Catherine Watson bravely run
To the rescue! long as sun
Floods the Firth with gold, your name
Shall be golden as your fame;
Never boy in yonder bay
But shall feel above his play
Towering up the granite cross
Mindful of our love and loss;
Never fisherman shall ride
Homewards on the swelling tide
But shall dream beside his boat
That he sees your body float,
With those hands that stretched to save
Drifting helpless on the wave;
And when tempests cease to roar
They who gather by the shore,
That wild ocean-forest thing
Whose strong roots do clutch and cling
Round the stones, shall haply find
Branches of the weed that twined
Round your hair in Berwick Bay,
Lest the tides should steal away
All that we, who loved you dear,
Held in veneration here.

Catherine Watson! you but saw
Boys who played beneath the “Law”
Strip and run to meet the tide,
Then you heard how voices cried,
And with not a look behind,
With your loose hair on the wind
Of your speed, you raced across
Sand and shallow to our loss,
Entered boldly to the wave
That roared at you, calm and brave,
Strong to die or strong to save.

Catherine Watson! though no more
You are seen upon the shore,
Never more with brush in hand
At our fisher huts you stand,
Smiling on our children’s faces,
Catching all their pretty graces
With your pencil, laughing free,
Dandling babes upon your knee,
Talking to our wives at home
Of the boats that sure will come
Round by Fidra laden well,—
Still we fishers feel your spell,
And at times we hear your brave
Voice sound cheerly o’er the wave,
Saying that you still can love
Berwick Law, and Berwick Cove,—
Still for children in the Bay
Glad would give your life away.

On the shore of East Bay, North Berwick, stands a very beautiful granite cross of Celtic design.  At its base are engraved the words: “Erected by public subscription to the memory of Catherine Watson of Glasgow, aged 19, who was drowned in the East Bay, 27th July, 1889, while rescuing a drowning boy.  The child was saved—the brave girl was taken.”

(Poems, Ballads, and Bucolics, p. 208)

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We do not realise that this war is life and death for us as a nation; and if Germany wins, it means the annexation of Belgium and vast harbours and naval stations right opposite our coast.  I believe that nothing short of the hearing of the landing of Germans on our shores will wake us to a sense of the urgency of our call to arms.  Everybody unmarried over nineteen and under thirty years of age, capable of learning to hold a rifle straight, should offer himself for a soldier’s training and his country’s cause immediately.  We want not 100,000 men for the Second Army, we need 1,000,000 if we are to be a real factor in the determination of this cruel war.  But, of course, they are not wanted all at once, for the simple reason that we should not have officers sufficient to train them.  If the Germans land, these recruits will probably be forthcoming.  It will then be too late.  I go further, and say that, seeing the fate of the whole Empire depends upon our being on the winning side of this war, if Young Britain will not respond to the call to arms, the Government would be justified, for this particular crisis, in making service obligatory till the end of the war.  Young men say, “Why should I volunteer while all these other fellows are loafing and enjoying life at home?”  Meanwhile what is urgently needed is that the young men of England should be made to realise the facts of our imminent national peril.  Mr Blatchford has done what he can.  We want a hundred Blatchfords and half-a-dozen Lloyd Georges to go through the country, and rouse our young fellows to a sense of their responsibility.  While there is time, and every day is of importance, will not men of the North Country respond, and make the supreme sacrifice, at the call, not only of country and fatherland, but of civilisation and freedom—to have offered themselves would be an inspiration for life?  I heard of 20,000 men gathered last week at a football match in the north.  A military man said, “What an army we could make of these men if they would join the colours.”  There is another danger we should have our eyes upon.  There is a standing army of Germans in the country still, most of whom have been trained as soldiers, many of whom have arms and ammunition in their lodgings.  A friend, who speaks German very fluently, went into a London restaurant a little time ago, and talked throughout the meal in German.  When he paid his bill, he said “What is your rendezvous when the war comes?” and the answer came quite pat, “Colchester.”  I imagine that if these men were Englishmen in Germany they would be interned in a concentration camp.  On the other hand, there are quite innocent people who must be classed, through no fault of their own, as alien enemies in our midst; many of them teachers who cannot get back to Germany or Austria, and who are reduced to a pitiable condition.  For these, as you may know, an Emergency Committee has been formed by the Society of Friends, and though the German Government might very well put at their disposal some of the blackmail levied in Brussels, any contributions that can be spared to help them should be sent to the Secretary of that Committee.

(Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 1914, 27 August, p. 4)

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Chelsea, February 5th, 1881

Thro’ mist and gloom, indignant and alone,
      He nursed his heart’s great fire, he spake his lore;
    Death smoothed at last the lines that sorrow wore,
And nations mourned a master spirit gone.
Of all our prophet saviours, last but one,
    Breaker of idols, stern-voiced counsellor,
    Shall England hear thy Doric phrase no more,
Hear and obey the village craftsman’s son.

Nay, long as Thames shall roll toward the Town
    Its gathered freshness from a thousand vales
      To pass in sorrow on towards the sea,
His words of truth shall sound tho’ tyrants frown,
    His courage keep us when our courage fails,
        His sadness to our gladness strength shall be.

(Valete: Tennyson and other Memorial Poems, p. 109)

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The Martinmas hirings are near, and many a young man in Cumberland will be freer than he has been to offer himself for the service of King and country.  I am persuaded that we in our quiet country districts in the North have not yet realised what this war means, and how the real issue is not between France and Germany, or Russia and Germany, but between Germany and Great Britain.  The Germans envy and hate, which has been nursed against us secretly for the last 30 years, is now seen in all its open madness.  It is the blackest and most devilish thing that has been heard of in history.  Nothing will be left undone by Germany to compass our downfall, and we who talked of the war being over by Christmas, or in six months, know now that it will probably only then have been begun in real earnest.  The issue of the war is life or death of the Empire.  To let others fight and fall while we stay at home is as unchivalrous as it is un-Cumbrian.  Many girls at these Martinmas hirings will be meeting the men of their heart.  Let them take the matter into their own hands, and tell the men straight out that their duty is to join the colours, to fight for right and honour, to save the Empire from ruin, to rid Europe of the mailed fist for ever, and the world from a military domination as ruthless in spirit as it is barbarous in operation.  Remember there is not a single male in Germany, with all its millions, that is not trained from boyhood to be a soldier.  I believe that Germany will fight as long as she can put a single army corps into the field, or has an aeroplane, a Zeppelin, a battleship, or submarine left her.  It is therefore high time that we quiet country folk cease to live in a fool’s paradise, and gave up such idle thoughts as that there are plenty to go to the war without our having to leave home.  To the mothers of Cumberland I commend the action of a brave French mother, mentioned in General Joffre’s Orders of the Day, who had given eight sons to the war.  Seven of them had fallen in battle, one of them a hero who had been decorated with the Legion of Honour.  She bade her daughter write in her name to the surviving soldier son to say that she was handing to him his brother’s decoration to keep, and, said she, “Tell him he is to do his duty.”  On the men of Cumberland I urge that the blood of those 600 men of the Border Regiment who, with their eight officers, after an eight days’ battle on the left wing, fell like heroes rather than leave their post, cries from the ground to bid our young Cumberland men fill their places and fight as they fought for home and England.

 (Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 6 November 1914, p. 2)

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