Wartime role of Thurso's Jane features in book
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
Jane R. Begg, of Castle Brims, Thurso, who served as an officer during World War Two. Part of her lecture on her experiences, delivered to the woman of Reay Church in 1943, is featured in We Shall Never Surrender, Wartime Diaries 1939-1945.
THE experiences of a female wartime officer from Thurso feature in a newly published book of Second World War diaries and encounters.
A multi-layered account of the British experience of the conflict, We Shall Never Surrender, Wartime Diaries 1939-1945, includes a small section from a lecture by the late Jane R. Begg, of Castle Brims.
Her daughter, Finella MacKinnon, who was born in Thurso but now lives in Skye, was present at the book launch last week in London.
“The book contains a very small section taken from a lecture by my late mother to Reay Churchwomen’s Guild when she was home on leave in February 1943,” Mrs MacKinnon explained.
“As a junior Auxiliary Territorial Service officer, she was in charge of a platoon of 60 girls on the Kent coast during the Dunkirk evacuation. She joined the Seaforth Highlanders in Wick in 1938 and became an officer in 1940.
“She was discharged in 1944 for my birth, but returned to the Women’s Royal Army Corps, Gordon Highlanders, in widowhood when she became commanding officer of the female section of the Aberdeen University Officers Training Corps in 1954. She died in 1999 just before her 86th birthday.”
Ms Begg’s short lecture to the guild plays a small but crucial part in the book, building up a picture of a country at war alongside other small snippets of home life which bridge the gaps between the main diaries.
Through the diaries of nine men and women, the book tells the story of the conflict as they experienced it, whether at home struggling simply to keep going, in high office with direct influence on its outcome, or protesting against it. Some of them, like Alan Brooke, who became Chief of the General Staff, the politician Harold Nicolson or the pacifist writer Vera Brittain, are well known.
Others – Anne Garnett, the wife of a country solicitor, George Beardmore, a young husband and father with ambitions to become a novelist, or Clara Milburn, a contented wife and mother of a son in the forces – are not. But, together with the diplomat Charles Ritchie, the novelist Naomi Mitchison and the resourceful and frequently unconventional Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, they all followed the war in their diaries from outbreak to victory.
At the end of each chapter, as the war progresses, there are additional entries – extracts from diaries, letters or speeches from other men and women – either British or living in Britain, which tell the stories of child evacuees, refugees, women in the services, British prisoners of war, and soldiers, sailors and those on special operations in Normandy.
Born at Castle Brims, both Ms Begg and her little sister moved to Pennyland House, Thurso, at a young age, and were educated at Miller Academy.
Her father was Donald (Dan) Begg who had Brims, Holborn Head and Pennyland farms. He was one of eight Begg brothers of Upper Dounreay, many of whom farmed in Caithness.
Her mother, Helen (Nell) was the sixth of seven daughters of the Rev Donald MacAulay, of North Uist and the manse of Reay.
During World War Two, she met and married Capt Finlay MacBeth, Royal Signals, of Shieldaig, Ross-shire.
Also taking part at the book launch were Baroness Shirley Williams, daughter of Vera Brittain, one of the diarists; Lord Claus Moser, a German Jewish refugee who had been interned in appalling conditions in the Huyton Camp near Liverpool and treated as an alien due to his origins; and Laura Mitchison, a great-granddaughter of Naomi Mitchison, another well-known diarist.
We Shall Never Surrender, Wartime Diaries 1939-1945 is edited by Penelope Middelboe, Donald Fry and Christopher Grace and published by Macmillan.
