On 12th June, 1940, the 51st Highland Division, last remnants of the British Expeditionary Force in France, surrendered to German armoured forces surrounding them at St Valery-en-Caux. The great majority of men of the 51st Highland Division were taken as prisoners of war.
Among them was Lieut. Jimmy Atkinson of the 7th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who had been captured a week before the surrender at St Valery. A keen country dancer in his life before the war, as Jimmy was marched through Europe to the POW camps he occupied his mind with the happy memories of music and dancing and he began thinking of steps for a new Scottish country dance.
After several weeks of travel through Europe Jimmy, along with a number of other POWs from the Highland Division, arrived in Oflag VII C in Laufen in Bavaria, where he would spend the next few months as a POW. Jimmy soon met up with another Scottish soldier being held prisoner at Laufen, Lieut. Peter Oliver of the 4th Seaforth Highlanders. Peter had set up a highland dancing class called The Reel Club which Jimmy soon joined.
At Laufen, dancing took place on the top landing of the prison hospital block, the only place in the overcrowded prison with room to dance. Meetings were held three afternoons a week and around 20 officers were regular attendees. With no musical instruments available, the tune was either whistled or the tempo of the dance was called out.
Jimmy soon put his idea for a new dance to Peter and together they worked it out. The dance took the form of the St. Andrews Cross, the insignia of the 51st Highland Division. Another member of The Reel Club, Lieut. Col. Tom Harris Hunter had been Chairman of the Perth Branch of the Scottish Country Dance Society before the war. He suggested a few alterations to the dance to ensure it complied with the Societies customs. Between the three men they created a new dance.
Music for the dance was composed by the piper and leader of the POW camp mouth organ band, Hector Ross of the 4th Seaforth Highlanders, and Dugald Stewart of the 8th Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, but most of the time the POWs danced the reel to ‘My Love She’s but a Lassie Yet!’
As the Reel Club was beginning to take off most of the junior officers in Laufen were sent to Stalag XXID at Posen in Poland, and later to Biberach in Bavaria. They eventually re-joined each other in the autumn of 1941 in Oflag VIIB at Warburg and the first public performance of The Reel of the 51st Division happened there on Halloween night 1941.
Both Harris Hunter and Jimmy sent details of the dance home to Scotland but the German censors in camp delayed the letter’s arrival believing the hieroglyphics to be a cunningly coded message! Eventually the letter to Harris Hunter’s wife made it home and she presented it to the Scottish Country Dance Society who went on to include the dance in their 13th book of Scottish country dances.