A hero in the family

By David Rennie

“We’re dressed for a funeral,” my 13-year-old daughter remarked, a bit doubtfully, to her brother and me as we marched down the shore road to the war memorial at Innellan, the long-ago Scottish home of one branch of her family. In one sense she was making a statement of fact. On this brisk December morning, a day after we had flown in from Washington, DC, we were darkly and formally dressed, following the sound of a bagpiper to a roadside cross.

The Lord Lieutenant of Argyll and Bute, in dress uniform and sword, was waiting there to unveil a memorial to my children’s great-great uncle. A gaggle of strangers stood beside him: the provost in his chain of office, a priest, old soldiers from the Royal British Legion, local residents. Marching down the pavement past a bus stop came three bandsmen of the Grenadier Guards in scarlet, their black bearskins ruffled by the breeze off the Firth of Clyde.