Reel of the 51st Division

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The emblem of the 51st Highland Division, which is danced after at the Reel

The Reel of the 51st Division is a Scottish dance developed by a prisoner of war in a German camp in 1940 .

During the Battle of Dunkirk in June 1940 around 10,000 British soldiers, including many Scots from the 51st (Highland) Division , were captured by the German Wehrmacht under Major General Erwin Rommel near Saint-Valery-en-Caux . These prisoners of war had to march around 1500 kilometers to Austria . The approximately 600 officers among them were initially imprisoned in Laufen Castle near Salzburg ( Oflag VII-C / H ). Almost all of these prisoners of war - officers and men - spent the remainder of the war in German camps.

In order to raise morale among the camp inmates in Laufen, one of the Scottish prisoners of war, Lieutenant Jimmy Atkinson († 1997), came up with the idea of ​​developing his own dance for the imprisoned officers, which is why the Laufen Reel (and 51st Country Dance or St. Valery's Reel ) is called. In this dance, the Saltire , the Scottish flag and the emblem of the division are symbolically represented and danced by ten men to the melody The Drunken Piper . The Reel Club practiced the dance on the roof of the warehouse; the melody was whistled due to the lack of instruments. A comrade of Atkinson wrote the steps of the new dance to his wife in Scotland who was the secretary of the Scottish Country Dance Society . There the dance was enthusiastically received. Since the sequence of steps of the dance was transmitted in certain abbreviations, the German defense suspected that it was an encrypted ciphertext with an espionage background, which is why another letter with a description of the dance steps from Atkinson to his wife was not forwarded.

Later the officers were distributed to different camps. Many of these prisoners met again in the autumn of 1941 in officers' camp VI B in Dössel near Warburg , where the Reel was officially shown for the first time on Halloween in front of Major General Victor Fortune .

Although the reel does not conform to standard rules, it was later included in the official book of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (RSCDS). Today it is one of the most popular Scottish dances worldwide and is danced by women and men.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Peyton : Without the Benefit of Laundry. The Autobiography of John Peyton . Bloomsbury Publishing, London 1997, ISBN 0-7475-3331-8 , pp. 34 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ↑ a b Michael Young: Reel of the 51st Division. September 1983, Retrieved November 25, 2013 .
  3. ^ RSCDS: A selection of core dances. (PDF; 144 kB) (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; Retrieved November 25, 2013 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.rscds.org  
  4. ^ War Dance: The 51st Country Dance. Retrieved November 24, 2013 .