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When we said goodbye to Dad for the last time October 2007 at the age of 86, I and my sisters, Gay, Mag and Libby lost, not just our Dad, but, a link to his generation and those of his forefathers. Through his life Dad had unearthed a wealth of family history and, as is always so with the loss of a loved one, all the questions you wished you’d asked come rushing in with, seemingly, no-one there to answer them. Suddenly who you are and where you came from become terribly important.
Dad was the son of William Stevenson Tullo and Gertrude Willocks, his parents having met in the choir of Wallacetown Church, Dundee . Gertie and her sister Meg were the daughters of Joseph Willocks, a watchmaker originally from Brechin and his wife Margaret Greig. Widowed in January 1892, Joseph remarried 4 years later and together with Mary Mennie, from Kennethmont, Aberdeenshire, had two children, Joseph born (1896) and Mary (always known as Maisie) three years later.
Joseph senior’s death in 1899 from throat cancer at the age of 55 was followed after by that of his wife in 1907 from heart disease. Gertie and Meg, then both teenagers , took over the care of their two young siblings then aged 11 and 8, living in various tenement flats in Stobswell, Dundee.
In writing to relatives overseas following Dad’s death, we recalled that Dad’s cousin, John Dewar (son of Maisie), had a diary, written by Joe during WW1. As children, we had visited France, accompanied by Joe’s diary, stopping at a number of the places mentioned, being fascinated by Joe’s description of the church at Albert, with its battle-scarred Madonna and seeing her restored to her former glory. His well-documented diary took us along the roads Joe had travelled and finally to the Thiepval monument where we the scale of carnage wrought by the Somme is all too apparent.
Having mentioned the diary to John, whose home is in Australia, we were thrilled when he not only sent us a photographic and digitally scanned copy of the diary but Joe’s medals too. As adults, of course, we felt a much wider range of emotions than when we’d travelled with the diary in France back in the 1970’s.
My good friend Tom Perkins, an expert in the history of the Somme, agreed to read the diary and see what additional light he could shed on Joe. Through painstaking research using local and national archives, Tom has brought into focus not only what Joe did before he went to war (eg: Morgan Academy, Boys Brigade, friends like Thain, also from Dundee) but also what he did during the year he served in France. His visits to the battlefields in the heatwave of July 2009 and the freezing fog of January 2010 yielded further information and a wealth of photographs, the most moving of which are of the Redan Ridge where it’s most likely Joe fell in November 1916.
We believe that Joe’s careful annotation of places and dates shows his determination that his story would be read by future generations. Perhaps most significantly, is where Joe reveals just how ghastly conditions were in the trenches. Knowing that this section would fall victim to the censor’s pen should anything happen to him, he writes in shorthand. Joe had been a clerk in the Stobswell Jute Works in Stobswell, his job being taken over by his sister Maisie when he enlisted. He would have known that Maisie would be able to transcribe his words and share some of his deepest thoughts with his family.
Joe’s pride in joining the Sportsman’s Battalion, his love for Florrie, joy at being on leave in Dundee and his interest in the places he passed through on arrival in France tell us a lot about the kind of man he was. We can only speculate what he might have gone on to do had he survived the war. John recalled Maisie talking about Joe’s plans to emigrate to Argentina to become a rancher. Who know whether that or the love of his home and family he left behind might have proved the stronger pull. We are simply glad that this Dundee soldier’s memory lives on through the diary and hope that you enjoy reading Joe’s words as much as we have.
Kate Young
Dundee