Private John Griffin

Private 4614 John Griffin was born at 5 High Street, Wigtown on 27th September 1895, the son of general labourer, John Griffin, and his wife, Maggie Adair.  The family soon moved away from Wigtown: in 1901 they were living at Stell Cottage, Penninghame where John Snr was working as a farm engineman.

By the start of the war John Jr was working at High Glasnick farm near Kirkcowan and he enlisted in the army at Newton Stewart. He probably enlisted with one of the local regiments but, at the time of his death Private 4614 John Griffin was serving with 20th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. His body was not found and he is named on the Arras War Memorial which commemorates almost 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand who died in the Arras sector between the spring of 1916 and 7 August 1918, the eve of the Advance to Victory, and have no known grave. He is also named on the Penninghame and Kirkcowan War Memorials.

At the time of his death, John’s parents were back in Bladnoch. Two years earlier, on 16 May 1915, they had lost their son George, serving with the Scots Guards, killed at the Battle of Festubert. Two months later, on 31 July, they would lose a third son, Robert, serving with the Black Watch.