This article has been developed from my study of 3505 Hugh Dingwall. He had enlisted at the age of 17 in November 1914 and went to France with the battalion in February 1915. It became evident that he had enlisted under age and he was found out, for he was returned home and only rejoined the battalion in the November. He served for almost a year before he lost his life in events described below. I researched him for a private client in 2016.
On 29 February 1916 (for it was a Leap Year), the battalion was transferred into the 118th Infantry Brigade of 39th Division, a formation of Lord Kitchener’s New Armies that had been raised in late 1914 and early 1915. The division was just in the process of landing in France, and the addition of the Dundee battalion was to take the place of a unit that was behind in its training and left in England. On 15 March 1916 the battalion merged with the 1/5th to become the 4/5th Battalion.
Events: background
The 39th Division moved to the Somme during the great battle that had commenced on 1 July 1916 but only became significantly engaged in latter stages. The first operation of significance since the move came on 3 September 1916, when the battalion took part in a successful if rather costly attack near Hamel on the River Ancre. It then spent time in the trenches of the Beaumont Hamel area, west of the Ancre, before it received orders for an attack on the formidable German defences known to the British as the Schwaben Redoubt.
Events/: 14 October 1916
Missing in action
It is apparent that there was uncertainty about Hugh at the time. He was initially declared as missing in action (listed as such in the “Dundee Courier” of 30 October 1916) and this was communicated to his family. By 15 November 1916 some additional information had emerged, almost certainly from a comrade who had witnessed the events, and the listing amended to “wounded and missing in action”.
Official enquiries made when a man was missing included exchange of information with Germany in order to ascertain whether the man was a prisoner of war or could be confirmed dead. There is no sign that any information came that way. The Red Cross, which handled private enquiries, has an index card which suggests that the family sought information, but it is marked as negative. This must have been a deeply worrying time for Hugh’s family.
In March 1917 all men serving in Territorial Force infantry units were renumbered: Hugh now became 200782 as he could not yet be definitely considered dead.
It was not until 28 August 1917 that the “Dundee Courier” published news that Hugh was now known to have been killed. The official War Office list of 12 September 1917 included Hugh in a list of men “previously reported wounded and missing, now reported killed”. He had, somehow, been found.
We must now jump forward in time to a date in 1919, when soldiers of 148 Labour Company of the Labour Corps exhumed the remains of 215 men who had been buried in “Thiepval Village Cemetery” and took them for reburial in “Connaught Military Cemetery”. This was part of a widespread programme of battlefield clearance and removal of many small cemeteries and plots, and the remains being concentrated into fewer, larger cemeteries that would be made permanent. Hugh Dingwall is one of the 24 officers and men of this battalion, all said to have been killed on 14 October 1916, who were among the 215 reburials.
There is very little public information about the original creation of “Thiepval Village Cemetery” (although it is possible that the archives of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission may have some details). A reading of the reburial lists and analysis of who these men were shows that almost all of them had initially been declared as missing in action in the Schwaben Redoubt –Thiepval area. It appears to me that the men were found on the battlefield in perhaps July or August 1917 and taken for burial in “Thiepval Village Cemetery”. By this time, the fighting front had moved many miles eastwards of the 1916 Somme sector, where things were now quiet. Several cemeteries that exist today, particularly north of the Schwaben Redoubt, were created in battlefield clearance work of this period. It is evident that many of the bodies found could not be identified: they had after all been lying out in the battlefield for some nine months, and with the Schwaben Redoubt –Thiepval area having been under shell fire for several weeks after the fighting of October 1916 one can only imagine the destruction of the battlefield and shallow graves that some of these man may have occupied before they were found in the summer of 1917.
The Dingwall family were almost certainly informed of his burial in “Thiepval Village Cemetery” and the later the move to “Connaught Military Cemetery”.