Duncan Harley

George Square in Inverurie was built over several years by a town council intent on improving the local housing stock. Slum clearance was an issue and an enlightened group of councillors financed construction in the years prior to the Hitler war. The conflict of course intervened and it was not until the late 1940’s that the housing scheme was completed and fully occupied. Meantime Polish troops had occupied, and vandalised, some of the new-builds and a general rent-review had been agreed with slum-tenants from Constitution Street who had refused to move to the new-build properties on cost grounds. Oddly perhaps, the newly built housing scheme became a local icon for wartime self-sufficiency. Rationing during the early years of WW2 led to a dramatic increase in demand for agricultural land throughout the county of Aberdeenshire. Marginal land, parkland and golf courses, including the old course at Turriff, were sacrificed to the plough and fallow land was brought into use....

There were many, up and down the land, who objected to serving in the 1914 -1918 war. Some protesters were ardent socialists, who adhering to the principle that the working classes of the world should unite instead of setting out to kill each other, refused point blank to fight. And of course, members of some religious groups were firmly against any taking of human life. Other objectors simply thought that the new war was a capitalist enterprise engineered for the sole purpose of enriching the industrial barons who, having made a fortune from previous wars, were now greedy for further profit on the backs of the ‘capitalist dominated masses. Demonstrations were held around the country, including at London's Trafalgar Square. But in the big scheme of things war fever, backed by acts of parliament, meant that those who refused to fight due to conscientious objections were liable to be rounded up and imprisoned for the duration. By the second year of the war the flow of patriotic vo...

As the wreaths pile up alongside the War Memorials on this Remembrance Sunday and the bagpipes play Battle’s O’er at some 2,000 locations worldwide it seems appropriate to remember that Scotland has its own Little Cenotaph sitting, almost forgotten alongside the main railway-line between Newtonhill and Stonehaven. Muchalls is described in the 1884 edition of the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland  as: “ a village in Fetteresso parish, Kincardineshire, with a station on the North-Eastern section of the Caledonian railway, 5 miles NNE of Stonehaven, under which it has a telegraph and post office”. The tiny settlement nowadays lacks a station but still sits alongside the railway-line which transported the men from the towns and the villages of Aberdeenshire to the battlefields of France and Belgium. Charles Dickens is said to have described the village as a remarkably beautiful place and there are dark tales of a long-lost smuggler’s cave, haunted by a Green Lady, linking Muchals C...