My family’s tragic band of brothers - by Robin Scott-Elliot

 

History was my favourite subject at school and it still fascinates me today – I’ve always got a pile of history books next to my bed (my favourite place to read!). What interests me most about history is not the big picture, the great canvas that shows the rise and fall of empires and kings and queens, but the all the small portraits of the people who make up history. I want to know about those in the frontline, the led not the leaders and that’s why I have a fascination with family history.

This is what got me into history in the first place – my family story. Everyone will have something in their family history worth sharing. I help put together a podcast (We Have Ways Family Stories) in which listeners send in stories of their relatives from the Second World War. Hundreds were sent in. These range from tales of brave men and women doing incredible things… to those whose battle was just to stay alive… to those whose part in history almost makes you laugh.

One listener told of a relative who worked at a top-secret weapons factory. The roof was covered in grass to make it look like a field with a few wooden cows and sheep scattered around. This person’s job was to climb up on to the roof each morning and move the cows and sheep around in case the Germans realised they were always in the same place.

So, everyone’s family has a story but you have to go out and look for it. That’s what I did with mine and it’s one of the main reasons I became obsessed with history.

Bertie Anderson

I’ve an old photograph hanging in my house of my great-granddad, WH Anderson, known as Bertie. It’s been handed down the family and I grew up hearing stories of Bertie and his three brothers, Ronnie, Charlie and Teddie. They were all killed in the First World War and so I decided I wanted to write their story so we would have a way of always remembering them and their short lives.

The Anderson brothers

This is what I found out…

When war began in the hot summer of 1914, Charlie Anderson, a lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry, wrote home that he “was so glad we will all be in this one together.” Charlie, like many Britons and in particular British soldiers, was excited at the thought of going to war. He pictured marching off to fight the Germans with his three brothers at his side. But by the time his brothers arrived in France, Charlie was already dead.

Charlie’s war lasted eight days. He went into the trenches on 11 December 1914. On 19 December he took part in an attack on the German lines and was never seen again. His body was never found. His parents, Nora and Willie, were told he was missing, but that didn’t mean he was dead. They had to wait seven terrible months until it was confirmed Charlie was gone forever.

By then Ronnie was at the front. He joined Charlie’s battalion, determined to ‘do his bit’, as people at the time used to say.

He lasted longer than Charlie, but not by long. In October 1915, Ronnie, a tall man with long legs, didn’t notice he’d stopped by a place in the trench which was not as deep as the rest. He was shot by a sniper.

What must this have been like for the two remaining brothers, Bertie and Teddie? What about Nora and Willie? Two of their children gone, the remaining two now at the front and in daily danger of suffering the same fate. What was it like to live like that for day after day, month after month, year after year?

Teddie Anderson

By March 1918, Teddie was in the Royal Flying Corps – he left school and joined up. The first time he went abroad was to go to war. If you lasted six months at the front as a pilot, you were sent home to be an instructor – most pilots didn’t last that long. Teddie sent long letters home from France. In one he wrote about singing all the way home after surviving a raid on some German observation balloons. I picture him sitting in the cockpit, swaddled in his massive leather coat with its fur collar, scarf flapping in the wind and goggles fixed tight, shouting out his song. I wonder what song it was?

On 16 March 1918, Teddie, now an instructor in Kent, suffered a catastrophic engine failure while on a test flight. His injuries were fatal. “He slipped away to a better place,” the nurse who treated him wrote to Nora.

Nora put a thin black line through 16 on her pocket March calendar. Nine days later she made another mark.

On 21 March, the Germans launched a huge attack, a last bid to win the war. Bertie and his men of the Highland Light Infantry stood in their way. On 25 March he was killed. He’d spent his final day leading his men in attack after attack. He died a hero – later awarded a Victoria Cross. The medal is in the Imperial War Museum along with photographs and the story of him and his brothers. When I go to London, I go and see the medal. It feels like I’m saying hello.

The telegram sent to Bertie's wife, Gertie,
 informing her that he'd been killed

Bertie never knew of the medal, or the fact he would be considered a hero. I wonder what Nora, his mother, made of it. Four children, all gone in the space of four years. How do you cope with that? She made an album about her boys, photographs and letters and newspaper cuttings, everything she had of them. All she had left of them.

I’ve got the album. I’m looking after it until I hand it on to my children and I hope they will hand it on in due course. And that way someone will always remember Nora’s boys, Bertie, Ronnie, Charlie and Teddie.

Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t. He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.