Ruaraidh Hilleary
Adventurer, soldier, sportsman and entrepreneur from Skye whose zest for life never wavered
RUARAIDH HILLEARY, who has died aged 95, was born into a family which settled on the Isle of Skye; for 45 years he served as secretary of the annual Skye Gathering, which he took, one year, to St Petersburg, and he was instrumental in establishing the first commercial wind farm on the island on his 1,500-acre estate at Edinbane – a highly controversial project, but one of the first examples of a joint community enterprise.
Hilleary was also the author of an entertaining memoir, Whatever You are Doing … Don’t! (2016), in which he recalled his earlier life as a twinklingly roguish adventurer and entrepreneur with a penchant for getting into scrapes.
The Hilleary family connection with Skye dates back to the early 1920s, when Ruaraidh’s grandfather, Major Edward Hilleary, established his home at Edinbane and he and his children married into old Skye families.
Ruaraidh Hilleary was born on February 8 1926 at Craigarn Hall, Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire, where his father Iain was working in the whisky trade for his maternal grandfather Duncan Macleod.
Born in a thatched cottage on Skye, Duncan Macleod had left the island as a young man and, as his grandson recalled, “went to Liverpool with nothing and landed a job selling lemonade in New York. However, he soon discovered that whisky was a much better bet.”
He sold his whisky around the world, and during prohibition in the US Al Capone was rumoured to have been among his customers; Macleod later moved back to Skye, rich enough to buy an estate and a Victorian mansion, Skeabost House, where young Ruaraidh spent his school holidays.
He remembered Duncan Macleod as “a most exciting grandpa”, recalling how he would arrive at Skeabost “in a yacht called Trident and you never knew who was going to be there – lords and ladies, celebrities, all sorts.” Invitations to parties at the house were highly prized and Hilleary recalled seeing Harry Lauder enjoying tea with the Reverend George Macleod, founder of the Iona Community, and the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli examining local tweed.
Hilleary inherited his grandfather’s daredevil spirit. He recalled riding his bicycle up the steps leading to the kitchen at Skeabost, and racing round the kitchen table chased by Mrs Buchanan, the fearsome cook, brandishing a rolling pin, while his grandmother tried in vain to instill discipline by shouting: “Whatever you are doing, don’t.”
Aged 12 he shot his first stag – or, to be more accurate, his first four, having bagged that number on his first day out with the stalker.
He was educated at Eton, where his housemaster was the mathematician HK Marsden, known as “Bloody Bill” for the pleasure he took in wielding the cane. “He used to play pocket billiards while he talked,” Hilleary recalled, “and he knew Bradshaw’s railway timetables by heart. I became very fond of him.”
He had less time for Robert Graves (“dreadful chap”), who tutored him in Latin one summer, and he locked the poet in the school squash court.
After leaving school Hilleary joined the Scots Guards. It was to his “eternal regret” that VE-DAY arrived before he had a chance to fight in France: “I couldn’t wait to get at them.” Instead, in the early days of peace, he was posted to Trieste, where the Scots Guards were responsible for patrolling the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. There, to get fresh milk, he kept a goat called Boadicea, which his comrades would feed with cigarettes, making its milk taste filthy.
He also kept a goose, Caractacus (female, despite the name), which developed such an appetite for bread soaked in brandy that it stopped laying eggs.
Hilleary was posted to Cologne and, postwar, joined the Territorial SAS. He joined B Squadron 21 SAS in 1950 as a Trooper (having resigned his Queen’s Commission from the Scots Guards) and served 17 years, eventually taking command of D Squadron 23 SAS.
After the war he lived abroad for a few years and “worked my passage out to South Africa on a cattle boat for a shilling a month. But I got sacked from the ranch for putting a donkey in the manager’s room one night, and then I went down the Zambezi in a dug-out with a friend of mine. We were shooting crocodiles …”
A keen sailor and skier, he once fell into a crevasse in the Swiss Alps, and completed the Cresta Run in St Moritz on a bobsleigh with no brakes.
Hilleary’s professional life was equally varied; it included stints working in a laundry, and selling cutlery in Rhodesia, insurance in London, smoked salmon in Paris, cashmere in Spain and “Highland Wine” in Scotland. In the 1970s he owned and ran a caravan park near Lossiemouth and went into a partnership with the rock star Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull in a fish-farm enterprise.
In 1952, while living in Horsham, he married Sheena Mackintosh, a member of the GB Olympic ski team, and daughter of Christopher Mackintosh, Olympic long jumper, world bobsleigh champion, Scottish rugby international and world-class skier, and Lady Jean Douglas-hamilton, daughter of the 13th Duke of Hamilton.
They moved to Scotland in 1960, running a riding school at Forres, fondly remembered by one former assistant as “the most wonderfully free and easy riding school, such as wouldn’t be allowed nowadays”.
They parted in 1982 when Hilleary moved back to Skye and Sheena decided to stay and run the riding school. They eventually divorced, but remained good friends until Sheena’s death in 2018.
On Skye, unlike his forebears, Hilleary never entered local politics, but sought to use his entrepreneurial talents to improve life for the islanders. The 18-turbine commercial wind farm on his estate at Edinbane, developed in partnership with the crofters, was given the go-ahead in 2007 and now produces enough electricity to power more than 25,000 homes.
But Hilleary was best known for his stewardship of the Skye Gathering, of which, following his father, he was honorary secretary for 45 years, during which time he succeeded, by refusing to compromise on standards or tradition, in making the two-night Skye Balls into perhaps the most sought-after social events in the United Kingdom. Partygoers who misbehaved or were improperly dressed were turned away at the door, and there were no exceptions.
In 2003 Hilleary arranged for the event to be held amid the splendour of the Shuvalov Palace in Saint Petersburg. A Boeing 747 was chartered and 230 members enjoyed a memorable ball and fine hospitality in the ancient Russian capital.
A Falstaffian figure in later years, with white hair, plump pink cheeks and mischievous blue eyes, Hilleary hated the ill health which dogged his final years (“When I fall over, I can’t get up. Like a cast sheep. Bloody awful”). But his mind and imagination remained sharp. “A damn good supper of lobster or grouse, and beer for breakfast,” remained his recipe for life, and he was able to enjoy a globe artichoke and local crab on his 95th birthday the week before he died.
Hilleary is survived by two sons and a daughter. Another daughter died in a car accident in 1971.