Lieutenant Journeil, of the 27th Regiment, committed suicide in September 1812 by swallowing sulphuric acid. He is said to have become insane from home-sickness. He was buried at the Knowes, just outside the churchyard, it being unconsecrated ground.
A Captain Levasseur married an aunt of Sir George Harrison, M.P., a former Provost of Edinburgh, and the Levasseurs still keep up correspondence with Scotland.
On May 24, 1814, the prisoners began to leave, and by the middle of June all had gone. The Kelso Mail said that ‘their deportment had been uniformly conciliatory and respectable’.
In Fullarton’s Imperial Gazetteer of Scotland we read that:
‘From November 1810 to June 1814, Kelso was the abode of a body, never more than 230 in number, of foreign prisoners of war, who, to a very noticeable degree, inoculated the place with their fashionable follies, and even, in some instances tainted it with their laxity of morals.’
Another account says:
‘Their stay here seems to have been quiet and happy, although one man committed suicide. They carried on the usual manufactures in wood and bone and basket work; gave performances in the local theatre, which was decorated by them; were variously employed by local people, one man devoting his time to the tracking and snaring of a rare bird which arrived during severe weather.’
Rutherford’s Southern Counties Register and Directory for 1866 says:
‘The older inhabitants of Kelso remember the French prisoners of war quartered here as possessed of many amiable qualities, of which “great mannerliness” and buoyancy of spirits, in many instances under the depressing effects of great poverty, were the most conspicuous of their peculiarities; the most singular to the natives of Kelso was their habit of gathering for use different kinds of wild weeds by the road side, and hedge-roots, and killing small birds to eat—the latter a practise considered not much removed from cannibalism. That they were frivolous we will admit, as many of them wore ear-rings, and one, a Pole, had a ring to his nose; while all were boyishly fond of amusement, and were merry, good-natured creatures.’
One memorable outbreak of these spirits is recorded in the Kelso Mail of January 30, 1812: