Folk preview: Castle Commando/Heisgeir

A new documentary about Commando training camps in the Highlands had a special resonance for the fiddler approached to record its soundtrack. By Jim Gilchrist

FIDDLER Duncan Chisholm’s music frequently celebrates his native Highlands, and the rugged scenery of his ancestral homelands of Strathglass. A new commission for the BBC, though, saw him composing music for a TV programme about an episode of 20th-century Highland history that touched him closer than anyone could have imagined.

Chisholm’s music for Castle Commando, on BBC2 next Tuesday, has been largely inspired by his grandfather, also Duncan Chisholm, a gamekeeper who became an instructor on the Special Training Centre that turned two Highland estates into a gruelling “paramilitary academy” for Commandos during the Second World War. Established at Inverailort Castle, Lochaber, then at Achnacarry Castle near Spean Bridge, the training courses produced an elite fighting force that would, in Churchill’s words, “take the war to the Germans” – so tough, in fact, that Chisholm senior was seriously injured during one exercise.

“This was my first commission from the BBC and when they told me it was about Commando training at Inverailort and Achnacarry, I couldn’t believe it,” says Chisholm. “My grandfather was a staff sergeant at Inverailort and occasionally trained at Achnacarry. ”

Chisholm’s grandfather, who died at the age of 76 in 1978, was working as a gamekeeper in Strathglass when Lord “Shimi” Lovat, whose father had formed the famous Lovat Scouts during the Boer War, was among the first to become involved in the newly formed Commando units in 1940. Chisholm joined the Lovat Scouts and was sent to Bisley in Surrey to train as a sniper, then despatched to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, eventually escaping back to Britain during the heroic chaos of Dunkirk.

He doesn’t figure in the documentary, but because of his background as a stalker and gamekeeper, as well as his sharp-shooting skills, he was made an instructor at Inverailort, specialising in “fieldcraft”, which covered weapons training, unarmed combat, camouflage and survival techniques. Among other things he featured in a training film starkly titled Kill or Be Killed, about sniping techniques.

Under the gruelling regime at Inverailort then Achnacarry, the 25,000 aspiring Commandos who passed through the centre became “unbearably fit”, as one veteran recalls. They also came under the uncompromising guidance of two former colonial police officers, William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, who were “masters of dirty fighting” on the streets of Shanghai. They developed the Commando knife and taught trainees to use it, mercilessly.

The centre specialised in fearsome “opposed landing” exercises which used live ammunition and could occasionally prove lethal, as Sergeant Chisholm was to discover. “My grandfather was seriously injured and the captain next to him killed when a mine went off,” says his grandson.

Chisholm was hospitalised for months with shrapnel wounds and burst eardrums. After being discharged, he was sent to Canada to learn how to handle sledge dogs, then returned to the Cairngorms, where he taught winter survival techniques to men for the assault on the Nazi heavy water plant in Norway that inspired the film Heroes of Telemark.

The Commandos scored some signal successes in raids on German-occupied Norway. They were also involved in the disastrous Dieppe Raid of 1942, when more than 3,300 of the Canadian main assault force were killed, injured or taken prisoner. The Commandos however, were successful in their mission to knock out the German big guns on either side of the French port, the fierce action prompting one soldier to remark to his officer: “Jesus Christ, sir, this is nearly as bad as Achnacarry.”

Chisholm’s music for the documentary, played largely on fiddle and pipes, “pretty much wrote itself in many respects,” he says, “because I remembered my grandfather and the type of man he was, and I also know the area around Inverailort very well.” He was so happy with two of the numbers that he intends including them on the final album in his Strathglass trilogy, on which he’s working at the moment.

In the meantime, he appears at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival on Friday in a piece celebrating Heisgeir – the Monach Isles – evoked in a multimedia concert by Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, in whose band he regularly plays.

His family connection made his involvement in Castle Commando particularly satisfying. “Everyone in the Highlands who knows anything about the war knows about the Commando training camps. They played a vital role in the war effort and the fact that my grandfather helped make that process work gives me a great sense of pride.”

• Castle Commando is on BBC2 Scotland on Tuesday 31 January. Heisgeir is at the Mitchell Theatre, Glasgow, on Friday 27 January. www.celticconnections.com