Great Scot April 2019 Great Scot_156_April_2019_Online | Page 15

Scotch Commemorates World War I
ship at night in St Petersburg and drowned. He
was 47.
HAROLD RYAN (1896) was in the
premiership-winning Scotch 1st XVIII in 1896.
During the war he twice served in New Guinea,
where he rose to the rank of warrant officer. He
also contracted malaria, which proved fatal to
him while living at Wellington in New Zealand on
28 September 1919. He was 42.
HERBERT BUCKLEY (1892) enlisted in
mid-1916 and by September 1917 was on the
Western Front. Just 26 days after arrival he
received a gunshot wound to the scalp. He
was able to rejoin his unit and only returned to
Australia in mid-1919. However, the following
year, on 24 May 1920, he died of his war injuries
in the Austin Hospital for Incurables. He was 42.
ROBERT RAY FERGUS (1905) reached his
artillery unit in France in November 1917 and
served with it until the war’s end in November
1918. While on leave a few weeks after the
Armistice he was hospitalised in England with
influenza, possibly aggravated by the effects of
gassing at the front. He was transferred to the
Pay Corps and was hospitalised again in late
1919. During the voyage back to Australia, he
was so ill by the time he reached Fremantle that
he could not continue. His father came from
Victoria to bring him overland. Robert reached
Melbourne, but died, aged 30, in the Austin
Hospital in Heidelberg on 6 August 1920.w
ISAAC MORRIS MOSES (1882), who in the
1890s had changed his name to Harry Morris,
put his age down from 48 to 44 in order to
enlist in July 1915, having disappeared to New
Zealand earlier that year without letting his wife
know. When he fell ill with trench fever on the
Western Front in December 1916 he was found
to be over-age and suffering with rheumatism.
He was sent back to Australia and discharged
from the army. His health problems persisted
and he died of heart failure at Caulfield Military
Hospital on 27 September 1920, aged 53.
The last Scotch death officially attributed
to war service appears to have been that of
CHARLES STANLEY WHITE (1913). Though
only 20 on enlisting in 1917, he was immediately
made a sergeant on the basis of his pre-war
military experience. He served on the Western
Front from March 1918 and was wounded
in the arm and leg in June that year. He was
hospitalised in England the following May with
pneumonia and burns, and then invalided
home in August 1919. Army doctors expressed
confidence that he would make a full recovery,
but he died of war-related causes at his parents’
home in Canterbury, Melbourne, on 3 May 1921,
aged 24.
Thus ends the catalogue, begun in these pages
in 2015, of the 226 war dead (of which Scotch is
currently aware) among Old Scotch Collegians
and Scotch staff. Lest we forget.
More details about all other Scotch Collegians
killed in World War I can be found on the Scotch
website, under ‘WWI Commemorative Website’
on the lower right of the home page.
DR MARK JOHNSTON — HEAD OF HISTORY
www.scotch.vic.edu.au Great Scot
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