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Pte. John Keith
British Army 14th Btn. (Fife and Forfar Yeomanry) Black Watch (Royal Highlanders)
from:Scotland
(d.2nd September 1918)
John Wallace Keith b. 5/6/1896 in Ladybank, Fife, Scotland was the son of Robert and Jane Wallace Keith. John was unmarried and working in the ticket office of Kirkcaldy Railway Station at the time he enlisted in the Fife & Forfar Yeomanry (the Black Watch). His first posting was to Egypt, but dysentery caused him to be shipped home to recover. He returned to the war in France and was killed in an action in the fields around the village of Moislain, Somme on 2/9/1918. Those killed in the same action were buried in Moislains but at the end of the war re-interred at the Peronne Communal Cemetery Extension.
John's name is shown on war memorials in Ladybank and Giffardtown, Fife and on the Railworkers National Memorial inside Edinburgh's Waverley Station. The Books of Remembrance at Edinburgh Castle show 'no known grave' but in 2001, thanks to the Commonwealth War Grave website, his burial site at Peronne was finally found. The next Spring our family, including his nephew Robert, travelled to France to honour him, placing a Saltire and British Legion cross on the grave. The cemetery at Peronne is quiet and beautifully maintained - more a tranquil garden than a 'foreign field'.
