Given that I have no links with the MacKinnon family and had never heard of Malcolm until very recently, how do I know these things? Because I am now the custodian of that bronze plaque, which somehow fell out of the hands of the MacKinnon family and found its way to a London auction house, where I bought it for £90 — a meagre sum considering its awesome symbolism.

I’ve had a lifelong attraction for ephemera — inherited from my father — and the house is littered with random “stuff” — a merlin’s egg taken from a nest in the Eston Hills by a Victorian sea captain, a 1958 FA Cup Final programme which tells, through the ghostly absence of Duncan Edwards and the rest, the tragedy of the Munich air disaster, and old coins from Persia, India and ancient Rome. There is an early edition of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads, inscribed in 1899 to a man I fondly imagine to have been a subaltern on the North-West Frontier, a plate one Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp, and a signed etching by the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt. It’s not so much a collection as a jumble. But every item has a story.

I bought Malcolm’s plaque because I felt sad that it was no longer cherished and wanted to discover more about his short life and unquiet death. As much as anything, it was a mark of respect for his largely forgotten sacrifice. Like most Britons, I have folk stories of relatives who fought and died in the Great War, fighting for their homeland in what they believed to be an existential struggle. Malcolm was one of hundreds of thousands from the dominions and colonies with only historic ties to the old country but who stood with it side by side.

There are, of course, bitter criticisms of the way the war was conducted by the generals and politicians, and disillusionment over the unconscionable scale of human sacrifice had set in well before the end of the war, both in Britain and across the empire. More than 61,000 Canadians died, 60,000 Australians, 64,000 Indians, and 17,000 New Zealanders — with at least twice as many wounded and many more returning home as broken men. Yet sorrow and incomprehension at the waste of life is mixed with an intense national pride in the courage of those young men that remains strong a century later.  In Canada, the name of Vimy Ridge has an almost biblical significance, as do Pozières in Australia, Flers-Courcelette in New Zealand, and Delville Wood in parts of South Africa. Travel to any of these Somme sites today and you will almost certainly hear the distinctive accents of those countries among the visitors, many of them children hungry for knowledge.

Malcolm, who lived on a remote family farmstead at Iona Rear, near Cape Breton’s Bras d’Or lakes, first enlisted with Nova Scotia’s Argyll Highlanders, later transferring to the Royal Canadian Regiment.

Some general information about his service was provided at the auction sale and I was able to piece together other fragments of his life from an internet trawl and with the invaluable assistance over email of three kind and helpful Cape Breton historians.

On his mother’s side, Malcolm was a MacNeil, probably a descendant of Donald “Og” MacNeil from the Hebridean island of Barra, who served with the British army in Canada during the late 1750s, helping to drive the French out of Cape Breton. During his service, local legend has it that MacNeil saw and was captivated by the uninhabited area around the Bras d’Or — with its freshwater springs and lakes teeming with fish — and returning to Barra on leave, sought to persuade his neighbours and relatives to emigrate there.

Og himself died with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, but the people of Barra began arriving not long after, including two of his sons who landed in 1813. Malcolm’s paternal greatgrandfather John MacKinnon — also a Roman Catholic crofter from Barra — arrived at Cape Breton around the same time. One of five children, Malcolm is listed on the 1911 census as living on a subsistence farm. According to historian James St Clair, there would have been some sheep, a few cattle for making butter and cheese, and a large potato and turnip patch.