Private John Thomson

Private John Thomson, 1st/8th ( Territorial ) Battalion, Royal Scots. He was killed in France on 1st August 1916, aged 23, near the notorious High Wood during the Battle of the Somme and commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in  France. He had been born in Oldhamstocks and was the son of George and Euphemia Thomson of Oldhamstocks, Berwickshire.  He had enlisted with his brother George ( see below). At that time the Battalion, who were Divisional pioneers, though not in action, suffered from the incessant shelling which characterised that part of the front. The photographs show troops on the Somme and the colour image depicts a peaceful Somme landscape today with ” no gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing now”.

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