Alfred Anderson (veteran)

Alfred Anderson (25 June 1896 – 21 November 2005) was a Scottish joiner and veteran of the First World War. He was the last known holder of the 1914 Star (the Old Contemptibles), the last known combatant to participate in the 1914 World War I Christmas truce, Scotland's last known World War I veteran, and Scotland's oldest man for more than a year.

Alfred Anderson was born on 25 June 1896 at 20 Kirloch Street, Dundee. He was the son of Andrew Anderson, a joiner, and Christina Thomas Emmerson. His parents married on 5 September 1888 in Chicago, Illinois, where they had two sons before returning to Scotland. The Andersons went on to have four more children, including Alfred. Andrew Anderson died on 31 July 1943, aged eighty-one, of bronchial asthma – from which he had suffered for over twenty-five years – and bronchopneumonia. Christina Anderson died of cardiovascular degeneration on 9 January 1953, aged eighty-four. Alfred registered both of his parents' deaths.

In October 1914, Anderson left his home and with the rest of the 1/5th Angus and Dundee Battalion of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), travelled by train from Dundee to Southampton and then crossed the channel by ferry to Le Havre. The regiment was mainly recruited in Angus, so Anderson was surrounded by a group of friends with whom he had joined the Territorial Force in 1912 at the age of sixteen; he thought that he was going on a grand adventure and as Anderson recalled in a television interview in 2005, it offered the chance of a holiday . The young lads who had joined up had volunteered to go and fight on the Western Front.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (24 and 25 December) 1914, Anderson’s unit was billeted in a farmhouse away from the front line. He vividly recalled the day and once said:

I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence. Only the guards were on duty. We all went outside the farm buildings and just stood listening. And, of course, thinking of people back home. All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machinegun fire and distant German voices.

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