The teenage John Munro initially chose to stay on in that 'elementary' school as a 'pupil-teacher'. This was part of a teacher apprenticeship scheme of 19th-century Scotland: it consistently in the late 19th century gave poor bright kids a moderately financially secure route to a teacher training college; and is probably underestimated by educational historians. Stories of poor 19th-century working class Highland lads equipped only with a formidable intellect and with a sack of oatmeal heading to university in Edinburgh or in Glasgow are mostly that: rather isolated stories. A much more assured road was the teacher apprenticeship.
The scheme was phased out in 1906 before Munro could complete it; and he therefore went to spend three years (1908-1911) in the 'higher grade' Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. Munro decided that he wanted to go to university, still with a school teaching career in mind: the growth of 'higher grade' education and the 1901-founded Carnegie Trust had by then made university access for poor but talented students more feasible than it had been for much of the 19th century.
Shortly after Munro's arrival, the Nicolson rector, the nationally famous WG Gibson (the first Scottish headteacher to get a CBE) set up a school poetry competition. Munro chose the Isle of Lewis as his theme and composed an ode in blank verse. His schoolmate Murdo Murray tells us that there was an external adjudicator for this competition, Grierson (professor of English at the University of Edinburgh, a poetry specialist and subsequently tutor to the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century: Sorley Maclean). Grierson in his adjudication said that he would be surprised if a better poet than John Munro had ever been born in Lewis.
To digress for a moment, as all we Gaels do: Murdo Murray was born in 1890, the son of a shoe-maker; Nicolson Institute dux of 1909; and graduate of the University of Aberdeen in 1913. Like his friend Munro he went to war in 1914; like Munro he wrote innovative Gaelic poetry about his war experience; but unlike Munro he survived the the first world war. He returned to a teaching career, ultimately as a school inspector, and survived until 1964.
The John Munro school poem, written in English, was previously thought by most Celtic scholars to be lost: in the 1950s, Murdo Murray recorded it in a 1950s issue of 'Gairm' (an academic Gaelic journal, now defunct) as lost; and Gaelic academia accepted his mid-1950s verdict. However, sometime in the late 1950s or very early 1960s, Murray was sent a copy of the 'lost' English poem. As we have discovered, by serendipity rather than scholarship, that copy was reprinted in the 1963 Nicolson Institute magazine and has survived in the school archives. There it is topped and tailed by some interesting notes:
The following ode on 'Lewis' was written as a school exercise by the late John Munro (dux 1911, killed in France 1918). Miss Jane Gibson made this copy [and] writes: 'I doubt whether many schoolboys nowadays have ever tried to write Miltonic verse; and that...in itself gives this poem almost a historic interest'.
We are indebted to Mr Murdo Murray, H.M.I.S. (retired) for sending us the poem.
It is worth quoting a few (and these are just a few) of the extant lines from Munro, the 18/19-year-old school Milton (and one clearly with some geological understanding of the origins and scarring of Lewisian gneiss):
A grand old isle washed by the ocean grey.
A fitter theme it were for Homer's harp
Or Vergil's song – to sing the lands that first
From peaceful rest beneath a shoreless deep
Upreared brave forms into a world of waste!
Thou had'st a Homer of thine own, my Isle:
Blind Rodrick's harp struck happy strains
But these to thee were lost…
What wonder tho' thy hills be weather worn,
And surface bare of blooming trees, until
Th' unfeeling, thoughtless ever, call thee bleak?
Know they the sorrows that have o'er thee passed?
The scars thou bear'st to show how thou has felt
The grind of grating ice, ton upon ton
And oceans broad, that capped the long gone world?
On reading this, one understands why in the Nicolson Institute of 1963 there still remained oral folk memories of John Munro. Even the oldest teachers had of course not taught Munro. But they could recall the memories of senior staff of the 1930s: of Munro as the ablest of school students; and of the tears in the staffroom in April 1918. (This in a school where staff did not easily shed tears, then or now.)
After three years in the Nicolson Institute, having gained the higher leaving certificate and been awarded the school dux medal, John Munro went to university, probably with a Carnegie scholarship. Graduating from Aberdeen University in 1914, he by then planned to train for the Free Church of Scotland ministry, but these plans were put on hold with the outbreak of war. He enlisted immediately (as so many did – for reasons that remain speculative even to such an imaginative historian as Niall Ferguson); and served in France with the Seaforth Highlanders from 1914.
A 1919 source, now in public record, says:
When war broke out in August, he volunteered and joined the 4th Seaforths. He was sent to France about the end of 1914, and served there continuously but for the short period he was in training at Gales [almost certainly Gailes in Ayrshire] Camp for his commission. During these years, he was in many engagements with the enemy and had many miraculous escapes, till the fateful day, 16 April [1918], when his beautiful and promising life was ended.
He had something to say, from dire personal experience, of nearly every name of sinister import over there: Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Loos, La Bassee, Delville Wood, Beaumont-Hamel, Cambrai, the Somme. And yet though he had seen all and suffered many of the miseries of war, he had come out of it all with his fine body unscathed and his finer spirit unclouded.
Munro, in the same manner as the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen, was killed in action during the last year of the conflict. Both Munro and Owen were second lieutenants when they were killed; and both were awarded the Military Cross shortly before they died.
For the issue of why Munro and Owen – both of modest origins – were lieutenants, one has to read Jeremy Paxman and Niall Ferguson; and indeed Bob Holman. An army whose officer class in 1914 was heavily upper class had, albeit inadvertently, slaughtered so many of them by 1915/16 that it had to talent-spot from among its working-class ordinary soldiers for replacements. In those pre-television days it was a (macabre) early version of 'Britain's Got Talent'.
John Munro had a young lady-friend (to use early 20th-century English). We have seen extracts of letters, not in the public record, which she wrote to Munro's mother after his death. She quotes from a note received from Munro's commanding officer:
The battalion was taking part in a counter attack at Wytschaete on that day 16 April 1918 and he was killed while gallantly leading the men of his platoon against a position held by enemy machine guns...I do not know if you heard that he was awarded the Military Cross for the most excellent work done by him during the Somme at the end of March. The notification of this award only appeared three days after his death.
(March/April 1918 had seen the last major German offensive of the first world war: an offensive initially successful, but ultimately so unsuccessful that it was probably the key to the November armistice.)
It would be going too far, certainly in terms of fame, to call John Munro the 'Gaelic Wilfred Owen'; but the similarities are interesting. Only three of his Gaelic war poems, albeit quite extensive ones, are currently known to have survived; but there are believed to have been more in now missing manuscripts. Here are but two verses – in English translation by the late Professor Derick Thomson of Glasgow University – from the surviving poems:
Our Land
Snow mantle on the mountain peaks,
like white hair lie the mist streaks,
the runnel and the moor-burn
leap and pour
tumbling and rumbling down the rough glens
that skirt and buttress the high bens;
antlered stags and red deer
roam the long slopes, heather-dun –
this is the Land of Brave Men,
a hero's land of hill and glen,
this is the Land of Brave Men.
Our Heroes Who Fell in Battle
With some of them, when they were alive,
we had our differences, did not see eye to eye.
Ah! They have fallen on the battle-field:
We found them lying, wounded to death –
their unsightly dust was all that was left –
five of them lying, like fingers outstretched,
summoning, guiding,
urging fresh effort upon us,
asking us to press on, together,
as when they fell, advancing,
over the plain of the battle-field.
John Munro can be described as the first modern Gaelic poet: Professor Thomson stated that his work was 'the finest early burgeoning of the "new poetry" of the century' and Dr Finlay Macleod has said that he was 'the first Gaelic poet to use a contemporary style'. Sorley Maclean and George Campbell Hay, both war poets too but much later, are seen as the breakthrough poets from tradition to modernity in the Gaelic poetic tradition; but, 20 years before their work appeared, John Munro was taking Gaelic poetry in a new direction.
If his commanding officer (inevitably) was terse in his private words of consolation, local contemporaries (as the now-digitised records of 1918 show) were more effusive:
Lt Munro was recently home from France on furlough. He had returned to France shortly before the German offensive started. During the first fortnight and before the Germans were brought to a standstill, his parents and friends were very anxious as to his safety; but they received the welcome news that he had come through the ordeal without a scratch.
On Wednesday, his father received a wire [i.e. telegram] from the Record Office, Perth, informing him that his son, Lt. John Munro, was killed in action on the 16th April. The sad news has cast a gloom over the whole parish.
John Munro was only one of some eight million or more service personnel who died worldwide in the first world war; and but one of the 720,000 United Kingdom dead. Some are moderately well-remembered: Raymond Asquith, son of the UK prime minister; John Kipling, son of Rudyard; Jack Cornwell, all of 16 years when killed at the Battle of Jutland and posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
Among the best-remembered dead, there are certainly poets, including Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke ('If I should die, think only...') and the Canadian John McCrae ('In Flanders fields, the poppies blow...'). John Munro is not remembered in that way. But he has his place in Gaelic literary history. He wrote what turned out to be his own epitaph:
Ar Gaisgich a Thuit sna Blàir
S iomadh fear àlainn òg sgairteil,
ait-fhaoilt air chinn a bhlàth-chridh,
tric le ceum daingeann làidir,
ceum aotrom, glan, sàil-ghlan,
dhìrich bràigh nam beann mòra,
chaidh a choinneamh a’ bhàis -
tric ga fhaireach’ roimh-làimh -
a chaidh suas chum a’ bhlàir;
‘s tha feur glas an-diugh ‘fàs
air na dh’fhàg innleachdan nàmh,
innleachdan dhubh-sgrios an nàmh a chòrr dheth.
The English translation is again by Professor Thomson:
Many a handsome man, young, agile, quick of hand,
with gay mien matching warm heart,
who had often climbed, with strong step, light, foot-sure, bright
to the high upland of the great hill,
went to his meeting with death –
often fore-knowing its skaith –
went out to the war:
the green grass grows over
the shreds his enemies’ arms
left, when holocaust had had its fill.
John Munro was a good man, a scholar and a soldier. He was also a fine poet.
Iain Smith is a part-time writer and Ruairidh Maciver is a research student in the University of Glasgow. They acknowledge the help they have had in writing this story, notably from the Nicolson Institute, Stornoway; and from various friends and relations. They also wish to thank the National Library of Scotland: which has brought to the most ordinary of us stories of our past which previously, if not lost, had certainly been hard to find. An earlier version of this was published in the Lewis print journal, the Rudhach
