John Francis Logan

Photo and quotes in the text are from the Hillhead High School War Memorial Volume (1921)

John Francis Logan was born 6^th April 1884 at 4 Otago Street, Hillhead. The 1894 map shows buildings on Otago Street right up to the junction with those fronting on Great Western Road:

However, the properties on the corner were demolished to make way for a bank and today this is the building that survives. The first shop on Otago Street (Retro) is number 8 (the low building between number 8 and the corner building is an electricity sub-station):

John's father, James Logan, was a drapery warehouseman. He had married John's mother, Frances Ann Fish, in Gateshead in 1883. John was their first child.

By 1891 the family was in Kelvinside at 12 Kelbourne Street and John has a younger brother, William James, born in 1887.

Note I believe that street renumbering in the 20th Century has led to number 12 now being number 54. (Thanks to multiple people on the Facebook page "Old Maryhill and Old Glasgow for help untnagling this.)

John attended Hillhead High School where, it was said, "he took a good place in his classes and had an interest in all forms of sport." He was a rugby player and "for some years was a prominent player in the 2nd XV".

By the 1901 census the family was at 11 Dryburgh Gardens:

James was still a drapery warehouseman and John (now age 17) had followed his trade and was an apprentice drapery warehouseman; while the Census does not record where they worked, from other sources "he entered the service of Messrs. Mann, Byars & Co., and after gaining some experience there he began business for himself as a manufacturers' agent."

Mann, Byars does not mean much to us today but between 1847 and 1938 it grew from its premises on Glassford Street in Glasgow and its shop, warehouse and factories occupied much of the block we now know as Marks and Spencers between Glassford Street and Virginia Street. the following photo is from The Glasgow Story website (click here)

Similar view in 2024:

I have also covered Mann Byars in an earlier post, John Edwards' father was also a warehouseman here but not until the 1920s (click here). If you have not read Bruce Downie's post you are in for a treat as it has photos and very readable history of the buildings between Glassford and Virginia Streets, which includes the only place in Glasgow where we know Robert Burns stayed (click here).

We have a rare insight into the pastimes of the men who fell in 1914-1918 - "Music and the drama had a great attraction for him, and for several years he was a member of the Glasgow Operatic Society and took part in many of its performances." I can't find any more about the Glasgow Operatic Society and wonder if this is the same thing as the Glasgow Grand Opera Society which was established in 1906 (see link)

By the 1911 Census John had become a clerk working for a shipping company and his brother William was a warehouseman; the boys still lived at home aged 26 and 23 and John's father was a manager in the warehouse. Possibly through having three incomes in the household, there were signs the Logans were becoming more affluent - they had a housemaid, Rebecca Gray, aged 21, and they lived at 1 Partickhill Road:

The road on the left hand side is Hyndland Street and in modern terms, Cottiers in the old church is just over the left shoulder of the 'camera'.

This map shows the flats the family lived in from John's birth 1884 to this point:

John's next job was as a manufacturer's agent or as he described his job: a "commission agent" - I take this to mean he was a middle-man between manufacturers and stores like Mann Byars.

Around this time the Logans moved to Bearsden, a house called Restalrig on South Erskine Park. Comparing records from 1915 and 1940 when street numbering became more common this can be identified as number 29:

John himself would not have lived here for long. He had previously been in the 1st Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, a part-time unit, for five years, finishing as a corporal. "Soon after war broke out [in August 1914] he joined the Lanarkshire Yeomanry as a private, transferring later to the 7/8th K.O.S.B. With them he proceeded to France and came safely through the heavy fighting on the Somme in 1916."

The 7th and 8th were originally separate battalions but at the Battle of Loos in 1915, the 7th lost two-thirds and the 8th one-third of the men serving killed or wounded; in early 1916 they amalgamated into a single battalion. John did not join until 24th August 1916 so when the Battle of the Somme was roughly halfway through.

In early December he was promoted to Lance Corporal and on Christmas Eve 1916 he was sent home for training as an officer, which took place at Lichfield in Staffordshire.

During this time he took the opportunity to marry Jessie White Brown, daughter of a surface colliery foreman from Motherwell. He was 33, she was 26 and gave her occupation as typist. While John still gave his job as commission agent, he was in the Cadet Officers' Training Corps. Jessie's home was described as Glenside on Shields Road in Motherwell; checking the valuation roll, Joseph, her father, was resident at number 180 just by Burnside Street.

The wedding took place on 4th June 1917 at the Windsor Hotel in Glasgow, which is not known today but was a very popular venue at the time. The Lost Glasgow Facebook page has a great post (click here), lovely photos and a short, informative text:

The location is on St Vincent Street at the junction with Douglas Street - here's my attempt to use Google Street View to give you an idea of where it is:

Number 250 is on the right, just as St Vincent Street starts to dip down to cross the M8.

As an officer he was posted to the Royal Scots Fusiliers and returned to France in August 1917 in the 1st Battalion.

The Hillhead High School profile describes what happened next in these terms: "During the great German advance in the spring of 1918 his battalion shared in the glory of stemming the onrush of the enemy, but at Locon on the 12th April he fell in action while gallantly leading his men. His School and the many friends who mourn his loss have the satisfaction of knowing that he contributed his full share to the victory that was already in sight when he fell."

With hindsight, we know the war would end within the year but in April 1918 this would not have been apparent. While the first two months of World War One involved advances across open country measured in miles, by the end of October 1914 the front line had become the extensive trench systems most people associate with this conflict. Loos, the Some, Arras and Passchendaele were huge, prolonged British attempts to breakthrough that turned into battles of attrition, the hope that killing Germans would eventually exhaust her manpower. In 1917 the ally of the British and French, the Russian Empire, collapsed and the German forces opposing that country were now freed for the fighting in France and Belgium. While the German offensive in March 1918 was expected, its size and the superior tactics were not, and it was a desperate time (see map above with German gains shown in brown) with all the hard-won gains of the battles of attrition being lost.

John's battalion was rushed forward to the upper of the two brown areas on the map (marked Lys Offensive), more precisely at the southern end of the battle. overnight they were put into the line overlooking a canal but close to dawn they got orders to cross the canal and defend the east bank near a village called Locon. here's how the area looks today:

Locon is the village in the bottom right, Hinges is bottom left - note the road running north-south marked D945 was not there in 1918. Here is the same area from a map in the War Diary of the 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers, held by the National Archive in London (again with Locon bottom right and Hinges bottom left):

The British were defending the area to the left of the map, the Germans were attacking from the top-right but not in a single thrust - as they met resistance from John's battalion, they would have moved men up around the flanks, set up machine guns and fired into the British positions from the flank and even the rear. (German machine guns could kill at a range of one mile - this is roughly the distance from Tesco on Maryhill Road to Queens Cross, so many men would have been killed without seeing their attacker.)

John and his men would have been taking what cover they could but as they were in farm fields and had arrived as dawn was breaking (standing up to dig in daylight would be suicidal) their ability to dig in would have been minimal. These photos show men of the 51st Highland Division digging in (not under fire!) at Hinges two days earlier, so they give a good idea of what John would have been trying to do (credit for both photos Imperial War Museum):

Note the grim looks on the faces of the two men looking at the camera. The photo is not completely clear but at least some of the men digging seem to be wearing gas masks - shelling by German artillery included gas shells as well as high explosives.

It's not certain this is the same group - they certainly seem more relaxed suggesting they were in reserve, but note how shallow the 'wall' is and that it would offer no protection from the rear and even the flanks

There's no record of what happened to John that day. The colonel of the battalion produced a nine page report with masses of detail but at 1.45pm a message was received from the officer commanding A Company that the officer commanding B Company was missing, and of his two junior officers one was killed and was wounded and missing. "... most of the men are casualties. From one or two survivors ... it would appear that the enemy attacked this company from the right rear and right flank, developing intense machine gun fire."

This is the approximate modern view a machine gunner would have had behind B Company and to the right (going back to the 1918 map this is looking towards the area marked with the red capital letters M L B):

and this is approximately where B Company would have made its stand:

John's field grave was reported to be located about 1000 yards north-east of Locon.

At the end of his report the colonel of John's battalion gave the casualty figures as 11 dead, 171 wounded, 167 missing (including 16 known to be wounded), giving a total loss in fighting strength of 349. I cannot find a figure for the number of men at the start of the battle but this would probably have been at least 50% lost.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission list of war dead records 65 men of the battalion died that day - others may have died of wounds subsequently. About half the records include an address for a parent or (more rarely) a wife - many are from the Glasgow area although there are English and Irish as well. Only eight have a known grave - as the British were pushed back, the dead and some wounded would have been left behind. They would have been buried but the graves may not have recorded a name and even if it did, a simple wooden cross could have been lost to subsequent fighting or the weather. These men are commemorated on several monuments to men with no known grave.

John was 'lucky' in that his body was buried and later transferred to Hinges Military Cemetery (photo credit WW1cemeteries.com):