Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 40

Yet, Angus, given his ancestors, should have known what to expect of warfare and its effect on enemies and allies alike, under dire circumstances

The other two pictures are studio portraits where, in dress uniform, including sword, cocked hat and a row of medals on his front, Crabbe is bald and has lost his beard although he displays an extravagant ramshorn moustache. On retirement EMSC’s rank was higher than that of his father, but he failed to have a portrait painted of him on a horse (although his favourite charger followed behind his coffin at his funeral in 1905). Britain in late Victorian times, had become a more humdrum, industrialized society than the early days of the monarch’s reign, when John Eyre’s portrait was commissioned.

It is unknown whether Angus knew much about the careers of his military forebears. Perhaps Daisy supplied her middle son with stories of Joseph, her great-grandfather who, as an East India Company army officer, impressed his superiors in India.

In Eyre John, Daisy’s grandfather, Angus could dream of the young officer proving his mettle in Wellington’s arduous Peninsular campaign. When it came to his maternal grandfather, EMSC, Angus was not only able to listen to Daisy’s tales of her father, he could also read about him in history books or even amass a collection of Wills’ cigarette cards with his grandfather’s picture on one.

Alpha male

Here was a Boy’s Own alpha male onto whose memory Angus could graft his aspirations. Did Daisy relate her father’s adventures in South Africa when the colonel hunted down Boer guerrillas with their crack marksmen? For two long years, the “sturdy” Crabbe, as Arthur Conan Doyle refers to him, “who was wounded four times,” flushed out these expert fighters from the mountains of the Cape Colony.

On several occasions Crabbe almost met with disaster, when he and his party were besieged by the enemy; only by much skill and subterfuge did they make their escape.

Soldiering, indeed, was in Angus’s blood, and in his Crabbe antecedents he had much to live up to. Yet, Angus, given his ancestors, should have known what to expect of warfare and its effect on enemies and allies alike, under dire circumstances.

On September 1 1934, as 2nd lieutenant, Angus joined the 1st Battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. It was a regiment and not the British army Angus wished to be part of. His grandfather’s Corps, the Grenadier Guards, was of no interest however smart or fashionable. On his application form he wrote, in order of choice, three regiments that he wished to join. The first on the list was the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders.

Although he was schooled south of the border, my uncle wished to assert his Scottish identity. As back-up, he wrote down The Black Watch and the Cameron Highlanders. The Argylls were an obvious choice. Before being invalided out, his father had entered its 3rd Battalion of Volunteers.

Many Argyllshire men from the landed and farming families had served in the Argylls. Together with the Lindsay-MacDougalls of Lunga and Stewarts of Appin, Angus found himself with men whose families knew the Largie Macdonalds and one, Ian Stewart of Achnacone, was to leave a lasting impression on him.

Recruited

Officers were also recruited from south of the Highland line and even from England but the regiment still attracted sons from famous Argyll families. As for the soldiers themselves, they hailed from Scotland’s central belt and northeast England.

Many sought a route out of poverty by joining up, but in earlier times, men were recruited from Argyll’s outlying regions including the islands and, because they understood little English, commands were given in Gaelic.

The Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders’ history stems from the final years of the 18th Century. In 1793 George III asked the 5th Duke of Argyll to raise a kilted regiment of 1,100 men, and in due course the 98th Argyllshire Highlanders were formed.

Less than a year later the new regiment, with men whose grandfathers had fought against Government troops at Culloden, embarked for South Africa to capture the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch. The 91st returned in 1803 to guard against invasion by Napoleon, English southern shores. In 1808 the regiment moved to Portugal to rout the French.

In 1871 Queen Victoria’s daughter, HRH Princess Louise, married the Marquess of Lorne (later the 9th Duke of Argyll). The following year, when the princess was appointed the regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief, the Argylls became known as Princess Louise’s Argyllshire Highlanders.

To mark their allegiance they adopted her coronet and cipher, while adding to their insignia the Argyll boar’s head and motto ‘Ne Obliviscaris’ (Do Not Forget). In 1881 under Cardwell’s reforms to the British army, the 91st amalgamated with the 93rd (the Sutherland Highlanders which, after their stand in the Crimea at Balaklava, earned the sobriquet of The Thin Red Line) and became Princess Louise’s Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders.

She designed the regiment’s new emblem which combines the Argylls boar’s head with the Sutherland wild cat. In military terms the emblem encapsulates a concept; the American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, claimed it answers the need for a belief in transcendence and in a higher aim, “an old rag of bunting blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional exterior.”

Resonance

Each former regiment retained its motto, the 91st’s ‘Ne Obliviscaris’ (Do not forget) and the 93rd’s ‘Sans Peur’ (without fear), which signified the regiment’s pledge. The Argylls’ ‘Ne obliviscaris’ has a particular resonance when thinking of Angus.

The newly-amalgamated regiment’s uniform was still the kilt but in the Sutherland tartan, which was similar to the Argyllshire regiment’s dark green Campbell design with its distinctive black line. Officers and non-commissioned officers wore a badger-head sporran, and glengarries were the favoured headgear.

Added to their kilt, sporran, bonnet, pipes, drums, emblems and motto, the Argylls possessed a mascot: Cruachan, a dark, brown Shetland pony presented by HRH Princess Louise in 1928.

The Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders served in the Boer War (1899-1902) and Great War (1914-18). The 2nd battalion, to which Angus would be assigned, remained at home until 1927, whereupon they voyaged to Jamaica for two years, followed by a four year period in Hong Kong and China.

They moved to India in 1933 where they remained, until just before the outbreak of war when they sailed for Malaya.

More tomorrow