William Elder

Until his death at the age of 108, Elder was one of a dwindling band of surviving Scottish veterans who fought in the trenches during the First World War.

Born in Selkirk in 1897, Elder had been an apprentice gardener at the Buccleuch estate at nearby Bowhill in the years before the outbreak of war.

When he was called up at the age of 18, he joined the ranks of the Royal Garrison Artillery and soon found himself in Flanders. Ypres and the Belgian countryside of the surrounding salient was to be the setting for some of the bloodiest fighting of the war.

Elder was at Ypres in 1915. The three battles to seize and hold the Ypres salient saw more than 1.7 million soldiers on both sides killed or wounded, together with countless civilians.

Elder survived these horrors only to go on to witness the slaughter of the Somme in 1916.

British Expeditionary Force commander and fellow Borderer General Sir Douglas Haig drew up a joint strategy, with General Sir Henry Rawlinson, to unleash a ferocious preliminary eight-day bombardment that he believed would wipe out the German forward defences.

He was to be proved tragically wrong. The allied artillery had failed to clear away the barbed wire and concrete bunkers sheltering the waiting German troops. When the British tommies went over the top on the morning of 1 July, 1916, the German machine-gunners were ready and waiting. What ensued has since passed into the record books as the worst day in the history of the British Army. In the following four-and-a-half months of fighting, the British sustained 420,000 casualties, but Elder was one of the lucky few who returned home.

He met his future bride, Daisy, who also worked for the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch at their stately home at Boughton, near Kettering, in Northamptonshire.

The couple married and Elder continued his work as a gardener, this time at the Clovenfords Vinery near Galashiels, helping to produce much sought-after white Muscat dessert grapes, which were shipped to the tables of London connoisseurs. He also worked at The Woll estate, near Selkirk.

Between 1931 and 1936 he first worked in the grounds at a cemetery in Selkirk before eventually taking up the role of superintendent at Kirkcaldy cemetery in Fife.

When world war came once again into his life, Elder served in the local Home Guard and assisted with the work of the Earl Haig Poppy Fund.

He was also later secretary of the Kirkcaldy United Services Institute for a period, helping to secure pensions for ex-servicemen and war widows.

In later life, Elder and his wife moved back to Northamptonshire, this time to Kettering, where he subsequently worked in the gardens of Burton Latimer Manor. He could be found gardening for friends - "helping out the old folk", as he called it - until he was well into his nineties.

His wife died 28 years ago and Elder stayed on in Northamptonshire, living with his daughter, until moving into a nursing home three years ago.

At his funeral service, mourners were told of Elder's fondness for bee-keeping and snooker, and, of course, gardening. As well as supporting his local ex-servicemen's club and the Royal British Legion, he was a member of various Masonic lodges in Scotland.

A spokesman for the Royal British Legion Scotland, Neil Griffiths, said he believed that at the time of his death, Elder would have been one of fewer than ten surviving Scots who had fought in France in the Great War.

Elder died on 23 June, 2005. He is survived by two children, 11 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren.