Private Allan Menzies as shown in Perth Academy’s school magazine, with thanks to the Local and Family History Dept, A.K.Bell Library, Perth for permission to reproduce it.
5th Cameron Highlanders. Reported missing, presumed killed, on the 25th September 1915 at the Battle of Loos.
We were delighted to be sent this photograph recently of Private Allan Menzies (1894-1915). It was discovered by Dave Dykes who is researching the 165 former pupils of Perth Academy who were killed during the First World War, Menzies being one of them. The image was scanned from a copy of the school magazine held at the A.K. Bell Library in Perth.
Menzies joined RBGE in August 1913 as a Probationer Gardener / Forester and had passed courses on surveying, meteorology, nursery work, physics and chemistry by the time war was declared a year later. He enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders on the 29th August 1914 on the same day as eight of his colleagues and died alongside three of them on the 25th September 1915 at the Battle of Loos.
Isaac Bayley Balfour named a plant in Menzies’s honour, Primula menziesiana, now renamed as Primula bellidifolia, in 1916.
Botanical illustration of Primula menziesiana produced by Lilian Snelling at RBGE, 3rd July 1918.