The Games of Kings

July 2002

Charlie Allan competed in the Highland Games from 1954 to 1976 in Scotland and around the world from Japan to Australia. He was a heavyweight in the years dominated by the great rivals Bill Anderson of Bucksburn and the Barnsley Blacksmith, Arthur Rowe. So often was he beaten by those two, that he was dubbed ‘Charles the Third’. Nevertheless the Teuchter’s wins did include the World Caber Tossing Championship and the Aboyne Chieftain’s Trophy for the best all rounder. Here he takes an affectionate look at this odd Scottish phenomenon.

The Games season is well under way. By the time you get this Leopard Meldrum Sports will have come and gone. Drumtochty, Aberdeen and Forfar Highland Games, held in the grounds of the old Queen’s home castle at Glamis, will all have been celebrated. But there will still be plenty left, including the big three Deeside games, Aboyne, Ballater and Braemar, and the Lonach with its unique march of the clansmen around upper Donside, and where the sun always seems to shine on the whisky drinkers.

When I am asked, which frequently I am, what were the highlights of my time at the games, I have a different answer each time. It is no wonder, for there were so many.

There was the time when I made the front page of the Daily Express, then quite a reputable newspaper. I was tossing the caber, which is easier than it looks once you’ve mastered the technique. The experienced caber tosser has no difficulty in picking up the stick and walking around with it. It may look unstable but it is completely under control, at least until he tries to put maximum effort into the toss. I used to do a little act pretending to stagger about and even making any photographers who had ventured too near to scatter. It looked dangerous, but it wasn’t.

The Heavies: From the left, Charlie Allan, Methlick; Arthur Rowe, Barnsley; Bill Anderson, Bucksburn; Sandy Gray, Leochel Cushnie; Charles Simpson, Thurso; George Charles, Bucksburn; John Freebairn, Kilsythe and James McBeath, Dunbeath. photograph courtesy of Charlie Allan

It was at the little games at Morar on the west coast. I had just picked up the caber when a tiny girl in a pretty pink frock came over to see the athlete. I stopped, and she stopped. I looked down at her and she looked up at me and way up at the long caber. She seemed unimpressed. I did a little curtsey to her, caber and all, and the crowd laughed as she tottered off to rejoin her parents who were rightly embarrassed. It was a heart-warming moment, really, and didn’t stop me winning the event.

But what makes it stick in my mind was the way the Express treated it. The child had been in mortal danger within a whisker of her life crushed beneath a falling tree trunk. And the muckle caber-tosser had shown such patience and concern for the wee girl’s safety that he was due for a Queen’s award for bravery at least.

I maybe shouldn’t admit to being so ill-thochtit, but another highlight was when an American athlete appeared at Braemar in the late Sixties. He would enter the high jump at which he had excelled at the American Inter-Collegiate Championships – or so he told us rather too often. Of course, there he would have been jumping on to a padded mattress to break his fall, whereas in those days we jumped from grass to grass.

As we landed on the grass, we had to make sure we got hands and feet down before heads, necks and shoulders. So confident was our visitor, that he declined to enter the event until it had reached the winning height of 5ft 10ins. Slightly scared of the bump that I had warned him several times he was about to receive, the intercollegiate was too tentative, knocked the bar off, and came crashing down on his shoulder breaking his collar-bone. Gamesmanship is not just for the World Cup you see. The last we saw of him he was disappearing into the ambulance having come last.

And I must tell you the sight I saw when first I went on an overnight trip to a highland games. The great (and great big) Sandy Gray of Locheol Cushnie would take me to the Skye Games at Portree. We shared a room in a typical west highland B&B. And ‘typical’ meant mean, wee beds as little as five feet nine inches long. I found it hard to rest my six-foot frame. But I was astonished by Sandy who stood five inches taller. He slept like a log, flat on his back with his legs sticking out the bottom of the bed, bent at the knees with his size thirteen feet resting flat on the floor.

When I asked the next morning if Sandy hadn’t been uncomfortable, he explained that had been nothing to him. He hadn’t had his feet inside the blankets since he was 15.

The games go back a long way, though a good deal of the history is conjecture. The Ceres Games was first celebrated by the victorious warriors on their way home from Bannockburn. And Henry VIII is said to have brought a team of English athletes north for the first Scotland v. England match in the 16th century.

David Webster, an Aberdonian who has spent a good life as a sports administrator and has officiated at seven Commonwealth Games, is our unofficial historian and he agrees that our lads sent the English homeward to think again again!

Webster’s History of the Scottish Highland Games (and his biography with Gordon Dinnie of Donald Dinnie, the great world champion from Deeside) is well worth a look. He traces the military roots of the games. The sword dance as a victory dance using the victim’s sword crossed with that of the victor. The massed pipes and drums are to bring discipline in marching, inspiration in battle and to inspire fear in the enemy – remember the Germans fear of the ‘Ladies from Hell’ in the World War 1.

Chieftains used prowess at the highland games to choose their retainers; the best pipers and dancers to entertain, the best wrestlers as bodyguards and the best runners as messengers. Webster tells how Malcolm Canmore chose such a messenger in what is reputed to have been the first Braemar Gathering in the 11th century. A large field was assembled to race to the top of Craig Chionich, the mountain which overlooks Braemar. The favourites were two brothers McGregor. But after the race had started another younger brother appeared and was given permission to give chase.

Off he set bounding up the hill and long before the top had overtaken all but his elder brothers. He offered to share the prizes which included a purse of gold coin. “Each man for himself,” came the dour reply. The youngster moved into second place. “Halves and I’ll yield,” he offered. “Never, winner take all.”

As the finishing line approached the youngest McGregor overtook his brother. With a desperate lunge the elder grabbed the boy’s kilt to hold him back. It was no use. Showing speed of thought to match that of his legs the young McGregor loosened the buckles of his kilt and won the race kiltless. There is nothing to say whether he was wearing traditional highland underpants and so set an early record for streaking into the bargain.

The games’ military connections meant that along with the kilt and the bagpipes they were banned after the 1745 Rebellion as the government tried to obliterate highland culture in the hope of removing the power base of any future Younger Pretender. But about 100 years later things took a turn for the better. Queen Victoria’s love of so many things Scots may have had something to do with it, or it may have been that she saw the military potential of a proud people scaring the living daylights out of the enemy with their strange garb and hellish noises. At any rate, she encouraged the games and re-started the royal patronage of the Braemar Highland Gathering which has lasted to the present day.

It was even a Royal Braemar the day they buried Lord Louis Mountbatten. Our own royals couldn’t attend, but they sent King Freddy of Tonga to represent the family at Braemar Gathering and keep the royal connection going.

By the 1930s there were hundreds of highland games in Scotland, though some were more like Sunday school picnics and others agricultural shows. But the whole lot were threatened by the rush to modernity after the war. By 1968 the membership of the Scottish Games Association was down to 23. I can’t tell you why, but they have recovered. The number in the association has trebled and the prize money makes me wish I was younger again, even though standards have risen so much I wouldn’t stand a chance now.

Immediate past president of the Games Association, Alan Sim from Fettercairn, says the games are in good heart. The only things he sees inhibiting their further success is the shortage of runners and jumpers and, more critically, committee members willing to put in the sort of work he and his fellows put in to keep the Drumtochty Games going. If it were not for the annual barbecue they run in its aid, there would be no games – and fewer hangovers.

And it’s not just in Scotland that the highland games are prospering. There are now far more games furth of Scotland than there are at home. They are held wherever large groups of Scots can be found, and are more like Scottish rallies than Olympic Games. The emphasis is on meeting fellow Scots and on marching with clan members, or at least people with the same names.

But it would be wrong to look down in any way on the New Zealand, Australian, Malaysian and South American games. They are very enthusiastic and they are very good at it. The current world champion pipe band is from the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and the world highland dancing champion is also a Canadian, Colleen Rintamaki.

The biggest games in the world is the two-day Grandfather Mountain Games in North Carolina. There are many top heavyweights all over the place, though Bruce Aitken from the Mearns is still just about the best.

But is the whole highland games thing just a sham, part of that odd phenomenon, the highland tail that wags the Scottish dog? Why is it that when people think of Scotland they think of tartan and kilts, bagpipes, caber tossing and the Highland Fling? Why do Scots who emigrate from Glasgow or Aberdeen meet to sing about Granny’s Hielan Hame or the Land of the Heather and the Kilt?

Isn’t it odd when the Highlands are empty and there is such a bustle in the Lowlands? And how can Forfar and Montrose have games which are highland? Has Oldmeldrum not got it right in having a sports rather than a highland games? Perhaps, but I don’t have a problem with it, really. If it sells a few more tonnes of shortbread I can easily accept tartan on the tin.

More than half the people of Scotland once lived in the Highlands and now they don’t. But the heritage remains. If people who have no recent connection with the Highlands want to dress up in the kilt for marriage, why not? It’s a bit of fun and inexpensive compared with a Hindu wedding. And why should the brides always get all the glory?

Since he retired from farming, Charlie Allan has been doing as little as possible. He is president of the Ythan Cycle Club, part-time barman, vice chairman of the NE branch of the Institute for Contemporary Scotland and bats for Methlick.

This is an article from the July 2002 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.