Alistair Campsie - Telegraph In particular, Campsie investigated Angus MacKay (1812-59), Queen Victoria's first piper, whose name appears on a collection of piobaireachd (which until then had mostly been passed on through oral tradition) published in 1838. According to Campsie the "self-appointed piping Establishment" had claimed that "Angus MacKay's father, John, had been taught by the MacCrimmons and had handed on their music unchanged to Angus..." Yet the MacCrimmon propagandists, Campsie maintained, had concealed the truth that MacKay was probably clinically insane from the age of 20, long before most of his work was written, and was dragged off to Bedlam after an indiscretion at Windsor Castle involving the Queen when he was raging drunk with "ardent spirits" at Christmas, 1853; he was certified insane in 1854. Though he was later diagnosed as "the most violent patient in England," MacKay's deranged musical settings, Campsie alleged, had been accepted in piping circles as piobaireachd Holy Writ. The Establishment, headed by two minor lairds who were also judges, then corruptly forced pipers to play Angus's disturbed versions. Those who refused... were fraudulently denied their rightful gold medals, clasps and cups at historic Highland gatherings, in the process killing off the traditional settings of the music. The book caused outrage. The Piping Times, the monthly bible for enthusiasts which had always supported the MacCrimmon Legend, launched a blistering attack on the author, its fury buttressed by some obvious errors in the book. Campsie claimed that someone had tampered with the manuscript in order to bring him and the book into disrepute and later appealed to libraries to insert corrections. According to Campsie's obituary in The Scotsman, the book "led to years of mutual tirades and even legal battles." On his website Campsie claimed that he and his family "were made homeless, my writing career was ruined, and I was hounded into a heart attack from which no one knew how I recovered. I was told the next could be terminal. Alistair Keith Campsie was born in Inverness on January 27 1929. His father played lead violin in the Scottish Orchestra (now the Scottish National Orchestra) but, finding it hard to make ends meet, moved his family to England, where he supplemented his income from music by working as a painter and decorator. After the Second World War, they moved back to Lanark. Alistair attended Lanark Grammar School and went on to study at the West of Scotland College of Agriculture in Ayr. In 1949, aged 20, he joined the Colonial Service and was posted to Sudan, and later Nigeria, to oversee agricultural projects. He always enjoyed writing, and created and edited the East African Farmer and Planter, the first magazine published in English and Swahili. Later, after spells as a stringer for British newspapers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zanzibar, he returned to Scotland to work for the Weekly Scotsman, and later for the Scottish Daily Mail and the Scottish Daily Express in Glasgow. When, during an interview with Cary Grant, the actor told him about the self-hypnosis technique he had used to give up smoking, Campsie, a heavy smoker, tried it himself. It worked and he later turned the experience into a book, Cary Grant Stopped Me Smoking (1991). After his retirement, in 1974 Campsie and his wife bought a former coaching inn at Barr, Ayrshire. Five years later they bought a hotel in Montrose which Campsie renamed The Piper's Private Hotel. They retired from the hotel trade in 1995. Campsie's other books include The Clarinda Conspiracy (1989), about Robert Burns, and a novel, By Law Protected (1976). Campsie had played the pipes from childhood and, during his travels in Africa, always carried his instrument with him. Once described as one of Scotland's finest amateur pipers, he was a keen proponent of the more rounded Cameron style of piping (against the more clipped MacPherson style), having been taught by Pipe-Major Robert Reid, a man described in his lifetime as "The King of the Pipers." Until the end of his life Campsie kept up his campaign against the piping establishment on his website, and passions continue to run high even after his death. An article on the website of the Glasgow-based College of Piping noted that, "like similar anti-establishment snipers," Campsie was "seldom seen at any gathering or competition, preferring his own narrow, visceral polemic to opinion formed through social discourse and reasoned argument with fellow pipers." The article went on to add, in a slightly more conciliatory tone: "Still, piping needs people like Alistair Campsie. " Alistair Campsie married, in 1963, Robina Anderson, who survives him with their daughter and two sons. Alistair Campsie, born January 27 1929, died April 21 2013