GUNS & POSES
They’re the last private army in Europe but haven’t seen action since 1803. So how did a South African sign maker end up commanding the Atholl Highlanders?
THEY may not be the most fearsome regiment in the land. Their cannons are rickety, their rifles are relics from the late 19th century and some of the soldiers are not exactly in their first flush either.
Their experience of battle is limited too – the last time they were offered for combat was in 1854 – and most of the rank and file probably prefer not to dwell on how they would get on in one.
But the Atholl Highlanders are certainly survivors. That, surely, is how they came to be the last private army in Europe standing – well, that and a little indulgence from the South African who, by a quirk of ancestry, now finds himself as their commander in chief.
For the 100-strong regiment is the personal infantry of the 12th Duke of Atholl, better known to friends as Bruce Murray, a father of three from the Limpopo province who runs a commercial signage company.
While in theory the duke retains the right to mobilise his troops at a moment’s notice, in practice military life is rather more predictable than that for its unpaid men. ‘The vast majority of Highlanders are recruited locally and many join to carry on a family tradition,’ says Graham Jack, the sergeant major who first joined the regiment in 1977.
‘Names are put forward by current Highlanders; in the past we’ve had Highlanders’ sons at six or seven years old, marching up and down outside [Blair Castle] carrying wooden rifles so we’re always pretty sure they’ll follow in their fathers’ footsteps.’
Just because there is little actual military combat involved (not since they last fired a shot in anger in 1803 anyway), that does not mean the men get to rest on their laurels.
In the early months of the year there are twice-weekly foot and arms drills in the ballroom of Blair Castle to prepare for the annual parade on the last Saturday of May.
The pipe band holds regular practices too and there are uniforms – unchanged since the mid-1800s – to brush and buff. Slackers may not be court martialled exactly but they can still be politely asked to withdraw.
Recently, the regiment saw active service overseas – touring battlefields in Belgium and France to commemorate those who fell in the First World War – and there have been several tours of duty in the US, all of them strictly ceremonial.
Yet they remain the only private army in Europe legally entitled to bear arms and march as and when they wish – rights bestowed on them by Queen Victoria in 1844 and, to this day, never rescinded and barely even questioned.
Little wonder the current 58-year-old duke finds the ritual of reviewing his retinue so moving that it leaves him speechless.
But how did a humble sign maker from South Africa come to command his own rifle-toting army of lairds and estate workers from northern Perthshire? The story begins with the 4th Duke who first raised the Atholl Highlanders in 1777 as relief for other British regiments fighting in the American War of Independence. In practice, the soldiers spent most of their time training in Ireland.
The regiment was disbanded in 1803 after troops mutinied over plans to send it to India but George Murray, the 6th Duke, reformed the Highlanders in 1837 as a bodyguard which he took to the annual Eglinton jousting tournament in Ayrshire.
Five years later, on Queen Victoria’s first visit to Scotland, the duke took his army to greet her at Dunkeld and the royal guest was said to have been impressed and entertained by their piping and dancing skills.
Two years later, she returned to Blair Castle for a holiday with Prince Albert. According to Blair Castle archivist Jane Anderson: ‘The Atholl men stood guard during this stay of unprecedented informality when Albert stalked and the Queen enjoyed pony rides. In recognition of this service she granted the Highlanders the right to carry the Queen’s colour and thus to bear arms.’
SHE added: ‘The following year in 1845 the Queen’s and Regimental colours were presented at the Atholl Gathering which was moved to Blair Castle on the anniversary of the Queen’s visit.
‘This became the social highlight of the year at Blair.
‘Throughout the rest of the 19th century, under the 6th and 7th Dukes, the Highlanders paraded annually at Blair Castle, provided a guard for members of the royal family and for distinguished visitors such as the Maharajah Duleep Singh and the Grand Duke Constantine.’
Only once – in 1854 – was there any danger of the regiment finding itself near a front line. The 6th Duke offered their services to the Prime Minister, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston, at the outbreak of the Crimean War but they were never used.
The regiment survived, entirely untested militarily, until the start of the Great War when went into abeyance due to most of the men being called up for rather more urgent – and perilous – service.
But half a century later, in 1966, the 10th Duke decided to revive the Highlanders as a tourist attraction.
While he became commander in chief, friends and local landowners were installed as lower ranking officers while estate workers were drafted in as foot soldiers.
The 6ft 5in duke – affectionately known as Wee Iain – once remarked: ‘I’m quite well suited to have a private army because I’m completely non-military.’
He insisted the troops were purely ceremonial and that the regiment existed only because it was ‘historically interesting and good publicity for Blair Castle’.
Good publicity for the whole of Scotland in point of fact. In 1968, this private band of kilted infantrymen marched through the streets of Edinburgh carrying fixed bayonets – a privilege granted during the city’s Sir Walter Scott Centenary.
‘I think it would be a courtesy to inform the Lord Provost before we did such a thing again,’ the duke said a few years later. ‘Although in theory we can march in any time we please.’
For 30 years the 10th Duke remained head of his ceremonial army but, as his health failed in the mid-1990s, fears for its future grew. The problem? He had no wife, no sons and not even any nephews. In fact, the natural successor to his estate was a South African-born third cousin with little interest in Scotland and whom he had never even met.
A battle loomed – but a legal one in which a private army would prove entirely useless.
Deciding that his distant relative, land surveyor John Murray, was unsuitable to inherit the estate, he entrusted the castle and 140,000 acres of land worth around £140million to his half-sister Sarah Troughton, leaving only the dukedom to the South African.
It was widely seen as an antagonistic act – not least by John Murray’s son Bruce who stood, one day, to become the 12th Duke.
‘We are shocked to hear about this,’ said Bruce Murray at the time. ‘At best it’s bad manners for the duke to have been secretly carrying out moves to deprive my father of his inheritance. At worst, it might be legally improper for a man who inherited the estate with the title to refuse to pass it on to the next in line.’
Matters were exacerbated by the fact that John Murray and his wife Peggy had recently travelled to Scotland to inspect the property and discuss the inheritance. The Eton and Oxford-educated duke refused to see them.
‘He wasn’t even polite enough to meet us after we had travelled all that way, although he knew we were coming,’ said Peggy.
Some also noted a whiff of hypocrisy about the duke’s actions. He himself had inherited the title from a fourth cousin twice removed. Why,
when he had no natural heirs, should he baulk at the estate passing to a similarly distant relative?
For his part, the duke was concerned that the Murrays would never live in Scotland and saw the estate purely as a ‘commercial proposition’.
In the first of those suppositions he was certainly correct. From the off, John Murray made it clear his heart lay in South Africa. ‘I respect and honour Scotland as the land of my origins,’ he said, ‘but I would never want to live there. I am a South African, not a Scotsman.’
Quite where this left the private army he stood to inherit along with the title was anyone’s guess. Indeed, his first reaction on learning of the 10th Duke’s death in 1996 was to renounce the title entirely.
HE later recalled: ‘I immediately wrote to the Lord Lyon King of Arms in Edinburgh and asked “how do I get out of this?”. I was living in South Africa where I’ve lived all my life. I had no experience of the aristocracy, especially of someone as high up as a duke. I didn’t know what to do or what to expect. It was too awesome to consider.
‘I got a response from the Lord Lyon’s office and it said, “You have to die or commit a felony”. I’m not sure what felony I’d have to do, but it basically meant it was for life.’
And so it turned out. For the next 16 years, until his death in 2012, the 11th Duke performed his Highland duties so assiduously that locals knew him as ‘the popular duke’. He took his role as the commander in chief of the continent’s only private army no less seriously.
On learning there were fears the regiment might be disbanded following his succession to the dukedom he wasted no time in putting those fears to bed, announcing: ‘Both Bruce, my son, and I, feel that their continued existence is imperative. And from my side, their demise would be unthinkable.’
On their early visits to Scotland, the duke and his reflexologist wife Peggy – now a duchess – stayed in Blair Castle. But latterly they stayed in the homes of the friends they had made in Perthshire.
And, as commander in chief, the ageing Duke would time his visits to coincide with his regiment’s annual parade where he would take the salute. ‘We took him to various places and showed him some of Scotland,’ said one friend, Edna Mackay, who used to work at Blair Castle.
‘And he did the same for us in South Africa. He was proud to be Duke of Atholl and he carried out his duties very well.’
AND so the private army and the legal right to raise it passed to his son Bruce the sign maker. And, far from bristling over the loss of an inheritance worth many, many millions, lately he has started to see only upsides.
‘The prospect of running an enterprise like this appals me,’ he said in 2015. ‘I am probably one of the luckiest dukes,’ he added, noting that he enjoys a raft of ducal perks while shouldering none of the responsibility of running the estate.
It worked out rather well for Sarah Troughton, part owner, part trustee of the estate, that she was spared a title.
‘Huge relief! I don’t want to be a duchess,’ she said the same year. ‘I prefer to get on with the business side of things.’
Next in line for command of the private army is Bruce’s older son Michael, aka the Marquess of Tullibardine, now 33.
Asked if he would ever live in Scotland, he replied: ‘It’s difficult. I’m African. Honestly? No.’
As for the private army he will inherit, it shows every sign of surviving – and absolutely none of ever engaging any enemies.