A SIMPLE mark of remembrance will take place in Innerleithen on Sunday to honour Tom Thumb.

Captain Robin Ballantyne-Welsh was killed in the assault during the Battle of Arras on April 23, 1917.

The six-foot-six son of Innerleithen had enlisted along with his friends, the brothers Ian and Duncan Grant Ferguson, at the outbreak of World War I.

Robin was the fiancé of their sister, Margaret.

By 1917, the three young men - Ian, Duncan and Robin - had all gone to their graves. Theirs are the first three names on Innerleithen War Memorial.

Robin’s body was never recovered from the battlefield, and there is no grave to remember him by.

Luath Grant Ferguson, the nephew of Duncan and Robin, travelled from his home in Hampshire to commemorate the death of Duncan in May, 2015.

And last year the family returned to the Peeblesshire town to mark the centenary of Ian's death.

Luath told us: "In the early morning of April 23, 1917, 100 years ago this Sunday, near Arras, in northern France, 500 men of 7th Battalion, the Border Regiment, were ordered over the top in the expectation that a broad sweep of barbed wire between them and the enemy front line had been cut and cleared.

"It hadn’t, and over 400 did not return.

"Conspicuous among the officers that day would have been the six-foot-six of Captain Robert - Robin - Ballantyne-Welsh, from Innerleithen, known affectionately to his friends as Tom Thumb.

"My late father, then a child, often recalled him with awe and love as the close friend of his two older brothers, both killed earlier in the War, and as the beloved fiancé of his sister."

The Grant Ferguson brothers were the son of the Rev John Grant Ferguson, who founded St Andrew’s Episcopalian Church in Innerleithen in 1904.

Luath's father Luke had been the first child to be born at Innerleithen's Pirn House in 100 years and also the last as it was demolished in the 1950s – replaced by the current school in 1957.

Last year Luath also published his father Luke's memoirs of his early life in Innerleithen.

A chance meeting between Luath and Rachel Mays from Smail's Print Works in Innerleithen led to Life at Pirn House going to print.

And it will be Rachel who will lay a bouquet of flowers on Sunday to mark the death of Tom Thumb.

Luath added: "Robin’s body was never recovered and therefore has no grave, but his name is now commemorated on the great War Memorial in Arras and, with the 69 others, on the somewhat smaller one in Innerleithen.

"With our modern world in so much turmoil, and April 23 being Shakespeare’s birthday, perhaps we might remember alongside Tom Thumb and those other men of the Borders, the humble soldier who, in Henry V, Act IV, Scene 1, challenges the man he does not realise is the King himself '...how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument?'"