One of the projects I have set myself do do over the next few months is to sort out a huge collection of family photographs which I have inherited from various members of the family.  Among the pictures I came across this fascinating little card.

Alex Smith, my grandfather, aged 29 and married with young children had been summoned for a medical by the army in August 1917.  Parliament passed the Military Service Act on  27th January 1916 and ever man between the ages of 18 and 41, if unmarried, was “deemed to have enlisted”. However, On 25th May married men too were “deemed” to have done the same.

I wonder what Alex and his young wife Ina (Georgina) were feeling as he made his way to he Castlehill Barracks in Aberdeen.  In the end he was catagorised C ii which I have discovered means that he was passed fit for “Labour Service at Home Camps”, but not to be sent with the Gordons to the Western Front. .  What that actually meant in practice, I have no idea. There was certainly never any mention in  the family  of Grandad doing military service.

What was even more interesting fo me from that tiny crumpled piece of yellowing card, was where the family was living at the time, Tarsets.  I knew that the early part of his working life had been as a farm servant in Aberdeenshire.  But I had no idea that every day when I drove to and from Aberdeen when I was working in the hospital, that I was driving past the very house where the family were probably living at the time.   My own mother would have lived there as  a little girl.

Tarsets farm was right beside the main road from Ellon to Aberdeen, not far from Ellon. After the dual carriageway near Ellon was built, that part of the road was been bypassed, but there are certainly two cotter houses there and I wonder if one of them was theirs.

You can see that he looks quite small beside the big Clydesdale horses – 5ft 5¾ins the army measured him at.  I have no idea of when or where this picture was taken but it does give a flavour of life at the time.

No horses at Tarsets now – but a few cattle in the steading took an interest in me as I took the photographs.   I wonder what Grandad would have made of them with their yellow ear tags.   How farming has changed in the nearly 100 years since he faced conscription into the army during the First World War.