The year 1916 closed with a Rotary-related death when the son of Harry Lauder fell in France.
A pawky Scotsman — the modifier, often affixed to his name, connotes someone who is humorously tricky or sly — the elder Lauder cultivated an instantly identifiable public persona, which in his case entailed wearing a kilt and tam-o’-shanter, smoking a short clay pipe, and wielding a gnarled cromach, or walking stick.
A singer, songwriter, and comedian, he packed vaudeville theatres in Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States and sold, by his own estimate, a million or more records.
During the first two decades of the 20th century, he was the highest-paid performer in the world.
At the end of 1914, Glasgow Rotary “installed” Lauder as a member, though the entertainer claimed to have joined Rotary earlier that year while touring America.
Rotary lore has it that Lauder met Paul Harris while performing in Chicago and that the two men became fast friends.
Lauder was effusive in his praise for Rotary, and he regularly appeared at Rotary clubs, where he would lead members in song, including one he had written whose chorus began: “In the Rotary, in the Rotary / That’s the place to find sociability.”
Over the Christmas holidays in 1916, Lauder was performing at a London theatre in a revue called Three Cheers, which regularly drew soldiers on leave from France — men, as Lauder explained, who were looking for “something light, with lots of pretty girls and jolly tunes and people to make [them] laugh.”
Rotary member and star vaudevillian Harry Lauder and his son, John.
On New Year’s morning, a banging at his hotel door awakened him.
A porter handed him a telegram: Four days earlier, at about 8 in the morning, his 25-year-old son, John, a captain with the 8th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, had been killed by a German sniper near the French town of Pozières. John Lauder had been about to return home on leave.
Lauder’s death hit U.S Rotary members hard.
The New York City club sent his father a tribute written by one of their members, author and editor F.D. Van Amburgh.
The Rotarian published the prose poem in its February 1917 issue.
“Can’t you see us, Harry?” its third stanza asked. “Can’t you understand that this is not alone your loss? This is an international sorrow that borrows from Rotarian hearts the warmest glow.”
In his memoir, A Minstrel in France, Harry Lauder recalled how the news of his son’s death nearly led him to end his career.
However, he did return to Three Cheers, compelled to provide for others a brief respite from the misery of war.
In June 1917, he visited British troops in France, where soldiers begged, “Make us laugh again, Harry!” (His wartime service, which included recruitment drives, hospital visits, and bond rallies, earned Lauder a knighthood in 1919.)
During that 1917 tour, Lauder visited his son’s grave on the Somme battlefield.
Today, the Ovillers Military Cemetery contains the graves of 3,440 Commonwealth war dead; more than 70 percent of the burials are unidentified.
Lauder collapsed on the mound beneath the white cross where his son lay.
“As I look back upon it now,” he wrote, “I can think of but the one desire that ruled and moved me.
“I wanted to reach my arms down into that dark grave, and clasp my boy tightly to my breast, and kiss him. And I wanted to thank him for what he had done for his country, and his mother, and for me.”
Don’t miss!
Historian David Fowler marks 100 years of the Armistice in December’s issue of the Rotary GBI magazine.
