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In Search of Willie Patterson
A Scottish Soldier in the Age of Imperialism
Dr Fred Reid
Foreword by Professor Hamish Fraser,
Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde
ISBN 0953503674 pbk £10.99£5.00
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We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor
we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most
remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduct isn't all
your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow
into plaster saints …
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy
that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!'
But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when
the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that,
an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you
bet that Tommy sees!*
*Rudyard Kipling Tommy
The Book
Musing on the history of his family, Reid came to focus on his grandfather, Willie Patterson. Estranged from Willie by his womanising, Reid's mother had woven a legend of 'the black sheep of the family' which he decided to research and evaluate.
This book tells the story of Reid's quest to understand the grandfather he never knew. In telling it, he is frank about the great pains a blind man must take to overcome many barriers to research. With the help of children and friends, he journeyed to Ireland and Mozambique, penetrating the Public Record Office and other archives.
This book also places Willie Patterson's life in context, making him more intelligible - though not necessarily likeable. Born of an Ulster father and Scottish mother in 1883, Willie grew up in the Calton, a notorious slum district of Glasgow. After leaving school barely literate, he worked for a time as a labourer and then joined the British army just after the Boer War. He served in Ireland and India until 1910. According to military historians, many of the 'other ranks' remained uncouth sweepings from the city slums, but Willie improved himself. He took advantage of the education and training which the army offered even then, emerging from his first period of service as a trained telegraphist and telephone lineman. He also emerged with syphilis and this book truthfully reveals the conditions of army life which visited that scourge on so many soldiers and the women who consorted with them. It shows that the myth of its untreatability before 1914 is untrue, at least in Willie's case. Nevertheless, his sexual history came to blight his marriage to Sally Craig and overshadowed his distinguished service in the East African campaign of the First World War.
On a bush-covered hill in remote Mozambique, Willie won the Military Medal for 'conspicuous gallantry in action and devotion to duty'. His return to a 'land fit for heroes' was not happy, either in personal or social terms. His son was drowned in a tragic accident at the age of fourteen. His marriage broke down in implacable strife. Clydebank plunged into economic depression. Willie's reactions were often cynical, but he also joined the Independent Labour Party and participated in the turbulent politics of 'Red Clydeside'. His daughter Margaret, mother of the author, shared his politics but loathed his patriarchal claims. His wife, Sally, finally walked out of the marriage with her two daughters.
Reid tells Willie's story with insight into the social conditions and historical forces which helped to shape the man. But how did Willie feel about it all ? In the absence of personal testimony, Reid compares him to Thomas Hardy's Michael Henchard, another overbearing self-made man whose mistakes produced a dysfunctional family and a tragic ending. Willie's achievements and martial virtues should be respected, he argues, even by those who deplore militarism and imperialism. Only true pacifists have a right to despise Tommy Atkins.
Biography
Dr Fred Reid was born in 1937. At the age of fourteen he went blind and was subsequently educated at the Royal Blind School, Edinburgh. In 1962, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a first-class degree in History and went on to obtain his D.Phil at the Queen's College, Oxford. In 1997 he retired as Senior Lecturer in History from Warwick University. His publications include James Keir Hardie: the Making of a Socialist and a number of essays on Thomas Hardy. He is married to a blind physiotherapist and together they have raised three sighted children.
Reviews
This book is a small masterpiece of the historian's art. With deftness of touch and rare precision of detail, Fred Reid succeeds in evoking the milieux and ultimately the age in which a life was led, in a way which is constantly both instructive and moving. No one with an ounce of historical imagination could fail to be absorbed by this ingenious and convincing work of biographical reconstruction.
Dr Robin Okey
Reader in History at Warwick University.
Fred Reid, In Search of Willie Patterson. A Scottish Soldier in the Age of Imperialism (Dunfermline: Cualann Press, 2002) ISBN 0 9535036 7 4, pbk, 159 pp
Fred Reid’s publisher kindly sent me a copy of this book, presumably in return for some very limited help I gave Fred at the outset of his search for Willie Patterson. I regret to admit that the book sat unread and virtually unopened on my desk for months. Then fate took a hand. I recently conducted a PhD examination with Fred’s old colleague Tony Mason. I happened to mention to Tony over lunch that I was thinking of writing a piece about my grandfather’s war. ‘You should look at Fred Reid’s book,’ he said. So I did. And I am glad I did. It is a gem of the historian’s craft.
Willie Patterson was Fred Reid’s grandfather. Fred never knew Willie. The search for him was hampered by Fred’s mother’s hostility to her father and by her memories, which turned out to be jumbled in at least one key respect. The search was also hampered by a lack of ‘evidence’. Historians like paper. But it is frightening how little useful paper evidence many (perhaps most) working-class lives leave behind. In Willie’s case, like that of my own grandfather, his army record proved a godsend. With little more of real substance to go on, Fred Reid chose to evoke Willie in the environment of late Victorian working class Glasgow that shaped him. He has succeeded brilliantly.
Willie’s reputation was that of a bad lot, a violent, feckless, sexually diseased womaniser who abandoned his wife and children to poverty. Fred Reid’s portrait is less harsh, more understanding, more ambiguous. But it is never sentimental. His explanation of the army’s appeal to badly educated working-class recruits is exceptionally perceptive. ‘Squaddies’ had their own agenda. They were not social blanks on which the army was free to stamp its image. Willie’s agenda was self-betterment. The hope was that the army would provide him with the skills to prosper on return to civilian life. The hope was hardly fulfilled, but Willie did eventually achieve a degree of white- collar respectability. There is an irony here. For whatever else the Edwardian army was, it was not respectable. Fred Reid’s portrait is uncompromising in its depiction of drunkenness, misogyny, racism and casual violence. His account of Willie Patterson’s painful ‘adjustment’ from the someone of being a ‘sahib’ to the no one of living in tenement poverty with a strong-minded wife displays a generosity of spirit worthy of Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn.
Fred Reid’s search for Willie Patterson took him not only across time but also across the world. Willie had not one military career, but three. His pre-war career in the Connaught Rangers brought no military distinction, exposed him to sexual licence and infected him with syphilis. It also taught him very few skills useful in civilian life. His second career as a Reservist recalled to the colours when war broke out was also disappointing. Willie’s attempt to re-engage as a Regular, with the eventual prospect of a pension, was rebuffed by the regiment. He was disgusted. When his term as a Reservist expired, at the end of 1915, he took his discharge and returned to civilian life. But on 5 May 1916, two days after the introduction of conscription for all males aged 18 to 41, he joined the Royal Engineers. Here he became a telegrapher and was shipped out to a forgotten war in East Africa, fought mainly by black men under white officers across a battlefield the size of western Europe, interspersed by ambush and occasional savage fire fights, with the omnipresence of disease, especially malaria. Here, Willie not only learned skills of real use to the aspirationally mobile, but he also achieved military distinction, winning the Military Medal on a forgotten battlefield, at Medo in Mozambique, a battlefield that Fred Reid located only after a display of the greatest ingenuity and detective skills.
Fred Reid ends his book where he began it, with the relationship between his mother and his grandfather. This book is the story of Fred’s journey. He should have the last words: ‘So the daughter detested her father for military service in a shameful cause, while the father suffered the effects of diseases acquired in defence of British power. She banished him from her life and he withdrew into oblivion. Between them, however, there was a common ground, which she could never have admitted. The teenage laundry worker who passionately supported the International Brigade and Republican Spain was as keen on martial virtues as the father who doggedly did his duty against the “brutes and braggarts” of the German Empire. Historical judgement cannot, in any final sense, condemn either as completely wrong. On this view of history, their descendants have at least this comfort: their ghosts can, after all, share some kind of strange meeting.’ This is an extraordinary and moving book.
John Bourne
Centre for First World War Studies