William John Kirkwood
Photo from Gallipoli 1915 Facebook page (link)
William John Kirkwood was born on 8th
August 1884 at 13 Sutherland Terrace, Partick (the family lived there from 1883
to 1886). This was renumbered as 24
Sutherland Street, then demolished for room for the Western Infirmary, now in
its turn demolished for Glasgow University.
William's birthplace ringed in red - note that with the exception of the properties fronting Byres Road the entire triangle Sutherland Street bisects were demolished after the Second World War and University Avenue diverted through the site. The modern approximation to the site of Number 24 is below:
Looking north-east, University Avenue is just beyond the bollards and Ashton Road is beyond the tree.
In adult life there is some evidence he was
known as Willie but I have stuck to William.
His father, David Allison Kirkwood, was a mercantile clerk who had
married Jeannie McPherson in Greenock (in April 1882?).
The family had moved to Bearsden by the time of the 1891 Census, living at Leabank. David’s occupation was “commercial clerk”. William has an older sister, Jeanie (after their mother) and a younger brother, Norman. As was common at the time they had a servant, 28-year old Bessie Dallas from Stranraer. Leabank is likely to have been one of the properties on Chapelton Avenue.
We know William attended Glasgow High
School around this time. He is 16 years
old at the 1901 Census and is an apprentice accountant. He has another sister, Catherine, and their
servant is now 19-year old Mary Sweeney from Shotts.
By the 1901 Census they had moved within Bearsden to a house called Dunbriton. Here is the page from the census but note that the street name is in correctly recorded as Roman Road.
In modern terms, Dunbriton is 9a Boclair Road.
David gives his occupation as “draper’s assistant” – if this was literally true, how did he afford a house in Bearsden, servant and (probably) private school for his children? I do wonder how the Census information was captured; was this a volunteer Census taker's interpretation of what was passed to them verbally? If so, did they ever take revenge on people who were offhand or officious by ‘demoting’ them??? By 1910 David's occupation was "mercantile clerk" which seems more credible.
William, his father David and brother Norman were all local golfers at Douglas Park (see also Adams, Kilroy). Obituaries of William say he took part in the Amateur Open Championship and Irish Championship, which may be so but I cannot find any corroboration. Indeed, in the local newspaper David and Norman are mentioned more frequently - this is from the Milngavie and Bearsden Herald of 11th July 1902:
On Tuesday 18th October 1910 William's older sister, Jeanie (known as Nita), was married at Dunbriton:
From Ancestry, we have a photo of the wedding party on the doorstep of Dunbriton:
The bride and groom are standing in the centre of the photo. William's brother, Norman is behind Nita and to the left, William's father David is behind the bride and groom and in between them. William is to the right of the groom; William's mother is just behind him.
In his military enlistment forms William gives his address as 8 Crosby Square in London. This was on Bishopsgate, at the site of what is now Number 22 which is the tallest building in 21st Century London.
This was his work address, however – in the 1921 Census, his brother Norman lived in London and gave as his occupation “Clerk (Stock Exchange), Robert Fleming & Co Stockbrokers etc, 8 Crosby Square, London EC”. Robert Fleming was an investment bank based in Dundee who had opened a London office in 1909 (Wikipedia) – could this be why William and then Norman moved south?
On 6th May 1915 William joined the army, specifically the Officer Training Corps of the Inns of Court based at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. While this was mainly intended for the legal profession, it may have allowed entry from professions associated with legal work in the City. William's paperwork on joining only add the details that he was five feet, seven and a half inches tall and that he could not ride a horse.
This is a photo posted by Don McLachlan on Ancestry - assuming it is William he looks to be in a very plain uniform which suggests it was in his early days of training and may have been taken in the back garden at Dunbriton.
Training was rapid, and after only ten weeks, his commanding officer recommended him for a commission (i.e. to be promoted to 2nd lieutenant, the most junior officer) on 28th July.
Part of William's application form, including his signature - note he requests being sent to a southern or a Scottish unit so was sent to ... the Yorkshire Regiment.
With a posting overseas imminent he married on 8th September 1915 to Olive Rose De Mattos, known as Winnie.
From The Chronicle 17 September 1915. William's father and Winnie's mother were the witnesses. The location suggests William could only get a short period away from barracks, indicating the imminence of the departure.
The 6th Yorkshires were destined for Turkey, specifically the Gallipoli peninsula on the western side of the Dardanelles. Turkey (at the time, called the Ottoman Empire) was an ally of Germany and the attack in this area was intended to close the Dardanelles to shipping (in and out) thereby pressuring Turkey to at least opt for neutrality. A previous attempt to achieve this by navy ships alone had failed and the first landings took place in April 1915.
Google Earth view, Gallipoli Peninsula is on the left of centre - this makes clearer the potential value of closing the Dardanelles straits as a barrier to naval and merchant shipping. The red circle shows Suvla Bay where the 6th Yorkshires had landed in early August.
The map above shows a close-up of the Suvla Bay area.
On Ancestry Don McLachlan posted another photo, presumably of William, wearing a hat that might be for warmer climates - so possibly shortly before embarking?
Unfortunately, the writing at the bottom is illegible.
William sailed on HMS Magnificent, an older battleship that had had its main armament removed and was now being used as a troopship. It left the UK on 22nd September, 14 days after William and Winnie were married. Here is a photo of the ship entering the harbour at Valetta on Malta, with William on board (photo credit Imperial War Museum):
The ship arrived in the Dardanelles area on 10th October 1915 and immediately started disembarking troops to Suvla Bay. Here is a photo of a smaller ship taking one group of men - if William was not on the boat then this is likely to be the way he got ashore:
The 6th Yorkshires were stationed around Karakol Dagh when he joined - on the map above this is the hilly area north of Suvla Bay. He was one of six replacements for officers killed or wounded since the battalion landed in August.
William was killed on 11th November; one account says it happened in a trench skirmish with Turkish troops. Another version says he was killed when the regiment’s position at Jepson’s Post was shelled. The two accounts are not necessarily contradictory but would ideally be reconciled.
Photo credit Western Front Association - note that while all accounts refer to this as Jepson's Post, it was actually named after a man called Jephson.
William is buried at the CWGC Hill 10 Cemetery, visible on the 2nd map above, immediately north of the Salt Lake.
Three other men from the 6th Yorkshires died the same day, Serjeant W Stallerbrass, Private Aaron Green aged 20 and from Sheffield, and Private Thomas Wallace aged 40 and from Sunderland.
Footnotes
Norman Kirkwood
William's younger brother also served, in Norman's case in the City of London 1st Field Ambulance. This unit was based on Malta in 1914 to 1916, which would have been a hospital area for casualties from Gallipoli. The unit then transferred to Salonika where an Allied Corps was fighting another ally of Germany, Bulgaria, until 1918.
In the 1921 Census he was living in Islington at 22 Parkhurst Road with his wife, Beatrice Irene.
He died in 1933:
Bessie Dallas, the Kirkwoods' servant in 1891, was born Elizabeth Milton Dallas in Stranraer in 1861. She married Alexander Aitken in Stranraer in 1894. If they settled in Stranraer I do not think they had any children, but I cannot find a record of her death in Stranraer either so they may have moved.
Mary Sweeney, the Kirkwoods' servant in 1901, was born in Shotts on 29th July 1881. She married Patrick Murphy in Shotts in 1910, had four children and died in 1943.
Henry (Harry) Scott-Orr was born in Brechin, Angus, on 10th September 1881, son of a minister of the church. In he 1901 Census, aged 19, he was an apprentice banker and in 1911, as we have seen he was in Woodford Green sharing a boarding house with William (and becoming unemployed!)
From here Cynthia Budd's amazing research on Ancestry identifies that he went to work as an assistant at a photographers, Walter Barnet & Co. In 1916 he photographed a German Zeppelin airship being destroyed while on a bombing raid over London. From the Victoria and Albert Museum website:
The First World War was the first conflict to see aerial
warfare and British photographer H. Scott Orr (1881-1972) was among the first
photographers to capture this new airborne battle in a photograph. The
photographer, who had a studio in Woodford Green, Essex, took several
photographs of German aircraft and published them as postcards under the
sanction of the Official Press Bureau. The series of photographs offered to the
Collection documents the historic destruction of the first German airship, the Schutte-Lanz
SL-11 Zeppelin on 3 September 1916. While anti-aircraft artillery had attempted
to bring the Zeppelin down, it was eventually shot down from the skies above
Alexandra Palace by the pilot of a BE2C, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson,
RFC, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his action.
He then enlisted in the Royal Navy as a stoker. When he was demobbed he seems to have resumed his trade as a photographer, married and moved to Manchester where he died in 1972.
Susan Mullard was born Susan Charlotte Hatcher in Stockbridge, Hampshire in 1869. She married Arthur Mullard, a coachman, and they had four children. He died aged 39 of a stomach malignancy (from the record of his death). Four years later she was William's 'landlady' at the time of the 1911 Census. This was a hard time for her - widowed in 1907, her mother died in 1910 and her father in 1912. She saw all her children into adulthood and died in 1957.
Olive Rose De Mattos, William's wife, never remarried. Her surname sounds as though it could be Portuguese but a look at family trees on Ancestry suggest the generations before her had lived in the Netherlands. She was born in Cardiff on 22nd June 1885, and seems to have been known as Winnie from childhood - in the 1891 and 1901 Census returns this is recorded as her first name. Her father, William was a Londoner by birth and his business exported coal, presumably from south Wales. After marrying William when aged 30, she lived the next fifty years as a widow - for example in the 1939 register she lives with her widowed mother in Hailsham, Sussex (next door to Winnie's brother and his wife). Winnie died in 1965 in her 90th year.
I don't know how William and Winnie might have met, but note her father was in business, he dissolved his company (with his younger brother) in 1906 and he may have had money to invest in the stock market - possibly though an account managed by William? It's just a theory but when William died in 1926 his probate record values his effects at just over £10,000, a considerable amount for the time.
Nita Kirkwood, Mrs Frank Hall Gibson. Jeanie was born at Sutherland Terrace, like William, on 29th January 1883. She lived her married life in Buckinghamshire, first in Gerrards Cross, then Chalfont St Peter, then back to Gerrards Cross.
They had three children, Jean in 1914, William in 1918 and Margaret in 1922. William's full name was William John Kirkwood Gibson after his uncle. Nita's parents moved to Buckinghamshire as well, probably to see their grandchildren.
Frank was born in Cathcart but lived in Bearsden by 1891 on Thorn Road. He had moved to Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. Glasgow School of Art Archives holds papers from a commission to help design a house for him in Gerrards Cross (16 folders of papers dated from 1909-1912, link). On their marriage record, Frank's job looks like "Gosport Departmental Manager" and is recorded as such on Scotland's People, but the 1911 Census shows he was a manager in the export department of a machinery business (possibly Agar Cross and Co. with an office at 11d Regent Street, London and exporting agricultural equipment mainly to Argentina), which seems more plausible. In the 1939 Register his occupation was "company secretary".
Frank died in 1947 and Nita died in 1949 by which time she lived at Gerrards Cross, also in Buckinghamshire.
Letters exchanged after William's death. The National Archives file on William contains letters from his father and wife. Here is the one from his father, written with great restraint considering it was so soon after receiving the news:
Return of William's personal effects:
A silver wrist watch with the initials WJK had been sent on Christmas Eve.
Letter from Reverend Dickie, New Kilpatrick Church, to Winnie's parents expressing sympathy and referring to William as Willie:
And finally, a letter in Winnie's handwriting:
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