Early Life
Findlater was born in 1872 at Turriff, Aberdeenshire, one of eleven children of Alexander Findlater, a miller, and his wife, Mary Ann Clark. He attended the school in Turriff but left at a young age to work as a farm labourer; under the law then in force, children were permitted to leave school at thirteen. Two months after his sixteenth birthday, on 7 April 1888, he travelled to Aberdeen and enlisted in the 2nd Battalion, Gordon Highlanders. The battalion was posted to Ceylon, where in 1891 he transferred to the 1st Battalion, then serving on the North-West Frontier of British India, now part of Pakistan. He first saw active combat there in March 1895, at the Malakand Pass, where he was hit but not wounded; later in the year, he served with the relief force in the Chitral Expedition.
In December 1896 he was appointed as a piper in the battalion's band. The Gordons, in common with other Highland regiments of the time, maintained a pipe band in each battalion for both ceremonial and military purposes; the pipers were trained infantrymen, and accompanied the main force on operations. The following year, the 1st Battalion was assigned as part of the force for the Tirah campaign, an expedition into the mountains to secure the Khyber pass and the northern approaches to India.
Read more about this topic: George Findlater
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)