Byline: Compiled by Charles Legge

QUESTION My father, Vic Young, who is 87, wonders whether he is perhaps the only living person whose father served as a regular soldier in the 1899-1901 Boer War? THERE are at least three other people in Scotland, all of whom are under 70, whose fathers served in the Boer War.

My father, Thomas Peart Romanes, was married twice. He had no family from the first marriage and I was the eldest of three children from the second marriage. I was born in September 1942.

My father spent the last six years of his life in Erskine Hospital, Bishopton, and on July 9, 1957, he had the following letter published in the Hawick News: 'Boer War Veteran's Unique Record. Sir, I consider the following is a bit of a record. When only 14 years and ten months, I enlisted in the KOSB [King's Own Scottish Borderers], at Hawick on March 1, 1897, putting my age down as 16 years.

'I marched past Queen Victoria on Laffans Plain at Aldershot when she reviewed her servicemen on her Diamond Jubilee. I was then only 15 years of age.

'I went on the Border March (with 200 picked men of the regiment) from Berwick-on-Tweed to Dumfries. When the Boer War broke out we went to Africa and were three-and-ahalf years there, including six months with the Army of Occupation.

'I returned with the regiment to Belfast in March 1903. In July that same year, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra visited Belfast and Londonderry and we formed a guard of honour for their Majesties at both places.

'After demobilisation in March 1904 I went to work in Glasgow at Parkhead Forge. While working there, King George V and Queen Mary visited the works on July 13, 1914, and 200 ex-servicemen were called to act as a guard of honour at the works' gates. We marched past their Majesties.

'When George VI and Queen Elizabeth opened the Health Exhibition in Bellahouston Park in Glasgow, I was included in a number of South African War veterans and lined part of the route. I served during World War I and was in the Civil Defence in the last war.

'On July 3, 1953, I went to London's Hyde Park when the present Queen reviewed her ex-servicemen. I can now say that I have been officially on parade under five monarchs.' Andrew Romanes, Motherwell, Lanarks. MY GRANDFATHER, William Wescott Cragg (1880-1956) of Grantham, Lincolnshire, served in the Boer War in 1901 and 1902. His daughter Mrs Steele, nee Cragg, of Reading, Berkshire, is the only survivor of his eight children.

William Wescott Cragg's war medals are now in the possession of his eldest grandson, Gordon Cragg of Grantham. His South African campaign medal, with five bars, confirms that he served in South Africa in 1901 and 1902 in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Cape Colony, with the 2nd and 4th Lincolnshire Regiments.

When William Cragg celebrated his 21st birthday in South Africa, he received a box of chocolates from Queen Victoria.

One of grandfather's war stories involved on a four-day forced march across the veldt to relieve a besieged British Garrison. The men had no food and little water and were instructed to cut off one inch of their leather belts each day and chew on it to assuage their hunger. Any soldier who stole another man's water ration was to be shot instantly.

On William Cragg's return home after the war he was presented with a medal (and possibly a gold watch and chain) by Grantham Town Council for being one of only two Grantham men who served in the South African war.

William Cragg was then active in the Territorial Army until World War I, when he immediately enlisted and was shipped to France for the Battle of Mons. His pre-war Territorial service and early enlistment earned him the Territorial Force Medal and the 1914-1915 Mons Star Medal.

William Wescott Cragg survived the full four years of trench warfare in Flanders, Belgium, France and Alsace-Lorraine, as a sergeantmajor with the Lincolnshire and Leicestershire Regiments. …