In the dead silence we shouted out “Merry Christmas” – although none of us felt at all merry.We were so tired, we didn’t have the energy to play football – and we were quite away from the front lines, so we didn’t do any mixing with the Germans that was so famous. The silence came to an end in the afternoon when the guns started again The killing began again too It was a very short-lived peace. We couldn’t wash in the morningbecause the water had frozen in the pipes We were glad when they marched us up to the front. It took three days but it warmed us up a bit!Anderson was soon into action and saw his friends being killed and wounded around him. This was a shock for him; his work in his father’s undertakers had somewhat cushioned him to the sight of death, but not to the loss of friends.When Christmas came, he was in a reserve trench some way from the front:I remember the eerie silence that Christmas Day All the explosions stopped. We were billeted in a farmhouse at the time and we went outside and stood there, listening – and remembering our friends who were gone and our people back home.

When war was declared his battalion, after two months training, arrived in Le Havre in October 1914 on a cattle boat. As Alfred Anderson recalled,We spent a night in a tented camp, which was bitterly cold. For him and his friends it became a way of life – two evenings a week drilling, weekend training with the Lee Enfield rifle and, most pleasing of all, a whole week’s camp in Montrose and Crieff. From the age of 12 until 14, he went by train to the Harris Academy in Dundee, where he enjoyed reading, writing and drawing; at one time he thought he would become an architect. After school he would visit friends at a local farm and this is where he developed an interest in animals, especially horses.When he left school he began an apprenticeship as a joiner with his father’s firm and in 1912 with his friends joined the Territorial Army in the 5th Battalion the Black Watch. Alfred Anderson, joiner and wartime soldier: born Dundee 25 June 1896; married 1917 Susanna Iddeson (died 1979; two sons and two daughters, and one daughter deceased); died Newtyle, Angus 21 November 2005. Alfred Anderson, who has died at the age of 109, was the last member of the British Expeditionary Force – the Old Contemptibles – and the sole remaining survivor of the “Christmas truce” of 1914.
Alfred Anderson was lucky to be born in Dundee, as his two elder brothers were born in Chicago where his father had gone to work as a joiner.

He remembered two soldiers returning from the Boer War in 1902, one of whom picked him up and carried him on his shoulder. That year, his family moved to Newtyle in Angus, where his father bought his own joinery and undertaking business.At the age of 10, Alfred was delivering milk before school and by 12 had saved enough to buy a bicycle so that he was able to increase his pocket money from the round by carrying milk churns on his handlebars. Alfred had vivid memories of his childhood in the days of gas lamps and coal fires. As a non-executive director of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (2002-03), he contributed his skills to yet another difficult negotiation, successfully restructuring the orchestra’s commercial management to ensure its continued success in a competitive arts market.Jon Clark’s final negotiation was with illness. Diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer, he managed the last two years of his life with remarkable courage, fighting to change what could be changed; accepting without rancour that ultimately he could do no more than manage the last few days of his life with dignity.Bob Remington.