The battlefield prose of an Angus son who died at Ypres is the centrepiece of his home town’s First World War commemoration.
As part of a series of displays being mounted at Kirriemuir’s Gateway to the Glens museum, John Beaton’s work features in Wartime Poets, the latest exhibition which tells the story of young soldiers in the Great War who used poetry to describe their experiences.
John Beaton was a Lance Corporal in the 5th Battalion of The Black Watch when he fell in France on May 9 1915, aged 20.
The youngest of 10 children, he was born at Sawmill Row in Kirrie’s Southmuir and worked as a chauffeur for the Wilkie business family before joining the Angus battalion.
LCpl Beaton’s brother, Archie, also died while serving with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, but a third brother, David, survived.
The Kirrie exhibition will run until early next year and help widen awareness of LCpl Beaton’s personal story, it having also been told in a First World War remembrance trail at Fleurbaix cemetery in France, where his grave is marked.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission embarked on the programme in 2012 to install visitor information panels into some 500 First World War cemeteries.
And last summer, Canadian descendants Douglas and Louise Beaton made a poignant Angus pilgrimage to visit the museum and the town memorial which bears the name of the two young soldiers.