Hector MacAndrew (1903 – 1980) was the foremost Scottish fiddler of the second half of the 20th century. He was born in 1903, in a cottage on the Fyvie Castle Estate in Aberdeenshire, where his father was head gardener and piper to Lord Leith. The family was musical - Peter, his father, was a good fiddler as well as a piper and Hector's brother Pat was also a fine, prize-winning piper. No surprise, then, that he began playing very early in life. As a young man he received some classical training in Edinburgh, which may help to account for the full and generous sound he made, particularly in slow airs; but valuable as this experience was, it never blurred or diluted his awareness of the aural tradition going back to the Gows which he venerated and came to embody. Like his father, he became an estate gardener, eventually at Keithhall House, Inverurie, the residence of the Earl of Kintore. By this time (1933) he was much in demand as a player at social occasions and eventually on Radio Aberdeen. During the War he served in the Royal Artillery and was with the Eighth Army from El Alamein to Trieste when the War ended. He talked little of his wartime experiences, but was at this time that he determined that, should he survive, he would devote himself as far as possible to keeping the tradition of Scottish fiddle playing alive.