James Sweeney had no connections with Chailey other than that he was sent to Hickwells to recuperate after being wounded on the second day of the Battle of Loos.
James's entry in Nurse Oliver’s album
reads:
Pte J Sweeney 18406
13 Batt Royal Scots
wounded at Hill 70 26/9/15
during the Battle of Loos
He shares this page with entries from fellow
Scotsmen 7567 Private John Currie of the 10th Gordon Highlanders and
S/7793 Private Andrew Geddes of the 1/7th Gordon Highlanders.
James was born at Newbattle,
Midlothian. He arrived in France on 9th
July 1915 with the 13th Royal Scots which formed part of the 45th Brigade in
the 15th (Scottish) Division. He was
wounded at Hill 70 on the second day of the battle of Loos, 26th September
1915, the day that 18274 Private Robert Dunsire of the same battalion, won the
Victoria Cross. The following two
paragraphs are adapted from my narrative, The Hospital Way.
James Sweeney may have been wounded by British
artillery fire dropping short onto the trenches that the 45th Brigade was
holding. The morning was misty and the
artillery had been told that the trenches would be temporarily evacuated. But nobody had told the Scotsmen and the 13th
Royal Scots in particular had suffered casualties. With classic understatement, The Official
Historian would write many years later, that the men upon whom the British
shells fell “… were therefore somewhat shaken and not perhaps able to take such
a vigorous part in the assault as they might otherwise have done.”
By the time the attack was finally pressed at
9am, the mist had lifted and although parties of
the attacking battalions succeeded in breaking through into the German lines
where desperate hand-to-hand fighting ensued, they were simply
overwhelmed. The attack failed not due
to lack of determination on the Scotsmens’ part but because of heavy machine
gun cross-fire from both sides and artillery fire which either killed them as
they ran or forced their surviving colleagues to retire. The few remaining men of the Fifteenth
Division could not, on their own, re-take Hill 70. More help would be needed.
James probably arrived back in England
at the beginning of October and after travelling first to the 2nd Eastern
General Hospital at Brighton, would have transferred shortly afterwards to
Hickwells. He obviously recovered from
his wound and was transferred to the 12th Royal Scots Regiment in the 27th
Brigade of the 9th (Scottish) Division.
It was while serving with this battalion that he was killed in action on
26th March 1918; one of four Royal Scots fatalities on that day. James Sweeney has no known grave and is
commemorated on panel 4 of the Pozieres memorial in France.
My thanks to Ken and Pam Linge for taking the photograph of James' name on the Pozieres memorial (above). Medal index card courtesy of Ancestry.
