Thomas Houston Boyle

He began his studies at University of Glasgow in 1909. After taking Ordinary Latin and Greek in his first year, and gaining certificates of distinction in both, he went on to study Logic and Moral Philosophy to Honours level. He gained a First Class degree in Logic and Metaphysics, graduating in November 1913. Like John Steele Allan he went on to study Divinity and had completed his course before he went to war. Both young men had been members of the Officer Training Corps and they took commissions in the same regiment, the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Thomas was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in May 1915.

His battalion, attached to the 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers was deployed on the Western Front at the Somme. On the afternoon of the 12th October, in miserable conditions underfoot, their left flank attack on German trenches at the Battle of Transloy was halted by enemy fire. Almost no ground was taken and casualties were high. 2nd Lieutenant Thomas Houston Boyle was killed in action, along with John Steel Allan and James Ross, contemporaries in the Arts Faculty who met their deaths on the same day, 12th October 1916, on the Somme.

2nd Lieutenant Thomas Houston Boyle is remembered on a panel of the Thiepval Memorial, one of 72,000 U.K. and South African officers and men who died in the campaign and whose graves are unknown. He was 25. At the time two of his brothers were serving in the Army and one in the Royal Navy.