Captain Fergus Bowes Lyon, Black Watch

 

The image of Fergus is reproduced by courtesy 

of his grandson, Jamie Joicey-Cecil.

Fergus was born at St Paul’s Walden Bury in April 1889 and duly packed off to Eton like all of his brothers. Having decided on a military career, he was commissioned into the Bedfordshire Regiment’s Territorial 4^th Battalion at the age of 19, and he transferred to the Black Watch’s Regular 2^nd Battalion just before it was posted to India two years later. He was thoroughly content with his life as a Subaltern in the Punjab, but as the Earl’s fourth son he was neither the heir nor the spare so he was entirely dependent on a salary which left him with very little in hand after settling his mess bills. He persevered for a little over three years but eventually, and with great reluctance, he resigned his commission in February 1914 and set about earning more money in the City. 

Needs must, but in all honesty his heart wasn’t in it, and he was perversely relieved when the call to arms rang out a few months later. War was declared on 4^th August, and Fergus was delighted to have his commission restored within a fortnight. Pausing only to marry his fiancée Lady Christian Dawson-Damer at a week’s notice, he joined the Black Watch’s 8^th Battalion, which was hard at work training its recruits at Aldershot. 

The Battalion landed in France in May 1915 and made its way to Bethune, footslogging in and out of successive trenches along the line facing the truly formidable German defences. Fergus, by now a Captain, wrote home to tell of the gas being used by the Germans, and described their trenches as being “quite impregnable, rows and rows of them and all lined with concrete and with murderous machine guns”.

Fergus managed to get home for five days towards the end of August, and met the daughter who had arrived four weeks earlier. He then rejoined his Battalion as it made its final preparations for what would become known as the Battle of Loos. The Black Watch was about to learn if the German line really was as impregnable as Fergus had thought. 

The German strategy had been to do no more than hold their line while they concentrated on destroying the Russian armies to the East, and the British would also have preferred to maintain a defensive role for the time being because the received wisdom was that they would not reach anything like enough strength for a successful offensive until the Spring of 1916. However, things were going very badly for the Russians so there was an urgent need to divert German attention from the East : it would be disastrous if a Russian defeat were to release all of the German divisions currently deployed against them. 

The British Army was therefore committed to a battle not of its own choosing, over a battleground utterly unsuited for an attack, when it was quite simply not ready for a major offensive in terms of either manpower or munitions. There could only be one outcome, although there was so very nearly another... 

The battle opened on 25 September, after a four-day barrage, and Fergus’s Battalion had the dubious honour of being allocated the Hohenzollern Redoubt as its objective. This was the most formidable point in the German line, a mighty stronghold which dominated the entire battlefield, but by mid-morning the Jocks had nevertheless succeeded in reaching and occupying the enemy trench network around it, and by the end of the first day considerable sections of the German front line were in British hands. However, the reserves had been held too far back to exploit the breakthrough, and when the battle resumed on the second day, the Germans were able to repulse all attempts to continue the advance.

By dawn on the third day, the tide had turned, and the attackers were in difficulties. German grenades were exploding in the Redoubt, men were observed falling back, and it was obvious that that the enemy was rapidly regaining hold upon the Redoubt itself. Fergus and his men, exhausted after fighting for two days and nights, had only just been relieved when new orders arrived : as one of the few surviving officers Fergus was to put together a scratch force of 100 men and return to the Redoubt to rally any men seen retiring.

Fergus did exactly that, but in leading from in front he made himself an obvious target and just as he reached the German line a grenade landed at his feet and shattered one of his legs, and he was then hit by bullets in the chest and shoulder. He collapsed into the arms of one of his sergeants and died soon after. He was 26 years old, and had celebrated his first wedding anniversary only a week before.

His men did go on to prevent the enemy from advancing further, but the fighting subsided on the fourth day and the British withdrew to their starting positions having taken some 61,000 casualties :  the Black Watch’s 8^th Battalion alone lost over 500 men, including Fergus and 18 of his fellow officers. It was a disastrous outcome, but the real tragedy of that battle was how close it had come to being a complete success. Those who broke through to the crest of Hill 70 on the first day had seen nothing ahead of them but an unoccupied and incomplete trench system.

 As Major-General Richard Hilton observed “The only two things that prevented our advancing into the suburbs of Lens were, firstly, the exhaustion of the Jocks themselves and, secondly, the flanking fire of numerous German machine-guns, which swept that bare hill from some factory buildings to the south of us. All that we needed was more artillery ammunition to blast those clearly-located machine-guns, plus some fresh infantry to take over from the weary and depleted Jocks. But, alas, neither ammunition nor reinforcements were immediately available, and the great opportunity passed.” 

There is no suggestion that the Allies would have simply swept on to Berlin, but a massive German defeat at this stage could well have led to a 1915 Armistice, and a very different world history thereafter.

The War Office’s brutal telegram now began a century-long saga which compounded the family’s grief : “Deeply regret to inform you that Captain the Hon Fergus Bowes Lyon was killed in action between 25/27 September 1915. Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy”. To add to the family’s distress, it then took the War Office three months to report that his body had not been recovered, and a further five months to report that his grave had now been found after all, located in a quarry in Vermelle.

 Lord Elphinstone, Fergus’s brother-in-law, made his way to Quarry Cemetery as soon as the Armistice took effect in November 1918 and although he saw that a number of graves had been destroyed by shellfire since 1915, he did identify the grave of Fergus, clearly marked and still intact. A small comfort perhaps, but not for long.

The grave marker disappeared at some point during the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s otherwise splendid refurbishment of Quarry Cemetery. Its documents do record Fergus’s burial in the cemetery, but there is no mention of him in its final grave registration forms, so in the absence of a headstone it was thought appropriate to add his name to the Loos Memorial to the Missing.

That was clearly on his sister’s mind as she entered Westminster Abbey for her marriage to Prince Albert in 1923 : Elizabeth Bowes Lyon suddenly left her father’s side for an unscripted detour to the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, on which she laid her wedding bouquet of white roses.

A century later, Fergus’s grandson persuaded the Commission to re-visit the logic of its original decision and, on due reflection, it agreed to the erection of a special memorial headstone in Quarry Cemetery, showing that Fergus is “Buried near this spot”. His name will therefore be removed from the Loos Memorial when the relevant panel is next replaced because, to adopt General Plumer’s emotive assurance at Ypres, “Fergus is not missing. He is here”.

Reproduced by courtesy of Philippe Clerbout

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Sources

London Gazette            1909 @ 134 ; 1910 @ 9141 ; 1914 @ 65013 and 6981 ; 1915 @ 608.

Indian Army List            1912 @ 235

National Archives         Service Record WO 339/7764 ; Medal Index WO 372/12

 

Chris Baker The Long, Long Trail ; Arthur Wauchope History of the Black Watch ; Gerald Gliddon The Aristocracy and the Great War ; Philip Warner The Battle of Loos ; William Shawcross Queen Elizabeth