Category Archives: Keiths

Ocean Liners: Speed and Style

Round the world with Christina Keith

In November 1925 the SS Empress of Scotland set sail from Southampton across the Atlantic, at the start of a voyage round the world. Among her passengers was 36-year-old Christina Keith, a Classics lecturer from St Hilda’s College Oxford who was on a year’s sabbatical. Independent-minded and always unconventional, Christina was embarking on the voyage alone, writing, ‘I want to meet different people for one year.’

Christina was my great-aunt, and I published her wartime memoir as War Classics. She was born in Thurso in 1889 and studied the male-dominated subjects of Latin, Greek and Classical Archaeology at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities. Her pioneering early career was interrupted by the First World War, and War Classics recounts her experiences lecturing to the troops in France and exploring the devastated battlefields soon after the guns had fallen silent.

Now, after six years of lecturing in Oxford, she was seeking wider horizons once more. I have the letters she wrote to her mother during her cruise, and they are full of vivid descriptions of life on board a 1920s ocean liner, and the changing world she met at each different port.

That’s why I was so keen to see the Ocean Liners: Speed and Style exhibition at the new V&A in Dundee, and it didn’t disappoint. The exhibition explores the cutting edge design and cultural impact of these legendary ships, and helped me place the story of Christina’s voyage and of her ship – built in Germany as the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria in 1905 – within that wider context.

It was a stunning, if bitterly cold, day for my first visit to the V&A Dundee, with the impressive building looming out of the freezing fog, and the RSS Discovery appropriately enough reflected in (very thin) ice.

I think Christina and I may well have some unfinished business …

On that night of all nights every man, drunk or sober, was to find a welcome: Christina Keith, 11 November 1918

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War Classics cover

One hundred years ago my great-aunt Christina was behind the lines in Dieppe as a tutor with the army’s education scheme. She describes the day when peace was declared after the four long years which had devastated her generation:

Late in the afternoon I went into the huts to see the men and how they took it. The Base Commandant had sent round word to close the canteens if we wished, as the men might be drunk. But we did not wish. On that night of all nights every man, drunk or sober, was to find a welcome there.

When I went in, they were still sober and the hut was packed to the door. Most of them were singing and some few laughing and talking. Would you like to know what they sang? No ‘Rule Britannia’ or ‘God Save The King’ – English soldiers rarely sing either unless they are bidden. No – it was a chorus we were to hear every day for the next six months, with varying emphasis – ‘When do we go home?’, each word punctuated by thumps of mugs on tables, and the last word raised the roof.

At night they were many of them drunk, and the sober ones, with thoughts of the punctilious WAACs with whom they were dancing, were for turning the drunks out. ‘No, no,’ said the Hut leader firmly, ‘let the drunks dance by themselves in this corner.’ So, sometimes three together, sometimes the orthodox two, sometimes one, the drunks danced merrily in their corner; whenever one, well meaning but nothing more, lurched out to grab a WAAC, he was hastily but tenderly shepherded back by a stronger comrade.

Outside bells blared; flags flew; bands played; at every window in the Grande Rue faces looked out, laughing, crying. In the distance the Marseillaise came rolling down and its echo ‘It’s – a – long – way – to – go.’

I stole into the Cathedral. Over the altar hung our flags, quiet and still. There was no need to wave them now. Utter quietness here and one spot of light only. In the chapel at my side lay the empty tomb and the marble watchers beside it. The figure of the risen Christ was outlined and ringed with light. Never have I seen so many candles ablaze together. Beneath Him in the darkness knelt clusters of black-robed women. Peace had come.

From War Classics: the remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front, edited by Flora Johnston

The shipwreck that never was

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There’s a ship called the Priscilla aground in the Pentland Firth at the moment – see for example this from the BBC News website.

Photo from BBC News website

My dad was a great storyteller, particularly when it came to both sides of his remarkable family, the Morrisons of North Uist and the Keiths of Thurso. The news item about the Priscilla reminded me of one of his stories which he heard as a boy from his own grandfather, Peter Keith (1847-1936). It’s the story of a shipwreck in the Pentland Firth which wasn’t quite what it seemed ….

Peter Keith holding his grandson Peter Keith Morrison

As a lawyer and notary public in Thurso, one of Peter Keith’s more sombre tasks was recording the circumstances of shipwrecks on the treacherous Caithness coast. On the morning after a stormy night the captain of a small sailing vessel arrived in his office, looking for a notary public who would record the sorrowful events of the night before. He told how he had tried to take refuge in the Scrabster Roads area just outside Scrabster Harbour, but his ship went down, drowning both the mate and the ship’s boy and leaving him the sole survivor. He narrated in detail the dramatic circumstances of the shipwreck and Peter Keith made notes, then told him to come back to sign the declaration once he’d had time to write it up fully.

So far, nothing unusual. But when a second man arrived in his office, claiming to be the sole survivor of a shipwreck in Scrabster Roads, Peter Keith began to wonder. Always canny, he said nothing but let the man tell his story. This time it was the ship’s mate, claiming that both the captain and the boy had drowned, but telling a quite different tale of how the vessel came to be lost. So Peter Keith once more made notes, giving nothing away, and in time both men signed their notarial protests.

It was about a fortnight later that the true story emerged, when the twice-drowned ship’s boy turned up alive and well. The ship had indeed taken refuge near Scrabster, but once she was safely tied up and the men presumably resting, both the captain and the mate independently decided to leave the ship – completely against their duty and without the other knowing. They went ashore and spent the evening in the thick, noisy warmth of (separate) pubs. But while they were enjoying a few stolen hours ashore of good company and fast flowing drink, sheltered from the howling winds outside, the cable holding the ship secure parted, and she began to drift out to sea once more.

Scrabster Harbour

Eventually the captain and the mate must each have made his way back to harbour. Their ship was gone. It was a wild night, and there seemed to be only one explanation. Each believing himself to be the only survivor, he took an invented story to the notary public to save his own skin.

And meanwhile there’s a ship adrift on that wild sea, with an inexperienced boy the only person on board.

There was a powerful west wind that night and it was blowing the ship right through the Pentland Firth. All the poor ship’s boy knew about navigating the Firth was that ‘you sail by Dunnet Head and by Cantick Head in Orkney, and you keep the Skerry lights open’. And it may have been by skill and it may have been by chance, but he brought that ship through the Pentland Firth without disaster, and was blown right out into the North Sea. Here she was picked up by a Norwegian ship and taken in tow, and the ship’s boy eventually got back to shore.

That’s where the story ends, although of course like all good stories it leaves me wanting more. Who was the ship’s boy and what happened to him? What a story he had to tell for the rest of his life! What about the captain and the mate, what happened to them?

There just might be some answers. The whole story was recorded in Peter Keith’s Protocol Book. There’s a collection of Keith Family Papers in Caithness Archives which I consulted when researching War Classics, the story of Peter Keith’s daughter Christina’s time with the troops in World War One. Among those papers is the Second Protocol Book of Peter Keith. I have no dates and no names for these events, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if the story of the shipwreck which never was appeared in some form among its pages!

9 April 1917: Vimy Ridge and Captain Daniel Gordon Campbell, one hundred years ago today.

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Canadian National War Memorial at Vimy Ridge

Extracts from War Classics: the remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front, ed. Flora Johnston

Then we came to open country and the road wound upwards. Stretches of barbed wire, gashes in the ground, trails of camouflage, sandbags in heaps, told us where we were. But they were far less noticeable than they had been from the railway. Our eyes commanded a wide stretch of country, sweeping away to the horizon. For miles all around the air was pure and sweet, and the horror of Thiepval seemed far behind. We saw nobody at all and it was hard to realise that so short ago this had been a battlefield for thousands. Only a lonely cross here and there – or a group of crosses – suggested it. I had begun to fear our American had forgotten all about us and was prepared to carry us to the end of the world when all at once, in the centre of the champaign and at its crest, he stopped. ‘This is [Vimy] Ridge,’ he said, ‘I’m going on to Lens. Goodbye.’ Hardly waiting for our thanks, he whizzed off and we were alone.

The high ground of Vimy Ridge provided a natural vantage point of great military significance. In April 1917, as part of the wider Battle of Arras, the Canadian Corps succeeded in winning the Ridge from the Germans at the cost of over 10,000 casualties.

The silence was unbroken; the land was desolate. Almost afraid to break the quiet, we moved on to the grass, and with a cry of delight, I stooped down and picked a flower. It was the commonest little yellow thing, that grows in unnoticed thousands at home, but I held it reverently and greedily and the Hut Lady looked at it too. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she said lingeringly, stroking it petal by petal. To find a flower after all that we had seen, seemed a miracle.

We moved on and picked up bits of shells, bullets, stray bits of camouflage: all the odds and ends left over from the fighting.

‘Come, and I’ll show you a big gun emplacement – boche,’ he said, changing the subject, ‘and then we’ll look at the Canadian memorial.’

My eyes had turned to the horizon again, to the heights that once were St Eloi. Someone I knew lay there, who had been a Canadian, and it was too far for me to go. I could only see the Ridge where he had been killed, and not the place where he lay.

As Christina looks towards St Eloi, we have a rare insight into her personal experience of loss and grief during the war years. The soldier in her thoughts is Captain Daniel Gordon Campbell of the Canadian Infantry, who had been engaged to marry her sister Louise. He had grown up near the Keith family, in Halkirk. Like them he attended the Miller Institute and Edinburgh University, where he excelled both academically and at sport, representing Scotland at the high jump. A lawyer, he had emigrated to Canada, and was serving with a Canadian regiment when he was killed at Vimy Ridge on 9 April 1917. He is buried in the cemetery at Mont St Eloi. Louise was devastated by his death, and kept detailed scrapbooks which include newspaper cuttings about the Canadian action at Vimy, letters of sympathy from friends, and information about his final resting place.

I went quietly to the big gun emplacement. It seemed untouched, and even to my inexperienced eyes, of amazing strength. ‘We got held up here I don’t know how long,’ he explained, ‘you see how well it is screened and how it commands all this stretch of ground.’

‘Put down those things you’re carrying,’ he said, glancing at my armful of spent bullets, bits of camouflage, bits of shells and flowers. ‘No-one will touch them here and I’ll snap you at the foot of Canada’s cross.’

The great high cross, with Canada in white letters, stood high on the crest of the ridge. The bright March sunlight danced on the white letters and picked out with silver the grey cross. The keen March wind blew like the winds of home over all the quiet field. The Hut Lady and I sat in the shadow of the memorial and looked towards St Eloi.

I have never seen the snapshots for, though our officer carefully took our names and addresses down on our map, he forgot to send them.

Today Vimy Ridge is the site of the breathtaking Canadian National War Memorial, overlooking the landscape on which so many Canadians lost their lives. More than 11,000 names of those whose grave is unknown are inscribed on the walls of this impressive monument, which was unveiled in 1936. However, even while the war was still continuing, memorials were erected on Vimy Ridge to commemorate the devastating losses suffered by the Canadian troops. Christina and her friend were photographed at the foot of one of these memorials. Louise’s scrapbook contains a photograph sent to her of one such cross, which may be the one visited by Christina.

Edit:

Daniel Gordon Campbell is among the lawyers featured in this exhibition in Toronto. It’s good that he is remembered.

Francis Burton Harrison and Frances Hodgson Burnett – uncovering a century old mistake!

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At least I think so … but if anyone can find evidence to the contrary I’d love to hear about it.

Testing the water with a new project (I need to lay the novel aside while I see what happens with it), I found myself this afternoon looking into the Harrison family, who owned Teaninich Castle in Easter Ross from 1921. Francis Burton Harrison, an American, was Governor General of the Philippines, and his colourful life story includes wealth, politics, controversy, a Scottish castle, as many wives as Henry VIII, and several tragedies.

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Teaninich Castle

Research these days does generally start with Google and wikipedia – but today is a perfect example of why it can’t stop there! Google Teaninich and Harrison together, and you read time and again that the flamboyant American Charles Harrison who lived there was the inspiration for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. There’s even a Frances Hodgson Burnett room in the castle. Intriguing! Was this Charles Harrison a brother, a father, or a mistaken first name, perhaps?

Digging a little deeper I found what seemed to be confirmation. American newspaper articles from as early as 1910 and 1913 identified politician Francis Burton Harrison (so definitely the right man) as the inspiration for Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was written by his mother, Frances Hodgson Burnett. One headline reads ‘Lord Fauntleroy is barred from the White House’!

Francis Burton Harrison in 1913

Really? Well, I loved The Secret Garden and the Little Princess as a child so I was pleased to find their author was connected to the family I was researching. The only problem is, I cannot find a single piece of evidence for the claim. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s family details do not include Francis Burton Harrison. She is said to have modelled the character on her son Vivian. Mr Harrison’s family details are also widely available, and do not include the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy.It seems there is no connection whatsoever between Frances Hodgson Burnett and Teaninich Castle. So what is going on?

Francis Harrison’s mother was in fact a writer of the same era, known as both Constance Cary Harrison and Mrs Burton Harrison. Incidentally, she sounds like a very interesting woman in her own right. One article about ‘lady dramatists’ mentions both women within a few paragraphs. Perhaps they knew each other. Perhaps the similarity of names led to confusion. Did our Francis Burton Harrison try to deny that he was Little Lord Fauntleroy, or did he in fact perpetuate the mistake? All the people involved were still living in the 1910s, when these claims were made. What did they think?

The Harrisons are a tiny, tangential link in the new project, so I need to resist the temptation to explore this one much further … at least for now.

But ‘fake news’ can last a long, long time …

#100womenwiki : Christina Keith

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#100womenwiki is a 12 hour ‘edit-a-thon’ taking place today (8 December) with the aim of adding more women to wikipedia. At present only around 17% of notable profiles on wikipedia are of women, and today is about encouraging people across the globe to consider whether there are women who should be included and are currently missing. I read about the initiative on the BBC website and decided to try submitting an article on Christina Keith, whose First World War memoir I edited and published as War Classics: the remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front. It was less complicated than I expected, and you can now read Christina’s wikipedia page here!

Reflections of Newcastle 1914-18

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I was interested to come across the Reflections of Newcastle project, which seeks ‘to explore the intellectual, cultural and social life of Newcastle during the First World War, concentrating in and around the Lit & Phil.’ It has a lot of resonance with my researches into Christina Keith’s life immediately before she set off for France.

I visited the Lit & Phil building in Newcastle as part of my research for War Classics: the remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front. Christina’s first job was as Classics lecturer at Armstrong College, Newcastle, but as soon as she took up the post in 1914, war was declared. The College was requisitioned for use as a military hospital and the department decamped to the Lit & Phil building. Christina lived and worked in Newcastle all through the war years until 1918, when she set off for France to take part in the army’s education scheme under the direction of Sir Henry Hadow, who had been Principal of Armstrong College.

There’s more information about Reflections of Newcastle 1914-18 here.

The entrance stairway of the Lit & Phil, Newcastle

William Keith and the Battle of Jutland

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Christina Keith, whose extraordinary wartime story you can read in War Classics, was the eldest of eight children. The Keith family, like so many others, saw one child after another drawn into a different aspect of the First World War. One of her brothers, William Bruce Keith, joined the Navy and was involved in the Battle of Jutland, the centenary of which is being remembered today.

William as a boy, appropriately dressed in a sailor suit.

William is known as ‘Uncle Bill’ in our family, but when he was a young boy his brothers and sisters called him ‘Willie’. He was born on 15 April 1898, so was just 16 at the outbreak of war. According to my father:

William wanted to go into the Navy and he discovered that he had just missed the date by which he had to apply and he would have to do something else, and then the war broke out so he was able to get in after all.

The Navy at Scapa Flow was a very real presence in the lives of the Keith family living in Thurso, and in her memoir Christina often refers to the familiar sight of battleships in the Pentland Firth. In 1916 William, now aged 18, was a midshipman on HMS Warspite. He describes the whole engagement in vivid detail in a letter to his brother Barrogill, who was serving with the army in France.

Our steering gear now got jammed and we started turning in circles – just before the ‘Defence’, which was quite close to us, caught fire and vanished. We were now helpless and the Germans seeing us turning in circles singled us out and concentrated on us. We had about 6 or 7 firing at us, and we couldn’t reply as we were turning so quickly that the guns wouldn’t train fast enough. Shells were bursting all around us, and I thought it was all up. One shell dropped so close that the spray from it drenched us in the foretop. We were hit several times and one small splinter came into the foretop.

Eventually the focus of the battle moved on, and they managed to sort the steering and were ordered to return to Rosyth. In an understatement so typical of the writings of the time, William says they were ‘rather hungry and tired’. Fourteen men had been killed and sixteen wounded. Inside the ship they found a scene of devastation, with chairs, tables, lamps and pictures broken into pieces. All lifeboats and rafts had been smashed, and they were in immediate danger of being torpedoed, so the men made makeshift rafts from the broken furniture. They eventually made it back to Rosyth in safety, and William writes, ‘when we got inside the Forth Bridge we did feel thankful.’

He was able to take some leave at home in Thurso, just across the water from the naval base at Scapa Flow on Orkney. Today, one hundred years on, a service was held in beautiful St Magnus Cathedral to commemorate the 8500 men, both British and German, who lost their lives in the Battle of Jutland.

War Classics: Barrogill Keith’s letters

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I’m interested to see that Caithness Archive Centre are publishing a series of posts on Barrogill Keith’s First World War letters on their website.

https://www.highlifehighland.com/caithness-archive-centre/letters-home-1-2-october-1915/

It’s great to have these fascinating letters shared so widely. I transcribed and published the full series of Barrogill’s letters in War Classics, my book about Barrogill’s sister Christina, which includes her moving account of her own time in France towards the close of the war.The book also includes more biographical information about the Keith family.

If you would like a copy of War Classics, you can buy it from Amazon or contact me direct.

Barrogill Keith

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Barrogill

Back to thinking about the Keiths ….

I discovered this week that there’s an exhibition of paintings by Barrogill Keith currently being held in Thurso. Barrogill (his unusual name comes from the nearby Barrogill Castle, which is now known as the Castle of Mey and is associated with the Queen Mother) was my great-uncle. His eldest sister was Christina, whose First World War memoir I published as War Classics, along with some of Barrogill’s own letters from the Western Front. His youngest sister Patricia was my grandmother, and was also an artist.

I’m very excited to be heading up to Thurso soon to see the exhibition, and to spend some time in their hometown once more.