A play recounting the exploits of a Church of Scotland minister dubbed the Tartan Pimpernel will be performed for the first time on the Hebridean island where he grew up.
The Rev Dr Donald Caskie helped save the lives of more than 2,000 allied troops during the Second World War.
His derring-do will be brought to life in his home village of Bowmore on Islay on November 3.
Playwright John Hughes described the event as a “homecoming” for the war hero minister, who was leading the Scots Kirk in Paris when the Germans invaded France.
He was inspired to write about Dr Caskie’s adventures after he learned that his Gaelic Bible had been returned to the church last year.
Eight members of the Caskie family will be in the audience when the Islay Festival-sponsored play, based on the minister’s book The Tartan Pimpernel, takes to the stage.
Dr Caskie’s nephew, Tom, who lived in Auchterarder until recently, gifted the leather bound Gaelic Bible to the Scots Kirk.
Mr Caskie revealed his uncle, who used the Bible in France, often used Gaelic to hide information he did not want to fall into enemy hands.
Denouncing the Nazis from his pulpit, when the Germans invaded he had to flee Paris.
He refused the chance of safe passage on the last ship bound for the UK and fled to Marseille instead.
There he ran a Seaman’s Mission, living a double life and passing the scrutiny of the Vichy Police, and helped British and Allied soldiers to freedom into Spain.
He was eventually recruited by British Intelligence officers and was told that his mission was the last link of a chain of safe houses which stretched from Dunkirk to Marseille.
With nothing to trust but God and his instincts, the crofter’s son operated in the Seaman’s Mission for many months until he was betrayed by a traitor.
Dr Caskie was eventually arrested by the Vichy Police, interrogated and banished from Marseille.
He moved to Grenoble where he continued to arrange for the escape of soldiers, seamen and airmen under the cover of a university chaplain.
He was finally imprisoned by the Gestapo and sentenced to death.
The minister had ignored repeated calls from British Intelligence and the Church of Scotland to return home.
His life was only saved through the intervention of a German pastor and he spent the rest of the war in a Prisoner of War camp.
The proceeds of the book penned by Edinburgh University graduate, who died aged 81, helped rebuild the Scots Kirk where the current minister is the Rev Jan Steyn, the former minister at Cupar and St John’s Dairsie United Church.
