“IT’S NAE yon blin’ bugger Scroggie is’t?” was the question asked by a Highland policeman inquiring after two climbers who had made a moonlit ascent (in March) of Byron’s “Dark Lochnagar”. It was indeed Syd Scroggie (and his friend Gavin Sprott), and Scroggie was indeed blind; perhaps not the only blind climber in the world, but certainly one of the most daring.
Scroggie was born William Sydney Scroggie in Nelson, British Columbia, and came to Scotland after his father (a Fife man originally) died of wounds received in the First World War. After school in Edinburgh and Dundee, he became a sub-editor on the legendary boys’ comic, The Hotspur, editing tales of derring-do that he was to match in later life.
Before the Second World War, when Scroggie still had his sight, he was an active climber, contributing to several first ascents in the tricky corries of Lochnagar and Ben Nevis. When the war began, Scroggie joined the Cameronians, and later found his true home as a dashing young subaltern in the Lovat Scouts, an elite commando force of mountain troops who learnt their hard craft in Scroggie’s old Highland climbing grounds.
Scroggie lost his eyesight and his right leg below the knee during the Italian Campaign, while engaged against a Jäger mountain division just weeks before the end of the conflict. Leading his men out of a minefield, he had stepped on to an anti-personnel mine. His last vision, he later remembered, was of the sky and the mountains. While recuperating in Naples, he laughed and joked about his dreadful wounds with fellow patients, and — fitted with a tin leg and good companions — returned to the Scottish hills in the mid-1950s (later his children would also often accompany him).
Scroggie described himself as an “inveterate scribbler” and was an equally inveterate student, teaching himself Greek along the way through braille.
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He wrote his best verse in Scots, and his own intended epitaph (there is another slightly variant version) is itself a fine little poem:
Alow they steens there lies a lad Pech’d oot an’ fairly deen, He gae’d his ain gait a’ his life But whiles wi’ ithers’ e’en.
The epitaph is characteristically modest: he certainly used other people’s eyes while walking his “ain gait”, but he taught others to listen and interpret the sounds of the hills, such as the cries of the birds and also to interpret the messages carried on the wind. Scroggie once observed that “whatever we call the hills, it has nothing to do with sight. It is an inner experience and can be as poignantly savoured with your eyes shut as open.”
He recently joined that elite band of Scots hillwalkers (such as Tom Weir, obituary, July 10), who have had cairns raised to their memory while still alive. Scroggie’s cairn (and indicator) is on Balluderon Hill, in his beloved Sidlaw Hills.
He was a subject of This is Your Life in 1964, and received an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Dundee in 2001.
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His verse is collected in Give Me the Hills: The Verse of Syd Scroggie (1978), and there are fine prose evocations of the Scottish hills in The Cairngorms Scene and Unseen, published by the Scottish Mountaineering Trust in 1989. He was married twice, to Barbara (they had three children together) and, after Barbara’s death, Margaret.
Margaret and his three children survive him.
Sydney Scroggie, poet, was born in 1919. He died on September 9, 2006, aged 87.