War Classics Read Free

family for generations back had lived in Castletown, a village in the parish of Olrig a few miles to the east of Thurso. He was born in 1847, the son of a tailor and the second-youngest child in a large family. Peter began his education at the local school, but this came to an abrupt halt when he was expelled for locking the dominie in the school building. He was then sent to the school of Matthew Dunnet in the nearby village of Bower. Matthew Dunnet had gained a significant reputation for education and boys were sent to him from far afield. 1 Peter clearly flourished under Matthew Dunnet’s tuition, and perhaps it was partly under the schoolmaster’s influence that he came to place such a high value on education, a value which he would pass on to Christina and his other children.
    After serving a three-year apprenticeship with a Thurso solicitor, Peter travelled in 1867 to Edinburgh where he continued his training with a legal firm and also studied at the university. During this time the 1871 census reveals him lodging in Bellevue, Edinburgh, with a Caithness family. Also living there was his 21-year-old sister Johanna, the youngest member of the Keith family, who was described as a student. We do not know what Johanna was studying, or where, but this is the earliest indication of a desire for higher education among the women of the Keith family. In 1871 Edinburgh University was still an all-male enclave, but a fierce campaign was being fought for the rights of women to a higher education, led by Sophia Jex-Blake who wished to study medicine. Since 1868 the Edinburgh Ladies’ Education Association had offered university-level lectures to women, with the stated aim not of training them for professions but of improving their minds. Johanna’s name does not appear in the Association’s class registers, which rather suggest rooms full of Edinburgh ladies from wealthy New Town addresses. Although we do not know where Johanna was studying, it is interesting to note that Christina’s aunt was there as a student in Edinburgh in the very earliest days of the struggle for higher education for women. 2
    Education was valued not just on Christina’s father’s side but also on her mother’s. Katie Bruce was without doubt a very intelligent woman. My father remembers that he and his family were in Thurso on holiday at the outbreak of the Second World War. In the uncertainty of those early months they decided to stay on in Caithness rather than return to Edinburgh. Katie took on the education of her young grandson, and when sometime later he did return to his school in Edinburgh, he was far ahead of his fellow pupils!
    At the age of forty Peter Keith, now a successful solicitor, bank agent and factor to the local landlord, apparently decided it was time to get married. The story goes that he was considering one local girl and took someone into his confidence. This friend is said to have asked him if he hadn’t considered Katie Bruce – she might not have the material advantages that the other girl had, but she was a very clever young woman. Peter took the advice, and they were married in April 1888.
    But what was Katie’s own story? Like her husband she was of Caithness heritage. On her mother’s side she was descended from a family of some wealth and local influence – her grandfather lived in Freswick House and farmed 200 acres. But Katie’s own childhood was not an easy one. In 1875, when she was just eleven, her father died of pneumonia, leaving her mother a widow with two children. William Bruce, whose origins were humbler than his wife’s, was a wine merchant who had expanded at some point before his death into keeping a hotel. In the 1881 census his widow was continuing to run the hotel, and her 15-year-old son was working in the bank. It might have been expected that 17-year-old Katie would be helping her mother in the hotel – but no. In another of those signposts