge of the time, tuberculosis.
It was 16 more years before the fatal illness returned and took their three children still living at home, as well as their mother, Mary, one-by-one in the years between 1907 and 1912.
By this time, George, who was a professor of history and english, and professor of a degree in Scottish law, had moved to India, where his brother, John Alexander, worked as the manager of the Bank of India in Bombay.
George took up a teaching post at the Muir Central College in Allahabad, where he taught Indian students whose main aim was entry into the Indian Civil Service.
George decided, in 1913, perhaps due to his ill health, to return to Britain. It was during his recuperation in London that he met and fell in love with nurse, Mabel Rosamond Turney.
With plans to marry, George revived his unused Scottish law degree and began revising to pass the English Bar.
Teaching post
He took up a teaching post at the Whitgift School in Croydon, London, an independent day and boarding school for boys, to provide his income.
Not long after, in September 1914, George learned of the tragic suicide of his brother, John Alexander, in India, presumed to be of depression as a result of being so far removed from his ever depleting family.
By this point, the horrors of the Great War were already in full flow.
On the night of October 13/14, 1915, a Zeppelin L14, a type of Nazi airship used during the First World War for reconnaissance and bombing missions, abandoned its planned mission and turned for home.
On the way, it jettisoned its bombs indiscriminately over Croyden, and in doing so, took the lives of three young Whitgift School students, brothers Roy, Brian and Gordon Currie, who happened to be amongst those taught by George.
This horrific event sparked a turning point for the previously mild-mannered professor, as George, consumed by rage, became determined to avenge the deaths of his three young pupils.
He rushed to the nearest army recruiting office to enlist but was rejected on account of his health, age and the shortage of good teachers.
Unwilling to accept this, George sought another way to join the fight, so he turned to the London Irish Rifles, a pre-war territorial force battalion.
They had, until 1916 and conscription, much recruitment autonomy, concentrating mainly on certain social classes.
Even the privates tended to be middle class, and this is possibly the way that George, using friends and contacts, over-