the future 15th Lord Lovat and 4th Baron Lovat.

  108 years ago today in 1911, the slightly crazed aristocrat of the Scottish Highlands, Simon Christopher Joseph Fraser, the future 15th Lord Lovat and 4th Baron Lovat, was born in Beaufort Castle, Inverness. 

Fraser is best known for insisting that his personal piper Bill Millin play the bagpipes as they stormed the German positions during the D-Day landings.

Fraser was the son of the 14th Lovat, also known as Simon Fraser. He belonged to a family with a long and rich history, tracing its ancestry back to the Middle Ages when Clan Fraser had first been granted lands in the northern reaches of Scotland at Lovat.

 The Frasers had, with a number of notable casualties, managed to steer their way through the carnage of the Jacobite Wars of the 18th century and though stripped of their titles as Lords of Lovat initially had managed to be restored to the aristocracy by the time of the early 19th century with the title of Baron in the peerage of the United Kingdom and were given back the Lordship finally in 1854.

 These Jacobite complications were part of the reason why Fraser was simultaneously the 15th and 17th Lord Lovat, accounting for the stain left on the family name left by his 18th century ancestor.

 As well as enjoying this aristocratic heritage, Fraser also claimed a Gaelic heritage too, being known as MacShimidh amongst his clan, a name which led to the anglicised nickname of ‘Shimi’. 

Coming from such a rich background it is little surprise that Fraser enjoyed a rather privileged education, going on to Ampleforth College in north Yorkshire where, like many of his class from Scotland, he veered towards a life in the military, joining the Officer Training Corps there and then.

 After Ampleforth, he moved on to Magdalen College, Oxford University, and there joined the university’s cavalry squadron.

 By the time he was nineteen in 1930 he had received his commission as a second lieutenant of the Lovat Scouts in the Territorial Army. 

Eager to be in the thick of it however he transferred to the regular army the following year and became a lieutenant with the Scots Guard. 

In 1932 his father died, thus making Fraser the latest Lord of Lovat and the 25th Chief of Clan Fraser.

 He continued to rise through the ranks of the army but by 1937 had resigned and withdrawn to the reserve before getting married and peacefully living out the remaining years of the 1930s at his castle in Scotland.

Despite having retired even from the reserves by the summer of 1939, the outbreak of war instantly saw him being mobilised for action with the Lovat Scouts.

 In 1940 he volunteered himself to be a part of the new Commando units being forged within the British army and was eventually assigned to Commando No.4, partaking in his first raid with them in 1941 at the Norwegian Lofoten Islands where he and his men destroyed the fish-oil factories and seized German codebooks along with taking hundreds of German soldiers’ prisoner.

 Not long thereafter Fraser was in the command of a hundred British and fifty Canadian troops and led them in a successful raid on the French coastal village of Hardelot for which he was awarded the Military Cross.

 He subsequently became a lieutenant-colonel and the acting commander of the Commando as a whole. His next operation with them proved to be a much bloodier affair in the Dieppe Raid. 

Though the raid as a whole was quite disastrous, Fraser’s men were some of the few that actually achieved their assigned objective of destroying the German battery of six 150 mm guns. 

Thereafter he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and promoted to the rank of Brigadier, commanding the first special service brigade.

In 1944, Fraser and his men were earmarked for the D-Day landings and were assigned to taking the beach codenamed as ‘Sword’.

 Up until this point he had proven himself to be an able and competent officer, well capable of leading men and achieving his objectives.

 At D-Day however a touch of his aristocratic flair and flamboyance evidently came over him.

 This was evident for a start by the fact that the Highlander lord waded ashore wearing a white jumper under his war gear with the word ‘Lovat’ inscribed into the collar. 

He was also reportedly was armed with his own personal Winchester hunting rifle though Fraser himself claimed that he was armed with a standard U.S carbine. 

The most notable sign however, both to his comrades and to the enemy, was his insistence that Bill Millin, a Scottish-Canadian piper, play the bagpipes as they charged onto the beach. 

Millin was originally hesitant about doing this for the obvious reason that he would be a sitting duck and cited army regulations specifically stating that pipers were not to be brought playing their instrument into battle anymore. 

Fraser however brushed these regulations aside and said to Millin “Ah but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish and that doesn’t apply.”

 Thus as the brigade surged forward onto the beach and were cut to pieces, Millin, the only man that day dressed in a kilt, played the “Highland Laddie”, “The Road to the Isles” and “The Blue Bonnets are Over the Border” while German bullets were whizzing and whirring around him. 

When he stopped playing, Fraser shouted across the madness of the battlefield for him to keep playing. 

Later that day when the battle was won, some captured Germans admitted that they had not shot the piper because they thought he was insane.

After taking the coast, the brigade swiftly moved on to Pegasus Bridge and from there went on to fight in the Battle of Breville a couple of days later.

 During this battle a stray shell fell short of its target and exploded amongst the officers at the front, seriously wounding Fraser and killing and wounding many others.

 That effectively marked the end of his war carer and though he recovered from his wounds he did not return to the army when the war was over.

 He instead committed himself to politics as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs until the defeat of Winston Churchill in the 1945 election. 

He nevertheless continued to partake in the House of Lords and the Inverness County Council. 

At home he tended to his enormous family estate of some 250,000 acres and also became chief of the local Shinty club. Fraser lived on for many years and did not die until 1995. 

By then his financial fortunes had turned sour, two of his sons had died, and he had in his last years been forced to finally sell the family home of Beaufort Castle.

The piper Bill Millin played the bagpipes at his funeral.