#lovat

Fern was Immediately an Icon.

Ok, so not exactly. For anyone who didn't know, Wybie wasn't in the book of Coraline. (Sad I know) So I was curious where he had come from. Shortly after I learned that he was created so Coraline could have someone to talk to in the movie, and didn't have to just think everything. He was literally made for her. (AWW, this ship is too cute).

So I was wondering where they got the name. Someone probably said something in a meeting or something about a pun they could make with his name or something. Lovat had me stumped. However, I stopped looking and instead just looked up fanart. A bit after watching the movie I got the book. It's a really good book! (I prefer the movie, but still good book) Then I found it.

On the top of page 154, at least on my copy, I found this written word for word.

(Ms.Spink is talking) "Make sure you keep an eye out for the old well. Mister Lovat, who was here before your time, said that he thought it might go down for a mile or more,"... (Neil Gaiman)

Picture for reference

SO! HE IS THERE!!!! Ok he's not, but we have another character with the name Lovat. This was probably where they got the idea for the name in the first place, but still!

I'd like to think that this was Wybie's grandfather, who while not in the movie, probably died. This legit says, before Coraline's time, implying his death. I love that the Lovat name still tells Coraline that the well is FREAKING DEEP!

The City of Lovat was born out of a thousand ideas. But its genesis can be traced to a single, almost nondescript photo I came across in 2008/09. Today, it is easy to overlook in its mundanity. It’s almost unremarkable in nature. It’s a quiet shot of an interior hallway. Exposed pipes and wires run along the ceiling. A grimy stairwell at the far end leads upward. A stack of baskets sits in a…

Brigadier Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat died on March 16th 1995 in Beauly, Invernesshire.

Simon Christopher Joseph Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat was born in 1911 and assumed the family titles in 1933.  He was educated at Ampleforth College and attended Oxford University. He joined the University's Cavalry Squadron and, after graduation in 1932, was commissioned into the Scots Guards.

He was also known as the 24th MacShimidh (Chief of Clan Fraser of Lovat), his friends knew him as Shimi, his clan referred to him as MacShimidh, his Gaelic patronym, meaning Son of Simon. Simon is the favoured family name for the Chiefs of Clan Fraser.

Shimi continued the military traditions of his father, Simon Fraser, 14th Lord Lovat, the founder of the Lovat Scouts., but joined the commandos, some time in 1940, after a disagreement with his CO in the Lovat Scouts. He served as a commando leader in World War II Eventually posted to No.4 Commando, Lovat's first action of the War came in March 1941 with the Lofoten Raid. The Lofoten Islands lay off the coast of northern Norway, and the object of the operation was to destroy oil installations, enemy shipping, capture prisoners and to bring back Norwegian volunteers for active service. The raid was an enormous success and, without meeting any opposition worth speaking of, the Commandos destroyed eighteen factories and seven installations holding eight hundred thousand gallons of oil, and they also captured over two hundred prisoners, sunk in excess of twenty thousand tons of enemy shipping, and returned with three hundred Norwegian volunteers. He also led 4 Commando group on the raid on Dieppe in 1942 in which his plan for the capture of the Varengeville battery was masterly. And proved brilliantly successful. Yet he had to fight the orthodox planning from above tenaciously to get his way. His was the choice of the landing beaches. And the successful scaling of the formidable cliffs and the fierce bloody attack and hand-to-hand fighting to take the battery were a model of what a commando raid from the sea could be. Every gun was silenced. And although the main attack on the harbour was a disaster, it could have been much worse if the guns had not been so successfully silenced.

 Hitler placed a bounty of a thousand Marks on his head, outraged by stories of his audacity. He received the DSO and Military Cross. He also issued orders that Lovat and his fellow Scot David Stirling to be shot as terrorists if captured.

On D Day when he ordered his personal piper Bill Milllin to pipe the commandos and himself ashore at Sword Beach, in defiance of specific orders not to allow such an action in battled, the piper questioned the order, citing the regulations, he recalled later, Lord Lovat replied: “Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.

Lord Lovat was wounded six days later and  he calmly, gave orders that not a step back should be taken, then called for a priest and was evacuated. Those who saw him then could not believe he could possibly survive.

But survive he did, but took no further party in the war, after which he served as Winston Churchill's personal emissary to Stalin in Moscow. Churchill described him to Stalin as 'the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled ships or cut a throat'. After retiring from public life he turned his attentions to developing and devoted much of his time to the family estates of 250,000 acres in the highlands and to Fraser Clan affairs. He bred a pedigree herd of shorthorn cattle and was an international judge of cattle travelling widely to Canada, America, Latin America and Australia in that regard.  He was also chieftain of Lovat Shinty Club, the local shinty team which bears his family name.

 In his final two years he saw tow of his sons die and  it was revealed that the second had suffered serious business losses and left large debts on the Beaufort estates that have been for so long associated with the name of Lovat. 

Brigadier Lord Lovat passed away at Beauly, Inverness-shire 16th March 1995.

Bill Millin, a Scottish bagpiper who played highland tunes as his fellow commandos landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day and lived to see his bravado immortalised in the 1962 classic war film “The Longest Day”.

Bill Millin was born in Glasgow on July 14, 1922, the son of a policeman, and lived with his family in Canada as a child before returning to Scotland.

Mr. Millin was a 21-year-old private in Britain’s First Special Service Brigade when his unit landed on the strip of coast the Allies code-named Sword Beach, near the French city of Caen at the eastern end of the invasion front chosen by the Allies for the landings on June 6, 1944.

By one estimate, about 4,400 Allied troops died in the first 24 hours of the landings, about two-thirds of them Americans.

The young piper was approached shortly before the landings by the brigade’s commanding officer, Brig. Simon Fraser, who as the 15th Lord Lovat was the hereditary chief of the Clan Fraser and one of Scotland’s most celebrated aristocrats. Against orders from World War I that forbade playing bagpipes on the battlefield because of the high risk of attracting enemy fire, Lord Lovat, then 32, asked Private Millin to play on the beachhead to raise morale.

When Private Millin demurred, citing the regulations, he recalled later, Lord Lovat replied: “Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.”

After wading ashore in waist-high water that he said caused his kilt to float, Private Millin reached the beach, then marched up and down, unarmed, playing the tunes Lord Lovat had requested, including “Highland Laddie” and “Road to the Isles.”

With German troops raking the beach with artillery and machine-gun fire, the young piper played on as his fellow soldiers advanced through smoke and flame on the German positions, or fell on the beach. The scene provided an emotional high point in “The Longest Day.”

In later years Mr. Millin told the BBC he did not regard what he had done as heroic. When Lord Lovat insisted that he play, he said, “I just said ‘O.K.,’ and got on with it.” He added: “I didn’t notice I was being shot at. When you’re young, you do things you wouldn’t dream of doing when you’re older.”

He said he found out later, after meeting Germans who had manned guns above the beach, that they didn’t shoot him “because they thought I was crazy.”

Other British commandos cheered and waved, Mr. Millin recalled, though he said he felt bad as he marched among ranks of wounded soldiers needing medical help. But those who survived the landings offered no reproach.

“I shall never forget hearing the skirl of Bill Millin’s pipes,” one of the commandos, Tom Duncan, said years later. “As well as the pride we felt, it reminded us of home, and why we were fighting there for our lives and those of our loved ones.”

Lovat, Millin and the commandos then advanced from Sword Beach to Pegasus Bridge, which was being heroically defended by the men of the 2nd Battalion The Ox & Bucks Light Infantry (6th Airborne Division) who had landed in the very early hours of D-Day by glider. Arriving at Pegasus Bridge, Lovat and his men marched across to the sound of Millin’s bagpipes under heavy fire. Twelve men died, shot through their berets. To better understand the sheer bravery of this action, later detachments of the commandos were instructed to rush across the bridge in small groups, protected by their helmets.

In 2008, French bagpipers started a fund to erect a statue of Mr. Millin near the landing site.

Millin’s actions on D-Day were immortalised in the 1962 film, ‘The Longest Day’ where Lord Lovat was played by Peter Lawford and Billie Millin was played by Pipe Major Leslie de Laspee, later the Queen Mother’s official piper. Millin saw further action in the Netherlands and Germany before being demobbed in 1946.

After the war, he worked on Lord Lovat’s estate near Inverness, but found the life too quiet and took a job as a piper with a traveling theater company. In the late 1950s, he trained in Glasgow as a psychiatric nurse and eventually settled in Devon, retiring in 1988.  He visited the United States several times, lecturing on his D-Day experiences.

He died from complications from a stroke on August 2010 in Devon. He was 88 years old.