THE HEROISM of The Black Watch in two world wars was highlighted in Kirriemuir yesterday.

It was a particularly apt setting, as one of the town’s sons, Private Charles Melvin, won Britain’s highest award for bravery while serving with the regiment.

Attention on The Black Watch was focused by Major Ronnie Proctor in a talk staged at the Gateway to the Glens Museum as part of a major exhibition there looking at life in the burgh and surrounding area during the conflicts.

Major Proctor, Angus Black Watch Association chairman and curator of the regimental museum at Balhousie Castle, Perth, told of the exploits of Pte Melvin, who won the Victoria Cross during the first world war, as part of his insight.

The VC was awarded after Pte Melvin, who served with the 2nd Battalion, single-handedly took on a group of Turks at Istabulat in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, in 1917. Dodging machine-gun fire, he rushed a front-line trench, where he killed a number of soldiers using his rifle and then with bayonet in hand, also disarming eight and wounding one.

He tended the wounded man and took him and the other prisoners back to his own lines before returning to the firing line.

The talks will continue until July and will feature Remembering the Great War by Mike Taylor, The Easy Trip by Bill Knaggs and Memories of the Second World War by Muriel Farquharson.

Items from The Black Watch Regimental Museum are included in the exhibition, called Kirriemuir’s War, which examines how local people carried on their lives under wartime restrictions, coped with rationing and came to terms with family members on active service at home and abroad.

Stories of evacuees living in the area and memories of Polish soldiers billeted in Kirriemuir are told through photographs, mementos and artefacts.

*Pictured: Major Ronnie Proctor after yesterday’s talk on the Black Watch at the Gateway to the Glens Museum.