The Silent Weaver (3 page)

‘Our main task for the first period of time,' said Donald
John MacKenzie, ‘was looking after and training the ponies, being kitted out with saddles and fighting equipment'.

We trained in front of Beaufort Castle on the ponies. They went round in a wide circle and on command we slid off the tail end of our ponies and jogged by the side of the following one for a bit and then sprang off the ground on to the pony's back and this went on for some time. Included in the scheme was sitting back to front, sideways, on our backs, on our bellies on the back of the ponies, always with the pony trotting in a circle. For the first while we were very stiff and sore all over, especially our posteriors as we spent hours in the saddle or bareback, but soon we were very competent riders.

One squadron swam its ponies across the River Beauly in midwinter spate. Another rode through the county seat of Dingwall wearing gas masks, prompting a letter to the
Ross-shire Journal
which wondered why their horses had no such protection. They played football and shinty and badminton, and were entertained by Sir Harry Lauder. They were sometimes allowed rough game shooting, and when they were not they poached pheasant. The Lovat Scouts was a largely Gaelic-speaking regiment, and in ‘B' Squadron little else was heard. At that time over 90 per cent of the Uist population spoke Gaelic as a native first language, and roughly 30 per cent spoke no English. The islanders' non-commissioned officers usually gave instructions and orders in Gaelic, introducing such terms as ‘Bren gun' and ‘respirator' to its vocabulary.

They were given a thorough medical inspection. Fifteen Scouts were discharged as unfit for service, and another 21 were limited to Home Service. Those 36 men did not include Trooper Angus MacPhee from Iochdar.

After seven months spent training in the hills and glens of
the eastern Highlands, early in April 1940 the Lovat Scouts were sent to stables and billets near Sutton-on-Trent in the English Midlands. The Hebrideans and the horses of ‘B' Squadron entrained at Beauly Station. The population of the town turned out to wave them off, and to hear the strains of their pipes disappear quickly down the track to Inverness, the Scottish Lowlands and the south.

The truth was that by the spring of 1940, the British Army did not know what to do with its mounted Highland soldiers and their garron ponies. The war had not turned out as might have been anticipated in 1936. The Lovat Scouts' deployment to ‘a minor theatre of war', which had been mooted four years earlier, no longer seemed practical. ‘A minor theatre of war' had probably suggested some distant, trackless part of the British Empire which required policing.

In April 1940 any such ambition was almost redundant. The conflict seemed likely to be a battle of survival for the two main Allies, Britain and France. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact and carved up Poland. Fascist Italy had thrown in her lot with the German Axis. Finland was engaged and neutralised by the Soviets. Adolf Hitler clearly had his eye on the other militarily vulnerable nations of Scandinavia and the Low Countries as well as France. If they all fell – as they would – the archipelago of islands which comprised the United Kingdom would be isolated and effectively surrounded.

In such interesting times the Lovat Scouts arrived in Nottinghamshire. Their commanding officers had tried to get them posted across the Channel to help with the defence of France, but it was decided that ‘the flat country of Flanders can
hardly be considered the ideal terrain for the employment of the Lovat Scouts'. Some mention was made of Palestine, where the army's residual equine – rather than mechanised – cavalry regiments were already deployed, but as quickly forgotten.

Instead, Angus MacPhee, Donald John MacPherson, Donald John MacKenzie and most of the rest of ‘B' Squadron found themselves getting off a train at Sutton-on-Trent on 6 April 1940 and making their way to civilian billets in such manorial English hamlets as Kelham and East Markham. They were in fact just 30 miles from Derby, where almost exactly 200 years earlier those of their ancestors who had ridden with Charles Edward Stuart had camped before being ordered to abandon their assault on London and march back to the Highlands.

‘We had a feather bed in which one sank almost out of sight and was very warm,' said Donald John MacKenzie of the Highlanders' return visit in 1940, unconsciously reiterating the sentiments of Jacobite officers in December of 1745. ‘The food was pretty grim, a piece of toast and one sausage or one egg for breakfast. The man of the house was a small elderly chap who never spoke to us, played darts most of the time so much so that he had almost gone through his dart board at the twenty and the bull.'

Three days later, on 9 April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, the two nations which guarded the Skagerrak, the straits leading out of the Baltic Sea, and whose 1,200-mile western flanks opened directly onto the North Atlantic Ocean from the Arctic Circle to Heligoland. British troops were sent to assist the Norwegian resistance. On 19 April, as a scarcely noticed precautionary measure, a small detachment of Royal Marines was landed in the Faroe Islands, a remote Danish
property halfway between the Shetland Islands, which were already garrisoned by British forces, and Iceland, which soon would be.

On 22 April, the Lovat Scouts ceased to be the last mounted reconnaissance unit in the British Army. They were ordered to hand over their ponies to the army's Remount Department. Most of the horses left on cattle trucks to the Remount Depot at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire – ‘to the butchers, I think', said Donald John MacPherson, although Michael Leslie Melville said that the War Office used them firstly as pack-ponies and then honoured a request made by the regiment ‘that when the ponies were no longer required for army use, they should be returned to the Highlands for sale'.

Angus MacPhee's ‘fine gelding' had a happier fate. He sold it to an admiring officer. But after the third week in April 1940, none of ‘B' Squadron would ever again ride the pony which had accompanied him from a croft in the Hebrides on that thundery day in September 1939. Henceforth they would be infantry foot-soldiers.

They were unsentimental. ‘We were mechanised and given transport of all descriptions,' said Donald John MacKenzie. ‘We still had to do a route march each week, and as we still wore our puttees, breeches and spurs, and the weather got hotter, and worst of all my boots, one pair, were getting too small for me . . . We suffered . . .'

With the British Army, Navy and Air Force still giving some assistance to the Norwegian resistance, most of the Lovat Scouts expected to be sent to Scandinavia. For a short time, the War Office planned to send them there. On 1 May an advance party of one troop of ‘B' Squadron under Lieutenant Simon MacDonald left Nottinghamshire in a convoy of lorries for
Greenock on Clydeside, probably to prepare for passage to Norway. But Oslo fell to the Germans and most of the British Army withdrew on 2 May, leaving behind a small expeditionary corps in the far north of the country. Eight days later the
Wehrmacht
invaded Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.

For three weeks the Lovat Scouts were divided. They stood-to 250 miles apart, in Greenock and rural Nottinghamshire, while at home and abroad matters moved with bewildering speed. On 11 May Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister and a national government was formed. The Low Countries tottered and fell. On 21 May, with Holland and Belgium as well as almost all of Norway and Denmark in German hands, the rest of the Lovat Scouts were put on a train from England to Glasgow. They joined their advance troop, who had, in Donald John MacKenzie's words, ‘idled about there in Greenock'.

On 23 May 1940 the Lovat Scouts embarked on the transatlantic liner
Ulster Prince
and, with an escort of two destroyers, steamed southwards out of the Clyde. They left behind, considered unfit for active service or suitable only for Home Detail, a total of 103 men, who did not include Trooper Angus MacPhee.

The small flotilla rounded the Mull of Kintyre and sailed north into the Minch. To starboard the Skyemen and western Highlanders ‘could see the hills of Skye and home'. To port, the
Uibhistich
gazed upon Beinn Mhòr, Hecla, Eaval and the other stony heights of eastern Uist until they disappeared from view.

Most of the ordinary troopers aboard the
Ulster Prince
still thought that they were heading for Norway. They were designated part of the North West Expeditionary Force, the same title given to the body of men that had, in the sub-Arctic
region of Narvik, in alliance with Norwegian, French and Polish battalions, achieved a measure of success against the Germans. But as the
Ulster Prince
left port, the new British government was privately agreeing to end its calamitous Norwegian campaign by abandoning the place, and to reinforce its own sea power by occupying other North Atlantic landfalls. So having cleared the Butt of Lewis at the northernmost tip of the Outer Hebrides, instead of setting a north-easterly course to Scandinavia, the
Ulster Prince
continued due north.

Early in the morning of 25 May 1940, Angus MacPhee, Donald John MacPherson, Donald John MacKenzie and 477 other Lovat Scouts sailed through a thick mist into Torshavn, the capital town of the Faroe Islands.

Sending them to the Faroes made sense to the War Office, if not to the Lovat Scouts. Almost 500 hillsmen and islanders from the remotest parts of northern Britain were told to garrison a group of remote, hilly, northern islands. By British military standards, it was good casting.

Tactically, the annexation of the Faroes and then Iceland by Britain meant that while the German fleet could dock on almost the whole of the Atlantic seaboard of mainland Europe, the Royal Navy still commanded the ocean itself. The garrisons were symbolic as well as practical. Along with Iceland and the Shetland group, those islands represented castles of occupation on a hostile sea.

A fellow soldier, the ornithologist and author Kenneth Williamson, would later describe what Angus MacPhee saw when he looked over the rail at Torshavn on that May morning. ‘Round about the town,' wrote Williamson, who arrived in the Faroes the following year to operate the military library there,
‘the hills were a watery green, rock-scarred and boulder-strewn, and seared with trickling rills.'

They rose in dreary, inhospitable slopes that looked devoid of interest or charm, rearing steeply to jagged crests of broken rock and scree beyond which one could imagine a great stony plateau ranging away for mile after mile.

The monotony of the surroundings cast into bold relief the attractiveness of this tiny, compact town spreading over the lowest slopes towards the water's edge . . . Time after time as the troopship lay outside the harbour, waiting for the berth to clear, the many-coloured town was almost blotted out, or appeared dimly to view, like pieces of a shattered rainbow thrown into confusion behind the lurking cloud.

The buildings crowded together with disdain for pattern, plan or uniformity of any kind. There were all shapes and sizes and kinds of buildings clinging to the knolls and shreds of fields, their roofs and walls shining with the wetness, glowing with a gay medley of colours . . .

Here bricks and mortar and slated roofs are practically unknown . . . The narrow, often hilly streets; the simple, un-adorned frontages; the long grass growing profusely on the roofs; the liberal use of bright paints that shine through the damp mists, or of darker hues that draw back like shadows in contrast – all of these so enliven every change of scene that one cannot but marvel at the inspiration which so obviously dwells in the shelter of those hopeless-looking hills.

As the
Ulster Prince
docked at the pier with its Uist pipers playing aboard, and the Lovat Scouts disembarked, ‘crowds of people including hundreds of children, came down from the town to look on and remained there all day'.

In 1940 there were 30,000 Faroese living on 18 of their 20 islands. Three thousand of them resided in Torshavn; the rest were scattered between fishing villages and placid agricultural
settlements. Apart from the fact that the Faroes were dry islands with no public bars or other licensed premises – beer and spirits were imported for the troops with their other rations – it was an easy community for Hebrideans and Highlanders to understand. Both the Faroes and the Western Isles of Scotland had once been the homes of eremitic monks from the Celtic Church; both had been part of the Kingdom of Norway (the Western Isles until 1266, the Faroes until 1814); both were accustomed to being governed in modern times from capital cities (London and Copenhagen) which did not speak their languages (Gaelic and a derivation of Old Norse). The Faroese, a sea-faring people, were well aware that their nearest neighbours lived in the Scottish islands, less than 200 miles away, and that the Faroes were considerably closer to Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow than to Reykjavik or Copenhagen.

Whatever their historical connections, remote communities develop similar courtesies. By and large the Lovat Scouts were made as welcome in the Faroes as Faroese soldiers in similar circumstances would have been hosted in the Uists. There were tensions during the occupation. There was a minority of German sympathisers among the Faroese. There were also Faroese separatists who resented British cooperation with Danish officials in exile, and the fact that Winston Churchill had announced that when Germany was defeated the Faroe Islands ‘will be handed back to Denmark'. There were Faroese who objected to the steady stream of young women made pregnant by British soldiers. There was occasional robbery from army stores; there were strikes for better pay for Faroese civilians employed by the British military. But on the whole . . .

‘Oh, we had a great reception,' said Donald John MacPherson. ‘They invited us into their homes. And you know, they
had all sorts of things that weren't in the Western Islands. They had telephones, and electricity – things we didn't have. And they were friendly, oh, very, very friendly.'