Alfred Anderson (veteran)

Alfred Anderson (25 June 1896 – 21 November 2005) was a Scottish joiner and veteran of the First World War.

Andrew Anderson died on 31 July 1943, aged eighty-one, of bronchial asthma – from which he had suffered for over twenty-five years – and bronchopneumonia.

In October 1914, Anderson left his home and with the rest of the 1/5th Angus and Dundee Battalion of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), travelled by train from Dundee to Southampton and then crossed the English Channel by ferry to Le Havre.

The regiment was mainly recruited in the County of Angus, so Anderson was surrounded by a group of friends with whom he had joined the Territorial Force in 1912 at the age of sixteen; he thought that he was going on a grand adventure and as Anderson recalled in a television interview in 2005, it offered the chance of a holiday.

All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machinegun fire and distant German voices.

Bertie Felstead, who died in August 2001 at the age of 106, was originally believed to have been the last survivor of the Christmas Truce.

Whilst Alfred Anderson was serving as a batman, he would often go out at night with Bruce-Gardyne into No-Man's Land to listen for enemy activity such as tunneling or troop movements.

After recovering at a hospital in Norfolk he became an infantry instructor at a camp near Ripon, rising to the rank of Staff Sergeant by the end of the war in 1918.

He was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1998 along with all First World War combat veterans who fought on French soil.

A biography (Alfred Anderson: A Life in Three Centuries) was published in 2002, and a bust of him stands on display at the public library in Alyth.