7606 Corporal Hugh McGuckian of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots, was killed in action on the 2nd June 1915. He was a career soldier, born in Wolsingham, County Durham, who had originally attested at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the 17th June 1901, and joined at Glencorse the following day. His terms of enlistment were three years with the colours and nine on the reserve. At the time of his enlistment he was 18 years and four months old and working as a miner. He was five feet, four inches tall with a fair complexion, brown eyes and brown hair. He had a scar on the middle of his back, and tattoo marks on his left forearm.
Hugh McGuckian served in South Africa in 1902 and later in India. His surviving service record is quite extensive and I attach one page of it, above.
Hugh's stations look like this:
Home: 17th June 1901 to 16th July 1902
South Africa: 17th July 1902 to 13th March 1903
Home: 14th March 1903 to 19th September 1904
India: 20th September 1904 to 8th March 1909
Home: 9th March 1909 to 9th August 1914
BEF France: 10th August 1914 to 2nd June 1915.
At the time of his death, Hugh was a married man with three children, two from his marriage to Mabel Lavinia Chalmers Sloggie (married 23rd August 1912) and one, a daughter - Mary, born in 1910 - from a former marriage. His two boys, James and Harry, would have been one year old and two months old when he died.
Hugh McGuckian has no known grave and is one of over 54,000 men commemorated on the Menin Gate at Ypres. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission notes that he was 33 years old, the son of Hugh McGuckian of Dunston-on-Tyne, and the late Mary McGuckian, and the husband of Mabel L C McGuckian of 3 Brandfield Street, Edinburgh.
Hugh McGuckian's name does not appear on the Wolsingham memorial in County Durham, presumably because he had moved out of the area some time before his death.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, WE WILL REMEMBER THEM.
Sources:
Ancestry (MIC, WO 363)
Soldiers Died in The Great War
Army Service Numbers
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
The image reproduced on this page is Crown Copyright.
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