The Artillery Volunteers never had to fire their guns in anger. The threatened invasion never came. But a few Volunteers did see active service. The Boer War was going badly and the army needed reinforcements. There was no shortage of men from the Volunteer Force willing to deploy, but the campaign required infantry not artillery. It also required doctors.
Captain Patrick Gillies, local doctor and commander of the Easdale Gunners, deployed in early 1901 to South Africa, where he took charge of a military hospital in the Natal province. When he returned to Scotland it was time to prepare the Easdale Volunteers for radical change.
In 1908 the Secretary of State for War reshaped the defence of the realm. The old Volunteer Force gave way to a new Territorial Force – today’s Territorial Army. Lord Haldane’s sweeping reforms had no need of the guns that had defended these shores for almost half a century.
On 31 March 1908 the Easdale Gunners stood down. On the following day the new Territorial Force came into being. Some Easdale men continued as Gunners and joined the Oban section of the new Argyll Mountain Battery. But most men remained in Easdale and joined its new Territorial unit: H Company 8th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Gunners became infantrymen; and Patrick Gillies became their commander.
A few years later they were mobilized. In 1915 this cluster of islands sent its men far and wide. They went to the mire of the trenches of France, to the crags and gullies of Gallipoli, and to the makeshift wards of a hospital ship in the Meditarranean. Theirs was a contribution that belied the modest size and remote location of their Argyll home.
But what of the guns? What became of the old 64-pounders? They remained on Easdale Island, overlooking the Firth of Lorne: silent sentinels while the world raged around them. There they stood for another thirty years. At the start of the Second World War they were taken away, requisitioned by the government for scrap metal.
Left – Captain Patrick Gillies. The local doctor was a member of the Easdale Volunteers for fifteen years and was in command from 1904 to 1908. He commanded the new H Company of 8th Argylls from 1908 to 1914. During the First World War he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was medical officer in charge on a hospital ship collecting casualties from the Gallipoli coast. He survived the war.
Top photo – headline in the Oban Times of April 1908.