When news of the Bill McLaren Centenary Exhibition crossed the Atlantic it prompted exiled Teri, Jamie Thompson, to email Shona Sinclair, the curator of the Hawick Museum, with an unexpected offer.

Jamie is the proud owner of Lt W.P. McLaren’s well-travelled military chest and he and his wife, Rhana, kindly agreed to ship it to the Hawick Museum for display in the exhibition.

Jamie said, “my parents bought Bill’s old house in Salisbury Ave in the 1970’s and found the chest in the attic. Bill was happy for us to keep it. In fact, I served in the British Army for 20 years and took Bill’s chest with me on many operational deployments to: Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it brought good luck”!

When the museum received the chest curators conducted further research about its provenance and found that Bill's box with  C224 Lay C/1 1942  embossed on the top is an ammunition  storage box. This box would have contained projectiles and/or charges for a 5.5 inch BL medium Howitzer used by the British Artillery.

As a major in the Royal Engineers Jamie Thompson had a spell on attachment to the Pentagon and after leaving the army he decided to settle in the USA with Rhana and their son, Hector. He took up a management post with Amazon and now works in risk management with one of its subsidiaries. Jamie's parents, Lynda and Ian, live in Denholm