War Classics (2 page)

Christina’s narrative reveals much about prevailing attitudes to gender, to class and also to race. With regard to her own nationality Christina was a passionate Scot, missing no opportunity to identify with other Scots and to praise her own people and traditions. Perhaps influenced by Sir Walter Scott, of whom she would later write a biography, the more tartan and Highland the better! And yet in an apparent contradiction she frequently referred to herself as an Englishwoman. It seems that in the days before nationalism had become a significant political force in Scotland, Christina was using ‘English’ interchangeably with ‘British’. And there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the British were the greatest race on earth.

In the immediate aftermath of the war it is perhaps not surprising that her attitude to Germany was scornful and even offensive. Once again this reflects the widely held mood of the nation, reinforced by the press. What is perhaps more surprising is that this scorn was not merely reserved for the enemy but also for Britain’s allies. The Germans are referred to throughout as ‘the Boche’, the Chinese labourers as ‘Chinks’. The French are careless and cruel to animals, the Portuguese are ‘the worst-behaved of all the Allies’, and the Americans are dismissed as selfish and unreliable. Only the Australians and the Canadians – notably both loyal members of the British Empire – seem worthy of her respect. British imperialistic superiority was alive and well. As she came up alongside men and women of different social backgrounds and from different nationalities, Christina was candid in her opinions and thus reveals to us much about attitudes which were commonplace in the early twentieth century.

But alongside all the interesting historical information we can glean from her writing, Christina’s narrative is worthy of a wide readership because of the simple humanity of her story. Here is a woman who lived through the war, whose brothers served in the fighting and who lost people dear to her, but who says little of her own experiences. Yet despite the sorrow and tragedy which exist as a quiet undertone, here too is a woman eager to grasp the opportunities which this war gave to her. And therein lies the contradiction, for Christina as for many others. In the midst of conflict there was opportunity. In the midst of horror there was comradeship. The cost of this war was unprecedented and appalling, but there were those for whom it opened doors – to new places, to new friendships, to new skills, or simply to a new way of looking at the world.

For Christina Keith, these six months in Dieppe were a window of freedom in a life restricted by the boundaries of convention. She revelled in meeting new people, encountering new viewpoints, welcoming a wealth of new experiences and even in having her preconceptions challenged. The enchantment of it all lay as much in the fact that she and those around her knew that this world they inhabited was a fleeting one, that they would be required to return to the restrictions and realities of British routine. They could not yet know that the magnitude of what they had lived through meant that British society would never again be the same.

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.  For a detailed study of the role of the YMCA in the First World War, see Michael Snape’s
The Back Parts of War
, 2009.

‘Living with the ancestors'

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‘An Edinburgh and Newnham girl'

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‘How fine their sense of duty has been'

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‘The meeting of mind with mind'

C
hristina Keith was born on 12 January 1889 in the little town of Thurso on the furthest north coast of Scotland. It was noon, so even on those short, dark winter days some light would have spilled in through the windows of the two-storey terraced house at 5 Princes Street as she entered the world. She was the first child of solicitor Peter Keith and his young wife Katie Bruce, born into a family which had deep roots in the Caithness countryside and a remarkable desire to reach beyond the ordinary.

Christina loved Caithness, that unique landscape with its huge skies and grey seas, where the light and the weather reflect the extremes of living on the very northern edge of mainland Scotland. She travelled far throughout her life for education, for work and for adventure, but Caithness drew her back in her retirement, and she ended her days as a writer living in the house in which she had been born. The decades in between had seen the Keith family prosper, expand and scatter, but Peter and Katie's various homes in and around Thurso provided a focal point to which their children and grandchildren continued to return.

For this was the ancestral land. Peter's family for generations back had lived in Castletown, a village in the parish of Olrig a few miles to the east of Thurso. He was born in 1847, the son of a tailor and the second-youngest child in a large family. Peter began his education at the local school, but this came to an abrupt halt when he was expelled for locking the dominie in the school building. He was then sent to the school of Matthew Dunnet in the nearby village of Bower. Matthew Dunnet had gained a significant reputation for education and boys were sent to him from far afield.
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Peter clearly flourished under Matthew Dunnet's tuition, and perhaps it was partly under the schoolmaster's influence that he came to place such a high value on education, a value which he would pass on to Christina and his other children.

After serving a three-year apprenticeship with a Thurso solicitor, Peter travelled in 1867 to Edinburgh where he continued his training with a legal firm and also studied at the university. During this time the 1871 census reveals him lodging in Bellevue, Edinburgh, with a Caithness family. Also living there was his 21-year-old sister Johanna, the youngest member of the Keith family, who was described as a student. We do not know what Johanna was studying, or where, but this is the earliest indication of a desire for higher education among the women of the Keith family. In 1871 Edinburgh University was still an all-male enclave, but a fierce campaign was being fought for the rights of women to a higher education, led by Sophia Jex-Blake who wished to study medicine. Since 1868 the Edinburgh Ladies' Education Association had offered university-level lectures to women, with the stated aim not of training them for professions but of improving their minds. Johanna's name does not appear in the Association's class registers, which rather suggest rooms full of Edinburgh ladies from wealthy New Town addresses. Although we do not know where Johanna was studying, it is interesting to note that Christina's aunt was there as a student in Edinburgh in the very earliest days of the struggle for higher education for women.
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Education was valued not just on Christina's father's side but also on her mother's. Katie Bruce was without doubt a very intelligent woman. My father remembers that he and his family were in Thurso on holiday at the outbreak of the Second World War. In the uncertainty of those early months they decided to stay on in Caithness rather than return to Edinburgh. Katie took on the education of her young grandson, and when sometime later he did return to his school in Edinburgh, he was far ahead of his fellow pupils!

At the age of forty Peter Keith, now a successful solicitor, bank agent and factor to the local landlord, apparently decided it was time to get married. The story goes that he was considering one local girl and took someone into his confidence. This friend is said to have asked him if he hadn't considered Katie Bruce – she might not have the material advantages that the other girl had, but she was a very clever young woman. Peter took the advice, and they were married in April 1888.

But what was Katie's own story? Like her husband she was of Caithness heritage. On her mother's side she was descended from a family of some wealth and local influence – her grandfather lived in Freswick House and farmed 200 acres. But Katie's own childhood was not an easy one. In 1875, when she was just eleven, her father died of pneumonia, leaving her mother a widow with two children. William Bruce, whose origins were humbler than his wife's, was a wine merchant who had expanded at some point before his death into keeping a hotel. In the 1881 census his widow was continuing to run the hotel, and her 15-year-old son was working in the bank. It might have been expected that 17-year-old Katie would be helping her mother in the hotel – but no. In another of those signposts which point forward towards the role education would play in the next generation of this family, Katie Bruce was not in Caithness at all, but was living more than 250 miles away in Great King Street, Edinburgh, enrolled in ‘Miss Balmain's Establishment for the Board and Education of Young Ladies'.

At this time there were many girls' schools in Edinburgh offering an education to the daughters of the middle classes. Some were larger institutions but many, like Miss Balmain's school, were substantial private houses which took a small number of boarders and perhaps some day pupils. While their brothers were being prepared for university in academies and grammar schools, the emphasis in most girls' schools was on languages, music and dancing. Visiting masters offered tuition in some subjects, while others were the domain of the resident female staff. In 1881 Jemima Balmain ran her school along with three other female teachers, one of whom was German. They had eight resident pupils, and four servants. Miss Balmain advertised her school in the following terms:

The number of Young Ladies received as Boarders being very limited, the most careful attention is paid to each in regard to health, moral and religious training, the preparation of their various studies, and their comfort in every respect. The First Masters attend to give instruction in all the branches of a thorough education and accomplishments, and Miss Balmain is assisted by Foreign and English Governesses. French and German conversation daily.
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So despite difficult circumstances at home, by the age of 17 and probably earlier, Katie was living in Edinburgh in order to receive ‘a thorough education and accomplishments', in a move which surely influenced the approach she and Peter would take to the education of their own children a generation later.

In 1888 at the age of 24, Katie married Peter Keith. The bride, the groom and their wider families all lived in or around Thurso … and yet the wedding took place far away in St John's church, Southall, in London. Some members of the family made the long journey down to London, for two of the witnesses were Katie's younger brother John, and William Keith, Peter's oldest brother. Peter gave his place of residence as Thurso, but Katie said she was living in Southall. We cannot be sure what she was doing there, but the third witness at the wedding was a young woman of Katie's own age called Mary Etherington. Mary was a teacher of music at a girls' school in Southall which her mother, also Mary, ran. Perhaps Katie was also teaching at the school? By the time of her marriage at the age of 24, Katie Bruce had lived in both Edinburgh and London, and she would pass those wider horizons on to her own children.

After a honeymoon in Paris, Peter and Katie returned to Thurso, and Christina was born the following year. They soon moved into the Bank House, a large home built above the premises of the British Linen Bank. This was where they lived in the winter months, but they spent their summers in ‘The Cottage', above the shore beside Thurso Castle, where Peter Keith was factor to Sir John Tollemache Sinclair.

In 1913 Peter Keith purchased Olrig House, which was the ‘big house' in the parish in which he had grown up, but by this time Christina was living away from Thurso. Many years later, writing to her mother, Christina said, ‘I love the Cottage – it is quite the nicest house we have.' She was conscious of the influence her childhood surroundings had had on her. She remembered how her father, who had been factor to the owners of Barrogill Castle (now the Castle of Mey) for many years, had stepped in when the castle and its contents were to be sold, and had purchased portraits of the 14th Earl of Caithness and his first wife, the Countess Louise, after whom he and Katie had named their second daughter. These portraits hung on the walls in the Bank House:

So the portraits moved to another home, to be landmarks for other children, who found, to their surprise, a subtle atmosphere of gaiety and splendour and high distinction somehow wafted from their presence. Living with ‘the ancestors' had nothing everyday about it. They swept you up into their own lively world.
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The family grew. When Christina was two, her little brother David Barrogill, known in the family as Barr, was born, followed the next year by Catherine Louise. Barrogill and Louise would both follow their father into law and would practice in Thurso. Barrogill later became Sheriff Substitute in Kirkwall, but his first love was art, and while training to be a lawyer he also studied painting at the Académie de l'Écluse in Paris and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art. Barrogill too had absorbed the family passion for an education which was genuinely stimulating. Writing for his school's former pupils' magazine (which he helped to found), he observed: