Hay Guthrie was killed in action on this day in 1916.
In the days before the 16 April, a local newspaper recounted the words of one Seaforth Highlander describing the barrages that were being endured by the 6th Seaforth Highlanders:
‘These mortars are of a tremendous size. You can see them coming through the air, twirling round and round and then they reach the earth a terrific explosion occurs….they are filled with nails, pieces of iron and lead pellets which fly in all directions. The weather isn’t the best just now and the trenches are very muddy’.
One mortar bomb explosion in a dugout killed three men (all from Morayshire) on 16 April 1916 and wounded several others. Lance Corporal Hay Guthrie, from Elgin, was killed instantly as he stepped outside of the dugout.
He was born in March 1881, the son of Hay and Elizabeth Guthrie who lived in Elgin. A gardener, he enlisted on the outbreak of war and went to France with the Battalion on 1 May 1915. He was home on leave in January 1916, when he married Isabella Shearer and left a daughter who had been born to the couple in 1910. Within barely six weeks, his brother Harry would die of wounds sustained in early June 1916.
Colonel Grant Smith wrote to Hay’s widow thus:
‘He is buried near the spot where he fell, and I am arranging to erect a memorial cross in the cemetery here, which will bear your husband’s name, and after it has been erected I hope to send you a sketch of it. Your husband’s brothers were near him when he fell, but are uninjured’.
The grave was obviously lost in later fighting and Hay Guthrie is commemorated on the Arras Memorial.
