John rests in Scone New Cemetery. He died of influenza complicated by pneumonia and heart failure at the Perth War Hospital (now AK Bell Library) on the 31st of January 1919 aged thirty-seven.
George was born in Borders town of Jedburgh on the 17th of June 1881 to George and Margaret (nee Telfer). He was their eldest. John would spend the entirety of his early life n the Borders, the family moving to Melrose. Sadly, John was to lose his father and mother in 1895 and 1896 consecutively; both aged thirty-seven; an eerie coincidence given that John would die at the same age. Whilst his younger siblings resided with their maternal grandmother, John took lodgings with a local family and worked for a grocer.
John married laundress Catherine Grierson Balla at Roxburgh on the 12th of August 1910. They would later leave the Borders for Edinburgh where their son John Jr was born on the 26th of June 1913.
It is likely the war brought the Burns family to Scone. In 1916 John had enlisted in the Lanarkshire Yeomanry and was sent to Scone Camp for training. Soon after transferring to the 9th Battalion Cameronian Scottish Rifles he was dispatched to the front line. John’s combat experience in the war was extensive, he and his battalion serving at notable battles including The Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres. Following the Armistice, John was among those participating in the occupation force that crossed into Germany.
John was among many who survived the war, only to succumb to Spanish flu shortly after – a cruel irony. Whilst on leave in Scone John contracted the disease. Following his death, his widow Catherine and John Jr left Scotland and moved to Surrey. Catherine survived him by thirty years.
Sources:
Scone Remembers, Our Men from the Great War 1914-1918
Broken Columns 