The Kandahar Reel or The Duke of Rothesay’s Kandahar Reel by Captain Andy Colquhoun
The Kandahar Reel performed for the first time in the Black Watch Officers' Mess.
RSCDS members will be famiIiar with the story of how The Reel of the 51st Division was devised during the Second World War. In 2009 the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, were serving in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Two officers, Capt. Andy Colquhoun and his cousin, Lt. Rob Colquhoun, decided to compose a reel that
reflected their tour. Ideas were scribbled in notebooks during operations and when back in Kandahar the reel was put together over a couple of late evenings in their tents. Coincidentally Major Ali Hempenstall, a grandson of one of the men who devised The Reel of the 51st, was also serving within the Battalion during the summer.
The cover of the Fletts book shows a detail of A Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl 1780 by David Allan in the National Galleries of Scotland.
During the course of writing Traditional Dancing in Scotland, the Fletts conducted a correspondence with Mrs Ysobel Stewart, one of our co-founders, about her early memories of dancing and how she had learned to dance. Following publication of the book, she wrote to them congratulating them on the thoroughness of their work expressing the view that the book would make “a notable contribution to Scotland”. In the mid 1960s Tom was offered a visiting professorship in Seattle for one year and there they renewed a friendship with Mary Isdale MacNab, a Highland dance teacher in Vancouver and supporter of the emerging RSCDS branch there. They had already met at Jack McConachie's class in London, which Mrs MacNab regularly visited. Mrs MacNab also collected dances from a wide range of Scottish traditions and sources and she told Tom about the background to her research and taught him some of the dances she had collected. In the final move of his career Tom was
The Kandahar Reel reflects the incredible teamwork required to run and support military operations. The first half of the reel sees the team building towards the focus of the dance – a series of four person teapots (right hands across). These represent both the double rotor Chinook helicopters that brought soldiers in and out of each operation and the single rotor Black Hawks that so often extracted their casualties during the operation. The reel was first danced as a demonstration set during a ball at the Black Watch Officers Mess in December 2009 to mark the Battalion’s homecoming. It was then danced for the Duke of Rothesay when he visited the Battalion to hand out Afghanistan campaign medals in January 2010. The devisers hope that this energetic reel will be danced widely in recognition of the efforts of the Black Watch during summer 2009, in support of those soldiers who returned with life changing injuries and in memory of those soldiers who did not return. The RSCDS is currently in discussions with the devisers regarding publication of the dance.
appointed Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Sheffield where, in addition to gaining an international reputation in mathematics and publishing research papers, he found time to write four articles on The Scottish Country Dance Its Origins and Development and The History of the Scottish Reel as a Dance-Form for the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University. Joan published Traditional Step-Dancing in Scotland in 1996, giving the historical and traditional background to solo dancing all over Scotland and including instructions for fifteen dances. It includes an appendix on Step-Dancing in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, written by Frank Rhodes. It is still in print and is available from Headquarters. Copies of the Fletts’ article in the EFDSS journal and their correspondence with Mrs Stewart are held in the RSCDS Archives. We have approached the School of Scottish Studies to find out if we can make Tom’s articles more widely available to our members.
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