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Appin and North Connell men get together to track down unknown World War II dead
The historic parishes of Appin and North Appin believed that no one from the area had died during Word War II. This meant that their War Memorial carried only the names of those who had perished in the first World War.
Appin church elder, Stuart Carmichael, couldn’t accept the probability of this. He talked to Hamish Emslie of North Connell who could remember those who had gone to fight in the second World War and, after further research, discovered that two local men had died in action in that conflict.
Mr Carmichael discovered that the first to be killed – on 8th June 1940, at the age of twenty-five – was Corporal John McGeachy (1915 – 1940) of the 8th Battalion of the Argylls, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. . He was born in Campbeltown but was later sent to be fostered by the Leslie family at Portnacroish in Appin.
The second Appin man to die was Flight Lieutenant Ian Maitland (1905 – 1942) from Fasnacloich, of the RAF Volunteer Reserve. He flew with the 408 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force. This was the second Canadian bomber squadron formed overseas – in 1941, disbanded in 1945. It won two hundred decorations and 11 battle honours for its wartime operations
Flight lieutenant Maitland died, on 28th August 1942, as he was returning from a successful bombing raid on the important coal-mining area of Saarbrucken NE of Metz on the Franco-German border. His personal story is profoundly sad. His eight month old daughter died from TB in 1929 and his wife fell victim to the same disease in 1936. HIs younger brother, Alistair, died from pneumonia in 1917, at the age of 13 months. All three are buried in Appin.
Stuart Carmichael has set up a website, oldappin.com, recording the history of the area.That site carries information on the involvement in both World Wars of people from Appin and Port Appin. It also carries details of how to donate to the fund villagers have set up to commission a memorial plaque to the two men whose lives given in service to the nation in World War II have now been recognised.
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No justice yet for James of the Glen in Argyll’s 256 year-old Appin Murder
For Argyll reported recently on the submission by Glasgow solicitor, John Macaulay to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) to have an application accepted to review the 256 year-old ‘Appin Murder‘ case.
This has just been turned down by the SCCRC because they say that it ‘fell on the second test which basically is in the interests of justice’. They also mentioned the time elapsed since the murder as a contributing factor in the decision.
One has to say that, on the grounds of reason alone, these ‘defences’ are far from strong.
Read the rich details of the case in For Argyll’s previous article – but, in short, James Stewart, the Jacobite found guilty and hanged for the murder of Hanoverian Government Agent, Colin Campbell (the Red Fox), was known to have been somewhere else at the time. And the secret of the identity of the genuine perpetrator, handed down the generations of the family of the Stewarts of Appin, was revealed by a family descendant shortly before she died a few years ago.
So quite how a review of the case could be thought not to be in the interests of justice seems odd.
The second defence advanced for rejecting the examination of the case – the time between the murder and today – would appear to accept that capital offences should have a statute of limitation on their pursuit. This too is controversial.
In any case, Mr Macauley’s client, a man who has become immersed in the case since he first came across it during a visit to Fort William’s West Highland Museum in 1982, is likely to choose one of two possible actions now. The first is an application for a judicial review. The second is an appeal to the Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill.
Another little twist to the story is that the client in question is a Motherwell man, John, the grandson of a Lithuanian immigrant who settled in Boswell one hundred years ago and adopted the surname of – Campbell.
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Will James of the Glen be cleared 250 years on? Glasgow lawyer asks for Argyll’s ‘Appin Murder’ case to be reviewed
John Macaulay, a Glasgow lawyer, has lodged papers with the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission, asking that it should review a 250 year-old case known as ‘the Appin murder‘. Macaulay has done extensive research into the case and is asking for Seumas a’ Ghlinne, or James Stewart – known as James of the Glen, to be formally cleared of the crime. This would, at long last, right what is widely seen as one of Scotland’s earliest miscarriages of justice and a case known to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson‘s novel, Kidnapped.
On the afternoon of Thursday, May 14, 1752, Colin Campbell of Glenure – called ‘the Red Fox’ – a government agent, was riding out to Glen Duror to evict local tenants, the Stewarts of Appin, to replace them with his own relatives. He never arrived. He was shot dead in the woods near the present Ballachulish Bridge. His murder shook the British establishment. The killer was never caught, yet another man – James Stewart, a Jacobite, was tried and found guilty in Inveraray, in something of a kangaroo court in September 1752.
11 of the 15 jurors were Campbells – also a clan that had fought on the side of the Crown against the Jacobites. Of the three judges, the senior one was the Duke of Argyll, head of the Campbell clan. The court sat with no break from 5.00am on a Friday morning until 7.00am on the Sunday morning. One exhausted juror was recorded as shouting at a defence advocate: ‘Pray sir, cut it short. We have had enough’.
Everyone knew that Stewart wasn’t even in the area at the time of the murder – he had an unshakeable alibi which the Crown accepted, that on the day of the murder he had been several miles away at Aucharn. However, the Campbell’s had to have blood for blood so James Stewart was found guilty and hanged, his body left to rot on the gibbet, swinging in the wind – symbolically near the place where the Red Fox was shot.
Today there is a monument marking the spot of Stewart’s hanging, on the hillside just above the southern entrance to the Ballachulish Brdge. A cairn between Ballachuish and Duror marks the spot of Colin Campbell’s murder in Argyll wood, to the north of Loch Leven.
Several books have been written on the case, the most recent being James Hunter’s Culloden and the Last Clansman, published in 2001. Hunter, a former Chair of Highlands and Islands Enterprise and of Ofcom Scotland, argues that a murder conspiracy was indeed hatched by the Stewarts of Appin, He – as others have done, implicated Ailean Breac, who would have had to leave the country anyway as a known British army deserter.
After Hunter’s book was published, 89 year-old Anda Penman, a descendant of the Stewarts of Appin, identified Donald, the son of Stewart of Ballachulish as the real killer. She was dying herself and thought it was time to reveal a secret passed on by word of mouth through her family for more than two centuries.
A spokesman for the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission confirmed that Mr Macaulay’s papers had been lodged and would be considered.
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Teenager airlifted from Scarba after ravine plunge
An RAF helicopter from HMS Gannet at Prestwick airlifted a thirteen year-old Yorkshire boy from Argyll’s Isle of Scarba to Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital, with Coastguards from Oban and Appin also called out and reckoning the boy was lucky to be alive. He and others on an activity trip to the island had evidently been looking at a waterfall when he fell – avoiding all the rocks on the way down and finishing up with no more than a broken leg.
Colintraive in top ten Scottish Property Rich List, Campbeltown bottoms out in Argyll
A Rich List of Scottish streets, areas and towns – calculated by average property values – created and published by Zoopla, a property valuation website, has placed Colintraive. in the Cowal peninsula opposite the Isle of Bute, as the ninth highest value area in Scotland and the fourth highest value town with an average property value given as £290,714. Cairndow in MId Argyll was the only other entry in this category for Argyll, coming eighteenth at £260,968. Campbeltown came twentieth in the lowest value towns in Scotland. Auchterarder in Perth, though, sees two of its streets in first and second place as the highest value streets in the country. They are Caldedonain Crescent whose average property value is £1.8 million; and Balmorl Court coming in at £1.53 million.
Within Argyll, Bridgend on Islay was named as the highest value street at an average of £931,296, a long way ahead of the second placed street, Kilmelford, at £482,136 – interesting in that Islay itself has four postcodes given in the ten lowest value areas. Cairndow came second to Colintraive in the Top Ten highest value areas – but had three postcodes named in the top ten in this category: PA25 at 260, 968; PA26 at £200,700 and PA24 at £171,353. Appin took second place to Colintraive in the highest value towns category, at£223,522.
Campbeltown’s statistics underpinned its real need for regeneration. It came bottom in all three categories of lowest value street, area and town in Argyll. It had four streets in the ten lowest value street category in the county and one seventh from the bottom in all of Scotland. At £38,137 there is a gulf between Bayview in Campbeltown and Bridgend in Islay.
The copyright on the image above – of Colintraive Community Garden – is owned by Lynn M Reid and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.