From Waterloo to Gallipoli - one Scots family's story

Against the odds, our First World War group had uncovered the story of each of the 27 men on our local war memorial. Officially the Strathblane World War One project was finished. In the first six months since its publication, our book A Village Remembers has raised more than £5000 for Erskine, the Scottish veterans' charity. Mission accomplished?

Maybe, but there was one young man that I couldn't get out of my mind. From the start we had all found William Ker, a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division, rather beguiling. The first time I saw his photograph, it made my heart thump.

"How could his mother bear to live after his death on the Somme in November 1916?" I remember thinking. It wasn't merely his beauty. The dry humour, lively intelligence and lyrical eloquence of the extracts from a handful of his letters that had found their way into a book published in 1923 offered an intriguing glimpse of this outstanding young Scot, who had studied Greek at Oxford, ran like the wind and played hockey for his country before being mown down by German machine-gun fire at the age of 24.

I'd finally tracked down a living relative - William's niece Anne - on the eve of publication and hastily rewritten the chapter about him after an emotionally charged afternoon going through family mementos: spare buttons from his naval uniform, portraits of a small boy in a sailor suit and snapshots of jolly family summer jaunts to the Ayrshire coast. This material had lain largely untouched since the death in 1981 of Anne's father, William's youngest brother. But there was no sign of the dozens of letters William must have written home from Gallipoli and the Western Front in the months before his death at Beaucourt-sur-l'Ancre.

That afternoon last autumn Anne had shown me a tantalising glimpse of a dozen or more battered tin boxes and old suitcases in the eaves of her Stirlingshire home, explaining that while she couldn't bear to throw them away, she didn't know what to do with them. Could one of them hold those Gallipoli letters?

It soon became clear that here was a family that had barely thrown away a receipt since 1750. This proved both a blessing and a curse. Not only had Anne become the repository for the written remains of seven generations of Kers, including the detritus of a number of maiden aunts, all of them prolific diarists and correspondents. She had also fallen heir to vast quantities of memorabilia from the families the Kers had married into, including the Patons, the Johnstons of Shieldhall and the Higginbothams of Killermont (now Glasgow Golf Club), a number of whom now slumber amidst the romantically decayed Gothic splendour of Glasgow Necropolis.

On Tuesday afternoons, picking boxes and suitcases at random, the two of us embarked on a string of global adventures, without ever leaving Anne's snug spare room. At times it felt like supercharged time travel. Buried amongst a mountain of yellowing paper was the story of Ker, Bolton & Co, one of the most successful global companies operating in Singapore, Java and the Philippines from Victorian Glasgow, under the control of Lt Ker's namesake and grandfather William Ker, father of ten, who lived at 1 Windsor (now Kirklee) Terrace and survived to the age of 90.

One day, as snow fell outside, we lost ourselves in the colourful account of a trip across the South Seas in a three-masted schooner in the 1820s written to someone still known in the family as "Uncle Sandy of the Cape". On another the 1890 journal of 20-year old Penelope Ker whisked us off on a European tour of classical sites and a winter of parties and painting, good walks and good works in Kelvinside. Alongside were articles and letters relating to her eldest brother William Paton Ker, a well-known English literature scholar who was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford before dying while climbing in the Alps in 1923.

A tiny package contained the lock of a dead toddler's hair. A doorstopper of a family bible listed family birthdates going back to 1788. One day we came across cards printed like floral bouquets and necklaces with charming photographs of small children circa 1870 gazing at us from the flowers and jewels. There were grand scrolls from Glasgow Merchants' House and a visiting card holder lovingly embroidered by a Ker wife as a keepsake for her husband before he embarked for the Far East in 1849. A letter, dated 1795, invited an earlier Wm Ker to survey a farm on the island of Gigha. Another suggested he command the local force being raised "to stop the progress of the Corsican", at the time when it was feared Napoleon might invade western Scotland.

Trying to fit together these stories was like tackling a 5000-piece puzzle. Some Tuesdays yielded a few individual fragments; others whole sections of the picture. Often the contents of one box ranged across several generations and frequently answered questions raised by what we'd found elsewhere.

Happily, the Kers have always been obsessed by their family history, even if it remained a work in progress. As a result, we came across numerous scribbled attempts at family trees.

The modern researcher had two added advantages. Digitised records on websites (principally the impressively well-engineered ScotlandsPeople) acted as a useful crosscheck. Secondly, though Anne who is in her 70s protests that she is forgetful, she has an encyclopaedic memory for the names of people and places linked to her family. Thus we have been able to piece together not only seven generations of Kers but also family trees for four of the families they married into, an aspect of family history that too often gets neglected.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, there was lots of cross-pollination between the prosperous merchants and entrepreneurs of Victorian Glasgow, who flitted between mansions like Craigmaddie and Easterton that face each other across the A81 near Milngavie. But the Kers had come from surprisingly humble beginnings, apparently rising by native intelligence, providence and hard work. In 1749 Anne's great-great-great-great grandfather, Edward Ker is recorded as a farm servant at Dalduff near Maybole in Ayrshire.

Come February the Gallipoli material still eluded us. Early on we had found all the letters to their parents at Easterton of Mugdock from William's two brothers, who were also on active service. Was William's death so traumatic for his parents that they had hidden away, even destroyed, the correspondence?

Then suddenly there they were, stuffed in the corner of the last suitcase: 90 letters, tied in neat bundles, in order of receipt between November 1914 and the eve of his death two years later. They are packed with wit and cleverness, especially the 35 penned from Gallipoli where William arrived 100 years ago this month with the Hawke Battalion of the Royal Naval Division, "Churchill's Little Army".

Before leaving for the Dardanelles in early May 1915, his main fear is that the war will end before he sees active service. His first impressions are positive: "I must come and cruise round here in my smack when the war is over."

The next seven months are taken up with the familiar formula of long periods of boredom interspersed with snatches of unalloyed terror when the Turks mount a bombardment or try to break through. Not that William ever admits to fear and rarely mentions Allied casualties, except to observe that the Anzacs (Australians and New Zealanders) are having a much worse time of it further up the line. Censorship barred him from communicating any geographical or operational specifics. But sitting beside the letters in the case were two heavy black metal balls that look for all the world like stage bombs. William's letter of November 23 confirms that they are in fact Turkish bombs that landed in his trench but failed to explode, so he is sending them home as souvenirs: "Jolly little chaps. They have been gutted so worry not."

And he boasts that while the Turks rely on lobbing them like cricket balls, the Brits use a catapult "after a model laid down by Ajax some years ago". (Ker, a former Oxford Classics scholar, knew his Homer and could identify local landmarks from the Iliad. Was he the only man in the Dardanelles to have taken his Ancient Greek dictionary to war, along with his favourite reads, John Buchan and RL Stevenson?)

By July the days are intolerably hot and the sand and flies are taking their toll. Many of the men are sick. He later reports that C Company, which started out with 212 men is down to 70, almost all of them invalided out with stomach complaints. But the summer nights are glorious: "Still cloudless, full of stars, the Milky Way with an unEnglish brilliance and a yellow horned moon. Twilight is short and the sun goes down behind Imbros with an almost audible pop."

To his delight, one of more than 50 parcels sent to him in Gallipoli from home contains a camera. Though he struggles to load it and fears the light has got into the film, half a dozen glass plate negatives survived. A century later Herald photographer Martin Shields managed to conjure up some of Ker's images, including a group of his men and a haunting one of Ker himself looking gaunt.

His letters are full of longing for home - "your soft grey land" - and he fantasises about days spent climbing on Arran or Skye and long breakfasts at Easterton (rather than his standard diet of bully beef, toast and cocoa). One day he idly wonders if homesickness is "a certifiable disease".

As autumn sets in, the conditions deteriorate. There are nights in flooded trenches with no hot food. ("By jove it was miserable.") Conditions for officers are considerably more primitive than on the Western Front. He describes at length his attempts to rig up an oilskin sheet over his dug out and jokes about wearing "nine sweaters and sleeping bags galore" in an attempt to keep warm at night.

In November he asks for Christmas presents for his company, suggesting that the good ladies of Milngavie might put together some socks, flannel shirts and Xmas puddings. While his men remain stubbornly optimistic, William realises that the Dardanelles campaign has been a costly failure and rages at Kitchener and high command: "The whole campaign has been hideously bungled."

William probably speaks for many soldiers when he writes: "What an infernal shame this war is: useless pointless, endless, ghastly, which does not alter the fact that I have enjoyed large chunks of it. I am able to take short views and enjoy the sunset and evening star, in spite of the news that comes in by every mail that someone else is gone."

The Hawke Battalion sails for France in February 1916 "leaving the scene of one of the greatest disasters in military history very cheerfully and with no animosity for the Turk."

William comes home on leave before rejoining the Hawke on the Western Front in April 1916. The letters from France are briefer, gloomier and more matter-of-fact, though he never loses his capacity for laconic understatement. His final letter, from a cellar in a "battered village" in November, makes this observation: "Life here merely differs from normal life in degree. It is an ordinary picnic or camp-out, plus the chance of being killed (occasionally great)... We are moving to the trenches so I must stop...Flocks of aeroplanes sailing very high in pale blue sky, looking like lazy dragon flies when the sun strikes them...This is on the eve of the considerable stunt for which we have been standing by. Battles have never been fought at this time of year in this climate and personally I think it creates a dangerous precedent for the unfortunate infantry but it is just possible that GHQ knows more about it than I do. We are very muddy and bored with being kept hanging around but think of the Boches! Well, so long. Love to all. William (I shall want some new clothes after this.)"

A Village Remembers by Strathblane First World War Group (£12.50 inc.p&p) is available from www.Strathblanefield.org.uk