War dead

[DJS]

Watched with interest the documentary last night about the players from Hearts and other clubs that fought with the 16th Royal Scots in WW1.

Do we know if any Caley or Thistle players went to war and were killed in action? I suspect there must be at least one or two and perhaps their sacrifice should be recognised in some way.

[Tichy_Blacks_Back]

DJS - I am sure there would have been several but that type of information would be pretty difficult to unearth now....especially for those who took part in WWI

WWII information though should still be accessible - I am surprised that is not the kind of thing that would have been among the documents and other memorabilia, trophies, photographs, paintings etc that were handed over to ICT when the clubs merged....

[Charles Bannerman]

Watched with interest the documentary last night about the players from Hearts and other clubs that fought with the 16th Royal Scots in WW1.

Do we know if any Caley or Thistle players went to war and were killed in action? I suspect there must be at least one or two and perhaps their sacrifice should be recognised in some way.

It's inevitable that a large number of players (and officials) from both clubs would have enlisted in both wars, and statistically 15% or more of them would have been killed in WW1. The casualty rates were a good deal lower in WW2 but there would have been significant numbers there too.

It's a notoriously difficult job to track people from an organisation who served or died in the wars. As it happens a few years ago I made a study of that very subject in relation to former pupils of Inverness Royal Academy where the research had been done during and immediately after the conflicts concerned and there were still difficulties. 60 and 90 years on, this would be a lot more problematic and made more complex still by the fact that a lot of Caley's records were lost in the fire of 1950.

As it happens the Hearts story of WW1 was relatively easy to pin down since the players almost en bloc enlisted in McCrae's battalion of Royal Scots and hence were quite easily traced. Possibly the nearest we have in Inverness was the 4th Camerons, a Territorial battalion which went over to France as part of Kitchener's New Army early in 1915 and the 5th Camerons, again a Territorial battalion which formed part of 152 Brigade of the reformed 51st Highland Division after the original was largely captured at St. Valery in 1940 and which went right through North Africa, Sicily, France, Holland and eventually Germany.

[DJS]

Having researched some of my own family's war history I know how difficult it can be. The only possible "easy" solution might be to check out the local press from when football restarted in 1919 to see if they touch on the matter of the players missing having been killed in action.