before
the Boer War by Lord Simon Fraser of Lovat.
Syd Scroggie
Sydney Scroggie was a Lieutenant in Lord
Lovat's Scouts, a ski/mountain regiment
raised before
the Boer War by Lord Simon Fraser of Lovat.
During World War II the regiment trained for mountain warfare in the Faroe Islands, the Welsh mountains, the Canadian Rockies at Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada, and at the School of Mountain Warfare in the Cairngorms, north of Braemar in Scotland.
They took part in the Italian Campaign against the elite German Jaegar/Mountain troops. Sydney Scroggie stood on a Schu anti-personnel mine in the area around Monte Grande, losing his right leg and the sight of both eyes. The last thing he remembers seeing were the mountains of Italy and the blue Italian skies.
The following morning Mountain Trooper Jack Soutter Walker (uncle and great uncle to Eric Sr. and Jr. respectively) was on patrol with a section of the Lovat Scouts and encountered a patrol of German Mountain troops. He received three Schmiesser machine pistol bullets, in the stomach, two of which had gone through his back. He lived until 10 p.m. the same evening (20 hours) knowing he was dying. He was buried by Sgt. Fred Osborne of Kirriemuir and some of his comrades. His grave is in Arrezo Cemetery, south of Florence where men of the Lovat Scouts and Indian Mountain regiments lie. Jack lived at 142 Montrose Street Brechin.
"Je Suis Prest"
(by Eric Wm. Walker)
NOT A BLIND BIT OF DIFFERENCE
(by D. Phillips, Dundee, 1978,
from the preface of Syd Scroggie's book of poems "Give Me The Hills")
It was not till ten years after the downfall of Hitler that Sydney Scroggie, now blind and with a tin leg, set forth once more into the Scottish hills where he had spent so much of his time before the war. A mine on the slopes of Monte Grande, as it then seemed, had put paid to his climbing career for good, yet here he was heading for Corrour bothy at last in company with a pal, and a paradox uttered by him at the nadir of his fortunes in a Naples hospital was at last being resolved. "I can do without my eyes," he had said; "but I can't do without my mountains." It was the last day of April; snow lay in the gullies of Bheinn Bhrottan and the Devil's Point; a meadow pipit twittered in the heather of Carn a'Mhaim: and what with the distance, the rough terrain and the pack on his back Syd had his doubts if he could manage the trip at all. In these doubts his pal, the late Les Bowman, privately concurred.
Syd's sighted career in the hills was centred on three climbs where he did something towards their first ascent, the Comb, Eagle's Ridge and Gardyloo Buttress. The first is in Corrie Fee which is skirted by Jock's Road on its way up Glen Doll towards the Tolmount, Glen Callater and Braemar. The second is in East Corrie, Lochnagar, where the croak of ptarmigan echo amongst boulders. The third is in the Allt a' Mhoulinn corrie of Ben Nevis, and figures in an anecdote Syd remembers from a few years ago. Along with a pal, Bob McLean, he was at the C.I.C. hut in this corrie when two rock-climbers appeared. "Are you going to have a shot at Gardyloo?" Syd was asking about their plans for the day. When he got a decided negative to this query then went on to ask why. Syd experienced a glow of triumph in recalling his pioneer work on that buttress now so long ago. For the reply was short and to the point. "Because it's too bloody difficult."
But the rocks in those days were far from absorbing all of Syd's attention in the hills. If he tackled them under the shrewd guidance of John Ferguson, then a schoolboy, but now a doctor in Dundee, it was with Colin Brand that he discovered such bothies as the Sheiling in Glen Isla, Jock Robertson's barn in Glen Muick, Bynack Lodge on the Geldie Water, and used these as bases for adventures quite as exciting in their way as getting up chimneys and cracks, abseiling to safety from some impasse of overhung granite. "Colin had the gift of leadership," says Syd: "you felt nothing could go wrong so long as he was around." This same Colin, romantic and unconventional as ever, now runs charter cruises to the Mediterranean in his ketch Many Waters. The hardest thing Syd ever did in his life, he says, was to cross the Capel track from Ballater to Glen Clova in the January of 1938. There was nine inches of unbroken snow between Deeside and Loch Muick, wreaths up to thigh and waist on the hill, and a road of bottle-glass ice between Braedownie and Newbigging where Mrs Harper's youth hostel was in those days, yet Colin and Syd did it in eight hours. "When you are in your 'teens," Syd says, "you do not put off time to examine the exquisite beauties of nature: you just keep going flat out."
During the war Syd was lucky enough to do army mountain training in the Canadian Rockies. "The Rockies are not better than the Scottish hills," he says; "only different." No climbers had ever operated in this region in winter before, and Syd is very pleased about what was to him the climacteric experience of these blue sky, sunny, frosty days. He organised and led a three-day expedition which was successful on Mt. Columbia, the second-highest peak in the Rockies. "It wasn't all that different from a long weekend in Clova, " he says; "but we had two nights to spend in snow-holes, the temperature got as low as 37 degrees below zero, and the altitude was 12,294 feet."
But we left Syd just now, blind and lame, somewhere between the Luibeg burn and the Dee on his way to Corrour with Les Bowman. What were his feelings as he struggled disabled and dependent across ground where of old he had been fit, free and young.
"I was beginning to make the discovery," he says, "that whatever we call the hills, it has nothing to do with sight. It is an inner experience and can be as poignantly savoured with your eyes shut as open." They got the Corrour bothy somehow or other, the two of them, spent the night there in sleeping-bags, and returned to Derry Lodge next day in the rain. "I was also discovering something else," says Syd, "and this was nicely put by my good friend and neighbour Jimmy Johnston many years later when I had ten years of blind hills behind me." Jimmy, a jute man retired from Calcutta, was not one to mince his words. "It's not you I admire, Scroggie, " he added: "It's the lads that take you to the hills."
The attitude of Syd's friends, and there
have been many of them, to this
passion of his for the hills is best summed up by a remark of Bob
McLean.
This worthy was subsequently to bum his way half round the world, then
bum
his way back again. "If you're daft enough to want to go to
the hills,
Scroggie," he said; "then I'm daft enough to want to go with you."
It
would be impossible even to summarise here Syd's exploits with his
friends
in what are up to date some 365 trips in the Grampians. But
with him,
quite as much as threading through the boulders of the Larig Gru,
weathering
out a blizzard in a tent on Bheinn a'Ghloe, or puffing his pipe in the
sunshine
at the summit of Lochnagar; quite as much as these things, together
with
unpardonable indiscretions on icy slabs or midnight snowslopes, it is a
matter
of the people he meets, people he would never have known had he adhered
to
the conventional blind life. "Nothing much ever happens," he
says;
"if you spend your time selling matches in the Murraygait."
Jimmy Stewart
of Shinagag, Derek Westwood of Daldhu, Bob Scott of Luibeg, Jock
McKenzie
of Upper Tullochgrue and the late Willy McLauchlan of Forest Lodge;
such
shepherds, stalkers and hillfarmers as these have imparted a richness
to
Syd's life without which he can hardly conceive it as having been worth
living
at all. "These are the real Scotsmen," he says; "and when
they and
their like are gone, then Scotland is finished for ever. "
But it is
the Newbigging folk in Glen
Clova, Ma Harper and her late husband Jim,
that
Syd thinks of perhaps with the greatest affection, standing as they do
both
for his pre-war hills and those same hills as he was blind to explore
hereafter.
"I aye ken it's going to rain when the whaup cries yon
mournfu' way."
He never forgets these words of Mrs Harper when he passes a
Newbigging
now in alien hands. "And if you want a pish,-" Bob McLean considers
these
words of Jim Harper's as the most hospitable he has ever heard.
The
stubbly old Angus man was putting Bob and Syd into his barn on a wild
night
of snow, "jist pish agen' the wa'."
Big stick in hand and polythene bag to keep the water out of his tin leg, Syd has been on a hundred hills, roughed it in bothies from Shenaval House to Sandy Hillocks, and crossed all the old tracks again and again, the Capel, Jock's Road, the Monega, the Tilt and the Larig, and if the Shelter Stone is his favourite howff then it is certainly Broad Cairn between Clova and Muick which is his favourite hill. "Jamie, Sydney and Mary," these are his sons and daughter: "they have all got me to the Shelter Stone in their day, and they all felt its mysterious fascination as I do." The hut on Broad Cairn is gone now which had faintly scribbled on its planks to the end, "C. Brand, J. Scroggie, S. Scroggie, 4th October, 1937." These words were a memorial to Syd's first trip in the hills, one which had every appearance at the time of being his last. "I think it was the terrors of that trip," says Syd, "that confirmed me in my bondage to the hills for ever."
"So long as there's breath in my body," he says, "and the Ministry of Pensions keep mending my leg, I'll get up Macdhui, pass down Loch A'an-side, and toast the knees of my breeks at a good fire of logs in Faindouran." He has composed his own epitaph, however, and in time to come it will be read on some grey boulder in some inaccessible place by those that follow in the footsteps of a minor phenomenon of our time.
"Alow they steens there lies a lad
Pech'd oot an' fairly deen,
He gae'd his ain gait a' his life
But whiles wi' ithers' e'en."
Let one of Syd's trips stand for them all, though to be sure it was Gavin Sprott's trip and for a change Syd had to do what he was told. A Railwayman in those days, Gavin now works in the country life section of the Scottish National Museum, Edinburgh. March is a winter month in the Scottish hills, often the most dangerous month of all, and it was dark when Gavin and Syd set off up Glen Doll, soft snow underfoot and a sky full of stars. "Gavin did not use a flashlight," says Syd, "because he did not want to have an unfair advantage."
They pitched their tent at 3,000 feet on the Tolmount, spent the night in it, then packing up moved on next day via Fafernie to Cairn Taggart and thence to an icebound Dubh Loch burn where it crosses the Callater track beneath the steep of the Stuie buttress. "It was now evening." Syd listens to what his friends tell him. "And the cirrus clouds were pink with the setting sun." The stars were out by the time they got to the summit of Lochnagar; it was intensely frosty: and when they got into their tent snow rustled against it blown up from the ground by a bitter S.E. breeze. "You could see the lights of Ballater away in the distance down there," says Syd; "and we felt sorry for them in all their comfort and security." Mist blowing up in East Corrie next morning was turned to gold by the rising sun. The expedition moved down the Ghlas Allt to Loch Muick 2,400 feet below, and it was a day of dazzling snowfields loud with ptarmigan and snow buntings. Then it was a case of trudging up the Streak to the Sandy Hillocks plateau, there to drum up in Her Majesty's rather tumbledown hut. "I told Gavin," says Syd, "how Martin Pirie once glazed the empty window with ice from the wee lochan." From here you drop down to the larches of Bachnagairn wood, skirt Stalker's Isle, Juan Jorge and Witch's Crag, then cross the rickety bridge over the Esk. Syd chuckles. "This is the bridge the glensfolk say the blind man crawls across when he is sober and dances across when he is drunk." Bert Henderson was abroad at Moulzie the stalker's cottage. He was relieved to see Gavin and Syd, reporting that the bobby had been on the phone regarding two climbers lost up the glen. Syd treasures what Bert said to the bobby. "It's nae yon blind bugger Scroggie, is't?" Well, what happened on that trip, nothing, or was it a lifetime in little.
Syd's hobbies are music, literature, correspondence, conversation, talking to audiences, and navvying in the garden. He also taps his typewriter far into the night. "I am," he said, with no hint of contrition, "an inveterate scribbler." Here are some verses inspired by the above trip. They also constitute an acrostic on "Gavin C. Sprott, M.A.," his companion and guide on those three memorable days.
"Gloaming behind us on the Clova road
And twilight dwindling to the death of day,
Venus now trembled and Orion strode,
In stiff-legged silence to the Milky Way.
Night in the Doll, and Mellon, Maud, Kil-Bo
Cut off the constellations, hugh and black,
Shadow and stars and frost and powder snow
Pale on the stiff, soft surface of the track.
Rucksack'd we brushed the surreptitious spruce,
Only the gate before us, gaunt and dim,
That bars with awkward iron bent with use
The outward surge of spirits such as ours,
Mountains in each the stuff of life to him
And night a double challenge to his powers."
42 trips in 1974, 43 in 1975, and a consequent kaleidoscope of new experiences in new places, where is it going to end for this 56 year-old, grey-stubbled blind adventurer in the Scottish wilderness. He will probably not equal John Ireland, who at 82 still trudges the Sidlaws. "Tak' my advice, laddie." Syd was little more than a schoolboy when John laid a hand on his shoulder. "Efter his mither a man's best freend is the hills."
Syd Scroggie
Roseangle, Strathmartine
Dundee
(In 1997, Syd is still "sharp as a tack"and aye keeps in touch with his many friends from his mountaineering days who are now scattered all over the world - Eric Wm. Walker)
Syd's book of verse "Give Me The Hills" was published in 1978 by
David Winter & Son Ltd.., 15 Shore Terrace, Dundee)
