ALFRED ANDERSON was already a soldier on the outbreak of the First World War, known until the 1940s as the Great War; he was a private in the Black Watch 5th Battalion. This was a unit of the new Territorial Force formed from yeomanry and militia units under Haldane’s Territorial and Reserve Forces Act of 1907. Anderson and a group of friends enlisted in 1912 when he was 16. He joined chiefly to attend the annual camp — as a holiday. Anderson’s father was a strict and hard-working owner of a small joinery yard, and his family did not have holidays.

Immediately after annual camp at Monzie, about 15 miles west of Perth in July 1914, 5th Black Watch was mobilised and concentrated at Dundee for intensive training ready to join the British Expeditionary Force in France. In his later years Anderson recalled the battalion’s departure from Dundee in October. Far from the popular image of marching through streets packed with cheering “stay-at-homes” and weeping mothers and sweethearts, the men were driven in trucks before dawn through deserted streets to a station closed to the public for the troops’ departure. Two days later they were enduring bitterly cold nights in a tented camp at Le Havre.

The ensuing months were spent in the misery of the trenches, with all the horror of artillery bombardment, mud and trench foot. One advantage Anderson held over his comrades was derived from his experience of assisting his father in his secondary work as the village of Newtyle’s undertaker. He had grown accustomed to the sight of corpses since the age of 14.

During the winter of 1914-15, Anderson was assigned to an officer as his orderly, first to Lieutenant I. M. Bruce-Gardyne and then, while the former went home on a course, to Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, the brother of the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Bowes-Lyon was killed in the opening stage of the battle of Loos on September 25/26, 1915, but Anderson survived, as did Bruce-Gardyne. The following year the two were manning a listening post in a shallow depression between the lines when a shell burst almost immediately overhead. Anderson was wounded in the neck and shoulder by shrapnel and evacuated to an improvised hospital in Norfolk.

When granted home leave, he was welcomed joyfully by his family but the sisters of a friend who had been killed denied him entry to their house when he called to express his sympathy because, as they put it: “You’re here and he’s not.”

Recovered from his wounds, he was posted to an infantry training camp at Ripon and eventually became a sergeant instructor. When hostilities ceased, he contemplated becoming a regular soldier, as he liked the life, but his father’s health was not good and he felt responsible for the family business, to which he returned.

In the Second World War, he served as a sergeant in the Home Guard, commanding the Newtyle platoon. He closed his business when he was 60 and worked for the next 19 years for Dundee County Council and then Perth City Council. On November 10, 1998, the eve of the 80th anniversary of Armistice Day 1918, he was invested as a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by the French Consul-General in Scotland as a mark of gratitude by the French Government for his service in France.

He married Susanna Iddison in 1917. She predeceased him, as did a son and daughter. He is survived by two sons and two daughters.

He was the last known holder of the Mons Star, awarded to those who fought with what the Kaiser dismissed as “Britain’s contemptible little Army” at the Battle of Mons in August 1914. He was reputed to be the oldest man in Scotland. His death leaves eight known surviving British veterans of the First World War who saw action overseas.

Alfred Anderson, Black Watch veteran of the First World War, was born on June 25, 1896. He died on November 21, 2005, aged 109.