Alexander Wishart was born on the 23rd of June 1887 in a small stone cottage on North Street in Leslie, Fife. He was the illegitimate son of John Willocks Wishart, a dyer from Montrose, and his wife, Catherine Wilson, a local papermill worker.

By 1891, when Alexander was three, the family had moved to Peter's Court in the Cowgate area of Dundee and at the time of the 1901 census, were living in a tenement block at 35 Benvie Road.

Alexander had left school and found employment in one of Dundee's many mills. Over the next seven years, he reputedly saw service with the Black Watch Volunteers (his surviving service papers do not refer to this) before leaving Dundee during 1907-8 when he secured work as a pithead worker in one of the many local mines around Kelty in Fife.

Also working in the mine was Maria Easton, the daughter of a coal miner from Stirlingshire who had come to the county in search of work roughly ten years earlier. Alexander and Maria began a relationship, and by the autumn of 1908, she fell pregnant with their first child. As was often the case, the couple were compelled to marry shortly afterwards and wed on the 31st of December 1908 at the Trinity United Free Church Manse in Kelty. Less than six months later, on 15 June 1909, whilst the couple were living at Hawthorn Cottage on Station Road, a daughter named Mary was born.

Perhaps it was his previous experiences with the Black Watch that prompted Alexander to visit the local recruiting office in Blairadam on the 18th of June 1910, when he enlisted for four years in the Army Reserve with the 1st/7th (Territorial) Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

On the 18th of May 1911, Alexander and Maria became parents to a son named John, who was born at Hawthorn Cottage like his older sister Mary. Barely a month had passed when joy turned to tragedy as John fell ill with acute gastritis and died after eight days on the 23rd of June.

Eighteen months later, on the 21st of December 1912, Hawthorn Cottage woke again to the sound of a newborn baby when a second daughter, Catherine, was born. The remaining years of pre-war life for Alexander and Maria passed quietly, and on the 18th of June 1914, Alexander re-engaged for a further year in the reserve.

Around the same time, life for the Wisharts took another dramatic turn when Maria was admitted to the Fife and Kinross Asylum, suffering from Locomotor Ataxia - a degenerative neural condition causing an inability to precisely control one's bodily movements.

The declaration of war in August 1914 and Alexander's subsequent mobilisation couldn't have come at a worse time for the family, and when Maria died on 8 September 1914, her husband was training with his battalion in Bedford.

Three months later, on the 11th of December, the Argylls left camp for Southampton and boarded the SS Tintoretto for France on the 15th. On arrival at Le Havre, the battalion entrained for Helfaut (via St. Omer), where they billeted over Christmas and New Year.

Alexander would have spent most of January to March 1915 rotating between training in the rear and manning the trenches in Nieppe near Armentières. On the 9th of March, his service papers record that he was taken from the 11th Field Ambulance to a hospital in Calais before being transferred to No. 14 General Hospital in Wimereux suffering from diarrhoea.

Upon recovery several days later, he was discharged to the battalion camp in Rouen and put on base duties until the 6th of April - after which he rejoined his unit at La Grande Manque Farm.

On the 25th of April, Alexander's battalion attacked St. Julien on the Ypres salient. Over a thousand yards of no man's land lay between the Argylls and their objective. As the attack formation advanced, the ground was reputedly 'swept by a sheet of lead' from German rifles and machine guns with subsequent enfiladed firepower, causing the battalion to suffer a considerable loss. Almost 450 officers and ranks were killed, wounded or missing. Of those who did not return was Alexander Wishart.

Alexander's death was reported several times in the Dundee press, and sympathies lay with his orphaned children, who had been living with their grandmother in Dundee. They were subsequently awarded ten shillings a week pension from the 22nd of November 1915, although, sadly, the family's tragedies did not end with their father's loss. Three years after the war, Alexander's daughter Catherine died aged eight from shock caused by scalding to her neck, arms and shoulders on the 3rd of February 1921.

Alexander's body was either lost or later, interred unidentified, and he is commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial.