PICTURES: Inverness octogenarian rows 3000 miles in epic £15K fundraiser for Erskine Hospital
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
AN octogenarian fundraiser from Inverness who rowed the equivalent of 3000 miles in supermarkets has handed over a whopping £15,000 for a service veterans' charity.
Johnnie Baillie this week presented the cheque – representing the fruits of eight months’ hard rowing – to Erskine Hospital.
His herculean efforts on a rowing machine raised over £15,000, plus £466 in Gift Aid from the Inland Revenue, and provides a significant boost for the charity’s funds, including £5000 towards the creation of a new Erskine activity centre in Forres, serving veterans in the north.
Starting in February last year, he “rowed” the equivalent of 3000 miles – Newfoundland to Scotland – inside the city’s retail park Tesco store, where he had previously worked for 20 years, as well as in several of the retailing giant's other stores including Elgin, Forres, Inverness, Dingwall and Tain. He also hit the aisles of Morrison’s Inverness store.
Former soldier Johnnie, a native of Durness, north-west Sutherland, raised the cash for the Renfrewshire-based charity, which provides a range of services to Scottish-based armed forces veterans and their families.
His target for the project was five million metres, at the rate of 5000 metre strokes a day. By the time he had reached his 80th birthday in July, which he spent rowing in Inverness Retail Park Tesco, he had completed around 1,835,000 metres.
He had hoped to row his last mile by canoe to the West Highland coast, but bad weather put an end to this plan.
“Rowing is just about the best exercise you can get,” he declared, “and I thought I might as well use this occasion to do something useful.”
Johnnie’s previous projects have already raised over £11,000 for Erskine.
He has over the years also raised over £8000 for children’s hospital charity Chas, and over £1000 for Kinlochshiel Junior Shinty League, when he lived in South West Ross and ran his wife Gina’s family croft, while also working as a 'Kishorn Commando' at the pioneering concrete oil rig construction yard.
Educated at Durness Primary School and the former Sutherland Technical School in Golspie, Johnnie joined the Royal Military Police for three years at 18, and served for most of that time in security at NATO headquarters, then located in Paris.
He always maintained an interest in the army, and in later life, after his return to civilian life, joined the army reserve. He volunteered for a spell as a member of the British peacekeeping force in Bosnia in the 1990s.
Erskine Hospital fundraiser Jim Watret, who received the cheque, said: “Erskine is fully committed to opening another activity centre in the Forres area and the money that John Baillie has raised from his remarkable rowing challenge will go a long way to fulfilling the services that the veteran community want us to provide for them. Everyone in Erskine applauds John for his sterling efforts over the last few years and we can but wait to see what his next challenge is.”
He has always been known by old friends as Johnnie, to distinguish him from his late father John Baillie, one of the Highlands’ most experienced sheepstock experts of his generation, who was appointed MBE for his contribution to agriculture.
John Baillie Snr, who arrived in Durness from Dalkeith as a keen young shepherd in 1932, liked to recall that he had initially been sent north by his employers, the wealthy Borders-based Elliott sheep-farming family, to help out at their remote Eriboll Farm for three weeks.
However he agreed to remain longer, married his sweetheart Mary Jamieson from Edinburgh and was shortly promoted manager at the Elliott’s main Sutherland farm, Balnakiel, near Durness village, where the couple remained for the rest of their lives and raised their six-strong family, of whom Johnnie was the second.
