Reid, James Meston
Rank: Major
Regiment: Royal Engineers, attached to North Russian Expeditionary Force
Biography: Son of Walter Reid, C.A., Aberdeen ; born Aberdeen, 10 February 1891 ; educated at the Grammar School ; student in Science, 1907-08. He studied chemical engineering at Aberdeen and Glasgow and subsequently in France and Germany, and became F.C.S. in 1913. At the outbreak of war he was with the firm of Orr's Zinc White Ltd., Widnes. He served as a Private in the Liverpool Scottish before the war, and in 1913 was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the West Lancashire R.E. (T.F.). In June 1915, after serving in England since mobilization, he went overseas and served in Gallipoli, Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula and the Balkans. For his services at Salonika, where he was in temporary command of a Greek Labour Battalion, he was mentioned in dispatches. In January 1918 he was invalided home suffering from malaria, but in June he gallantly volunteered again for active service with the North Russian Expeditionary Force and was sent to Onega on the White Sea, where he was in command of fortifications. He died at Archangel on 6 November 1918 of illness contracted on service. Ambitious and self-reliant, Meston Reid could have looked forward to a successful career but when the war interrupted the work he had chosen, he threw himself with ready keenness and determination into his new task.
Date of Death: 06 November 1918
Burial Details: Buried at Archangel Allied Cemetery, Row B, Grave 5.
Publication: Roll of Service, edited by Mabel Desborough Allardyce. Published 1921.
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