Boys in kilts get another HK tilt
REMEMBER the Black Watch? They certainly remember us, and should be looking forward to their next tour of Hong Kong which is pencilled in for the final seven months of British rule.
It was no secret their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Andrew Ogilvy-Wedderburn, loathed the press after reports about their troublesome two-year tour in the early 1970s were dug up on their return in 1993.
A peeved Sir Andrew made what he thought to be a final parting shot when the battalion withdrew from the territory in September.
'If the press is to be believed,' he wrote in the Hong Kong forces' magazine The Junk, 'we are all marauding Jocks who eat our children.' That never happened to our knowledge, but they have at times kept dramatic events under their kilts.
One example: an adventure training expedition to Nepal this year where two team members were killed in the Himalayas.
Those deaths occurred as training of this type was being called into question following the Low's Gully fiasco in which five soldiers - including three from Hong Kong - almost died after they were stranded for a month in the Malaysian wilderness.
Both victims of Expedition Shipton's Step were Nepali Sherpas - one died from altitude sickness, the other from a broken neck after a fall.
No information was released at the time, although unlike the Low's Gully episode, there was no suggestion the Black Watch expedition was anything but well-planned.
Team leader Captain Nigel Scott-Dempster may in fact receive an award in recognition of his courage in abseiling down a ravine to recover one of the bodies.
