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| James and Nettie AINSLIE (Cairo, Egypt, 1917) |
My grandad, James AINSLIE, like so many young men during
WW1, answered the call to "Fight for King and Country". It must have been an exciting, anxious,
and sad time as he left home to enlist with the 1/4 (The Border) Battalion
Territorial Forces of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB) stationed in
Galashiels. At
the time, he was a young man of 22, still living with his parents in Ednam, in
the Scottish border country, and working as a ploughman. He was part of a large agricultural family
with 7 siblings, but it is possible that his youngest sister, Nettie, was his
favourite. When James went to war, Nettie
would have been about 4 years old.
The above photo taken in Cairo, Egypt 1917, shows him holding a paper in his hands (probably a letter) and it looks
like he is thinking of the letter and the letter writer. The young girl on the top right of the picture is his sister Nettie (who would have
been about 5 or 6 at the time).
I hope that thoughts of home and family brought him some
comfort as he fought in the Battle of Gallipoli, considered to be one of the
bloodiest battles of WW1. On July 12,
1915, in what is described as ‘one of the darkest days in the history of the
Scottish Borderers’ the casualty list for his battalion for that day alone was
535.
Thinking about the carnage at the Battle of Gallipoli I
wondered how grandad came out of it with no major injuries. One possible reason could be that he was
active behind the front line, in charge of the horses that were used to move heavy
machinery and guns to the battle field from the beaches and staging areas.
This requires a bit more research but I think that there is
some evidence for his being one of the soldiers in charge of the horses. For one thing, in a number of pictures he is holding a riding crop and wearing riding boots.
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| James AINSLIE (top right) with friends possibly in Alexandria, Egypt 1916/17 |
Also lending some credence to this is that he worked as a ploughman before enlisting. The kind of work that he did would have involved hard physical work leading a team of horses plowing the fields. He would have used one, two or three horses, but likely two horses, and would have had to know how to handle the horses to keep them pulling together in a straight line. He would also have had to care for the horses, feeding, grooming, and stabling them.
This would have been useful skills for working with horses while
serving during WW1. Soldiers in charge
of the horses would have cared for their horses from boarding the troop ship
in Avonmouth to arrival in Gallipoli via Mudros, Greece. Stanley BLANDFORD describes in one of his
letters home (Dorset Brothers at War by Jessica Christian, page 52, letter
dated April 9, 1915) about the work of caring for the horses while on the troop
ship to Egypt: “On the Sunday we cleaned out the stables. It is a hard and dirty job. The horses are each in narrow boarded
partitions. They have just room to stand
up and move their legs just a little.
They are stabled in long lines on either side of two corridors, which
run the length of the two extensive holds…You ought to see us cleaning out,
stripped to the waist…all the morning shovelling dung and carrying it in
baskets to the decks where we deposit it in the sea.” He also discussed his responsibility for
boarding and de-boarding the horses and the daily feeding and caring for the
horses assigned to him once landed. If grandad was in charge of some of the horses, he would have done similar work.
At Gallipoli, horses would have been used to move heavy equipment and guns from the boats onto land and to transport them to the front line. The picture below was taken at Sulva Bay where grandad’s battalion was stationed. It gives a good idea of how many horses were used and how they were kept at the 'horse lines' waiting to transport people and equipment.
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| British horse lines at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. Imperial War Museum item # Q 13452 |
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