CAPTAIN TALBERT STEVENSON, MC & BAR
BLACK WATCH
14TH NOVEMBER 1917 AGE 22
BURIED: LA CLYTTE MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
"Your son was without exception the finest specimen of the young British officer I have ever met. His loss to the battalion is irreparable. Since our former Colonel (sic. should it be captain?) left he has been my Adjutant, and I relied implicitly on him. Brave to a fault, brimming over with energy and kindness, a prime favourite with officers and men, he also possessed a very old head on young shoulders. Personally, I loved your boy as if he had been a son of my own, and I have never been so cut up over any loss in this war."
Lt. Colonel Thomas David Murray
Quoted page 257 Volume 3 of the Marquis de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour
Stevenson was studying Chemistry at Manchester when the war broke out. He joined up immediately and was gazetted Second Lieutenant on 2 September 1914 arriving in France on 2 February 1915. Promoted lieutenant on 27 September 1915, and captain on 10 August 1917, he was wounded three times before being killed in action by a sniper at Polderhoek on the Menin Road. Stevenson, who had been awarded an MC in January 1917, received a posthumous bar to it in November 1917.
His father, Francis Stevenson, chose his inscription. It's a quote from a very obscure poem called 'To All Who Love, written by Lieutenant Colonel J. Berkley and published in The Spectator on 24 February 1917:
If Death should claim this mortal shell of me
Which you have seen and touched and thought to be
Needful to happiness,
I pray you shed no tear as though this life
Held all, or were but passing phase of strife
'Tween pleasure and distress.
I pray you clothe yourself in gala hue,
Purging your soul of that self-pitying view
That calls for mourning black.
For I would have you mingle with a throng,
Bright-hued, exulting, cheering me along
The road that leads not back,
That I may pass beyond the SOLDIERS' GATE,
Whose arch is SACRIFICE and threshold FATE,
Unburdened by regret;
To greet my battle comrades who have bled
For ENGLAND'S sake, and, risen from the dead,
Rest, clear of Honour's debt.
I pray you, urgently, to see your woe
As just that jarring note you would forgo
Could you but feel at heart,
How, grieving, I could have no other grief
Than helplessness to bring you dear relief,
Being near - yet far apart.
Four years after Talbert Stevenson's death his sister, Mrs Margaret Philip, had a son who she named Talbert Stevenson Philip after her brother. He was killed in action in Normandy on 19 August 1944. Lt Colonel Murray's sons were both killed in 1943.
There is more information about Talbert Stevenson on this Great War Forum site.
A portrait of Captain Talbert Stevenson MC & Bar by Anton Abraham van Anrooy hangs in the Black Watch Castle and Museum, Perth, Scotland
