Between 1882 and 1888, William Wishart, a fancy goods manufacturer, and his wife Jane McMillan became parents to five children. The youngest, born in Glasgow on 1 June 1888, was named Alexander McMillan, a middle name he shared with his older sister Jeannie.

Shortly before his fifth birthday, Alexander’s mother died of chronic bronchitis, an affliction she had been suffering from for the best part of five months. Like many widowed men in the period, William remarried shortly afterwards, this time to his cousin Isabella from Dunfermline. In 1903, for an unknown reason, Alexander and his three sisters were sent to Canada, where they eventually settled in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

At the time war broke out in 1914, Alexander was working as a telephone lineman, an occupation he held when he visited the Winnipeg recruiting office on 25 February the following year. The next day he was taken on strength of the 28th (Northwest) Infantry Battalion CEF and among the draft who embarked for England on 29 May from Montreal on board the SS Northland.

Upon arrival, the battalion, which formed part of the 6th Infantry Brigade, 2nd Canadian Division, went into training at Dibgate before moving to Otterpool at the end of July. Alexander arrived in Boulogne from Folkestone with his unit in the small hours of 18 September and entrained for Flanders, where he first went into the trenches near Kemmel on the 26th. Around 9 October, during an artillery bombardment, Alexander suffered a contusion to his back and was sent to No 22 General Hospital to recover. He wasn’t out of the field for very long and rejoined the battalion in early November. Aside from brief periods of leave in November 1916, November 1917 and November 1918, Alexander appears to have remained with the battalion throughout the remainder of the war and likely saw action in a number of battles, including the Somme (1916), Arras and Passchendaele (1917), Amiens and the Battles of the Hindenberg Line (1918.) Following the Armistice, Alexander marched into Germany and was based there until the end of January 1919, when the battalion began gradually moving back to England. Alexander’s company left for Le Havre at the start of April, and he was eventually struck off strength on 13 May, when he left Liverpool for Montreal on board the same vessel that brought him across the Atlantic almost four years earlier.

After the war, Alexander returned to Winnipeg, where on 8 April 1920, he married the daughter of a farmer from Ontario named Myrtle Verna Morden. In 1921 the couple were living in Morden, a small township southwest of Winnipeg named after Myrtle’s grandfather Alvey Morden, with Alexander having returned to his old pre-war occupation and by 1927 had moved just north of the city to Stonewall.

Alexander died at the Winnipeg General Hospital on 8 September 1927; his wife lived for another 56 years.