An MP has told how his grandfather came to be in an iconic picture taken by a Daily Mirror war photographer a century ago.


SNP culture spokesman Brendan O'Hara addressed Parliament last Tuesday during a debate to commemorate the Armistice.


Mr O'Hara explained that John O'Hara was one of five British soldiers photographed as they emerged from Saint Vaast church in the northern French city of Armentieres in 1918.


John, who was in the Machine Gun Corps at the time, had been seconded to help a priest salvage priceless relics from the church which was in ruins after a German bombing raid.


He and his comrades carefully carried wooden statues of saints to a safe place, a moment frozen in time by Mirror snapper David McLellan who recognised its symbolic importance.


Last month the Daily Mirror recreated the famous shot with current parishioners at Saint Vaast after locating the same statues in a quiet corridor of the building. 


After our story appeared, Mr O'Hara got in touch to say that the man on the left of the front row was his grandfather.

Mr O'Hara, the SNP member for Bute and Argyll, said: "The story behind the photograph is really interesting. My aunt Eileen brought home a magazine from school in the early 1950s because there was a photograph of someone she thought looked exactly like her dad. 


"The family were amazed when he said it was him and he remembered the photo being taken although he'd never seen the photograph before.

John O'Hara of the Machine Gun Corps

My granny then cut it out of the magazine and kept it. My dad took it when my grandparents died and it has been with my mum ever since." 


Glasgow-born John O'Hara, 19 when the photograph was taken, enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps and was sent to be trained as a mechanical transport driver.

In 1917 he completed infantry training and was then given further training as a machine gunner. His family believe he was badly injured after being shot in the 2nd Battle of Passchendaele that year. 


John O'Hara is second from left in this colourised version of the famous picture

After being repatriated to recover from his injuries, he was then sent back to France, and that was when he came to be photographed by McLellan. 


In later years he worked as a GP, including a spell as the official doctor of Celtic Football Club.


"The photograph of those otherwise anonymous Tommies, one of them my grandfather, standing to attention on the steps of the church, carrying the rescued wooden statues, has become very well known and, I think, rather poignant, Mr O'Hara told fellow MPs during a speech in which he also praised the Daily Mirror.

Brendan O'Hara (
Image:
Daily Record)


"It is one of the great images of the final days of the great war.

Thankfully, and rather obviously, my grandfather survived the last terrible months of the war, but I have always wondered what happened to his four comrades.

What fate befell them in those last awful months?"