Gaelic Bible returns to Paris
THE GAELIC Bible which belonged to the well-known Church of Scotland minister and war hero the Rev Dr Donald C Caskie is going back to the Scots Kirk in Paris where the Bowmore-born clergyman ministered from 1935-61.
The Bible is being returned to the French capital by Dr Caskie’s nephew Tom where it will take pride of place in an exhibition commemorating the life and the ministry of the noted Ileach.
On the lead up to the Second World War the Scottish minister strongly condemned the Nazi regime and when France fell to the Germans in 1940 he knew he was a marked man and that his life was in imminent danger.
He left Paris and his church and made his way to Marseilles where he set up an escape route for allied service personnel stranded in occupied Europe. Working from a disused seamen’s mission and using a number of safe houses and dependable contacts, he set up means of escape for those trapped which led them through the Pyrennes to Spain and eventual freedom.
Thanks to his efforts more than 2,000 allied service people successfully escaped the German threat.
Inevitably, he was betrayed, tried by a German court and sentenced to death. Thanks to the intervention of a German Lutheran pastor, Caskie was reprieved but remained a prisoner until the defeat of Germany. He eventually returned to Paris and a war-damaged church and set about the rebuilding of a new Scots Kirk.
His account of his wartime experiences, The Tartan Pimpernel, published in 1957, proved an immediate bestseller with the proceeds going to the rebuild.
He left France in 1961 and his final parish was Skermorlie and Weymss Bay North on the Firth of Clyde.
He died in 1883, aged 81, and is buried in his native isle alongside his parents in the Bowmore cemetery.
Hugh Smith, 4 Flora Street, Bowmore, Islay PA43 7JX.
Tel: 01496 810658