Millin, William ("Bill")

Legendary World War II piper; Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada to a father of Scottish origin, who returned to Glasgow as a policeman. William, who was 3 years old at the time, grew up and went to school in the Shettleston area of the city. He joined the Territorial Army in Fort William, where his family had moved, and played in the pipe bands of the Highland Light Infantry and the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders before volunteering as a commando and training with Lord Lovat at Achnacarry (Scottish Gaelic: Achadh na Cairidh; ’field of the fish-trap/weir’), which is a small hamlet, private estate, and a castle in the Lochaber region of Scotland; He became famous, because he played at Sword Beach during the landing of the British troops on D-day (6 June 1944) in Normandy, France; For his astonishing bravery he was nicknamed the "Mad Piper". In the 1950s he became a registered psychiatric nurse in Glasgow, moving south to a hospital in Devon in the late 1960s, until he retired in Dawlish (in Devon) in 1988; For commemoration ceremonies he made regular trips to Normandy; In 2006, a Devon folk singer, Sheelagh Allen, wrote a song, entitled "The Highland Piper", about him (NB [2020]: Unfortunately I was unable (yet) to discover its text or a recording of it); In 2009 France awarded him a "Légion d’honneur" for gallantry; In 2013 a life-size bronze statue of him was erected at "Sword Beach", which was the code name of the Allies for the strip of coast near Caen in Normandy; He is even depicted, even though anonymously, and only seen from behind, in a postage stamp (➺ WS/Seeler, no.113), issued in 2004 by the Isle of Man postal authority, in commemoration of D-day, about which he wrote a book entitled »6 Juin 44: La cornemuse du D-Day« (Translation: C. Hardy; Jean-Pierre Hardy), which was published in 2015; Millin, who suffered a stroke in 2003, died in hospital in Torbay; His wife Margaret (née Dowdel, from Edinburgh) had died already in 2000; According to one website, Millin handed his famous set of bagpipes over to the National War Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh when he was 78 years old. The instrument is now on display in the Dawlish Museum, however, and another set is on display in the "Mémorial Pegasus" [Pegasus Memorial Museum, apparently also called "Pegasus Bridge Museum"], Ranville (France); This latter instrument is a spare set (which Mr. Millin called his "Normandy pipes"), on which he had played when his original set was damaged during the campaign.