J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Shetland

The Ghosts of Swarbacks Minn

by

My fourth and final post about the naval heritage I visited during our recent holiday in Shetland…

By complete coincidence (honest!), our rented cottage looked out directly over Busta Voe, at the head of the Swarbacks Minn anchorage. During World War I, this was the base of the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, responsible for enforcing the maritime blockade on Germany by patrolling the great North Atlantic gaps. The squadron initially operated the elderly Edgar-class cruisers, but these proved unable to cope with the sea conditions and were swiftly replaced by larger and faster armed merchant cruisers, which then formed the squadron until it was withdrawn in 1917. These were ships like HMS, formerly RMS, Oceanic, once the largest ship in the world, although her service proved to be brief: she was wrecked on Foula on 8 September 1914, and one of her propellor blades now stands sentinel outside the Shetland museum in Lerwick.

The propellor blade from the Oceanic

Quite a lot of information about 10CS’s operations can be accessed easily online, for instance here and here; there’s even a freely accessible doctoral thesis on the subject.

There’s now relatively little extant evidence of the one-time naval presence in Swarbacks Minn, but it doesn’t take much imagination to visualise the great grey hulls lying in this extensive stretch of water, which is over 100 metres deep in places, and several local history books and pamphlets contain some excellent photographs of the anchorage in its heyday. (One example illustrates this news story, about the local bakery that was established to supply the squadron.) Busta House, commandeered as an officers’ mess and shore headquarters for the admiral commanding 10CS – initially Sir Dudley de Chair – is now a very pleasant hotel, where we enjoyed a good meal.

(Today’s ‘not a lot of people know that’ fact: de Chair’s granddaughter is the wife of Tory MP and arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg.)

Busta Voe and the Busta House Hotel

Most evocative of all, though, are the gun emplacements on the island of Vementry, which stands on one side of the entrance to the anchorage. These still have their original six-inch guns in place; they were originally part of the armament of HMS Gibraltar of the Edgar-class, which became the depot ship for the base after her withdrawal from front-line service. We only viewed the guns from the opposite shore, on the island of Muckle Roe. It’s apparently possible to land on Vementry and inspect them close-up – see the photos here and here – but, sadly, it’s out of bounds in May, which is lambing season in Shetland!

The guns of Vementry

I’ll be exploring the history of the Swarbacks Minn base, and many other aspects of Shetland’s naval heritage, in much more detail in an article in the autumn issue of Dockyards, the newsletter of the Naval Dockyards Society. And we’ll definitely be returning to Shetland!

The Submarine and the Bus Stop

by

Number two in my short series of posts based on last week’s holiday in Shetland…

Unst is an absolute must for visitors. As Britain’s most northerly inhabited island, it racks up the superlatives literally every few hundred yards, the further north you go – the most northerly roads, the most northerly shop (splendidly named ‘The Final Checkout’), the most northerly museums, the most northerly castle (Muness – a real gem), the most northerly brewery, the most northerly public loo…formerly the most northerly defence site, too, but RAF Saxa Vord closed a decade ago, and its buildings have now become the unlikely home of, yes, the most northerly holiday resort. But in World War I, Unst had another claim to fame, as the most northerly naval ‘base’ (of sorts) in the British Isles. During the early months of 1917, the submarines E49 and G13 used Baltasound, in the north-east of Unst, as their base for patrolling the seas off the island. On 12 March, though, the E49 struck a mine as she passed between the islands of Balta and Huney, just after leaving harbour. The mine had been planted by UC76, which had left Heligoland on 3 March. The three officers and twenty eight men of E49 were lost, including her commanding officer, Edinburgh-born Lieutenant Reay Parkinson RN, who, despite being only twenty-four, was a knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy for his part in rescuing the crew of the Italian battleship Benedetto Brin after its destruction by an explosion in Brindisi harbour on 27 September 1915. A new memorial to the crew of E49 was unveiled only in March of this year, and looks out over Baltasound to the site where the wreck lies.

The E49 memorial. The wreck lies off the lighthouse at the southern (right) end of the lighthouse in the distance

In something of a bizarre juxtaposition – or, more likely, an astute piece of placement by those responsible – the E49 memorial sits right next to one of the most famous tourist attractions on Unst, Bobby’s bus shelter, probably the only bus stop in the world to have its own website.

It’s a bus stop, Jim, but not as we know it

The Hollanders’ Graves

by

Last week, we had a terrific holiday in the sun-drenched beach resorts of…

Shetland.

OK, it’s a fair cop, the temperatures never reached double figures in the week we were there, and were driven down further by the constant northerly wind (reaching gale force at times, e.g. on our return ferry voyage to Aberdeen). But if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t want to spend all day baking on a lounger, then an archipelago which offers stunning scenery, fascinating heritage sites, varied wildlife (orcas were off the coast while we were there, although we didn’t see them), and some of the best roads in Britain – straight, wide, largely empty, and sans potholes – should be high on your bucket list. Shetland is a different world, and that’s emphasised by the blue and white flag that you’ll see flying everywhere. No, not the diagonal saltire (and you certainly won’t see a Union Jack for love nor money) – this is the horizontal/vertical Nordic cross of the Shetland flag. This is a resolutely independent place, where some, like one of the candidates in the forthcoming general election, still believe that the transfer of both these islands and Orkney to the Scottish Crown in 1468-9 was illegal, and that the northern isles should actually be independent; so woe betide you if you suggest to a Shetlander that s/he’s merely a Scot who lives in Scotland, and, come to that, if you suggest that their home is called ‘the Shetlands’.

As far as I was concerned, of course, it was an opportunity to check out the islands’ naval heritage after making several previous visits to Orkney, as described in earlier posts on this site. So this is the first of a series of short posts I intend to publish in quick succession, and it’s the one that deals with my main period of study.

Shetland was an important anchorage during the Anglo-Dutch wars; important, that is, for the Dutch, who used its many sheltered inlets, or voes – fjords by any other name – as harbours of refuge for their merchantmen. Bressay Sound, which lies between Lerwick and the island of Bressay, was a particularly favoured anchorage for the Dutch herring busses, so to deny its use to them, John Mylne, Charles II’s master builder, erected a fort at Lerwick during the second war. This wasn’t completed before the end of the conflict, although the very sight of it, and exaggerated rumours of its strength, were enough to deter a potential attacking squadron in 1667. (A detailed account of this episode can be found at p.178 of this old source.) However, it wasn’t garrisoned during the next war, leading to it being burned by the Dutch in 1673, and was only completed and brought into service in 1781, when it was named Fort Charlotte.

The ramparts of Fort Charlotte, still defending Lerwick’s parked cars after 350 years

Ronas Voe, on the west side of Northmavine, the north-western peninsula of Shetland’s mainland, was another favourite harbour of refuge, and this was where the outgoing Dutch East Indiaman Wapen van Rotterdam overwintered in 1673-4, having sailed from Texel on 6 December 1673. But word of her presence was sent to Whitehall, and on 11 February three frigates, the Cambridge, Crown and Newcastle were sent north to attack her, which they did a few days later. Unfortunately, no logbooks which would provide a precise date, or description of the action, survive from any of the frigates, but the Wapen van Rotterdam was taken, briefly becoming a hulk named Arms of Rotterdam for her new masters. There are no firm figures for casualties in the engagement, but an indeterminate number of dead were buried in a mass grave on the south shore of the voe by the local people, who were rather more sympathetic to the Dutch, whose vessels they had hosted and traded with for many decades, than King Charles II and his ministers might have wished them to be. The grave site was marked by a simple memorial, and this has been renewed over the years; you can see more pictures of the area here.

Ronas Voe, looking north west, with the ‘Hollanders’ Graves’ memorials on the left

Visiting the ‘Hollanders’ Grave’ is something of an adventure, as getting to so many places in Shetland can be. Although marked on Ordnance Survey maps, there are no signposts and no obvious or easy access, other than by skirting the premises of a fish factory to get down to the foreshore. But visiting this quiet, poignant place is definitely worth the effort, and it was good to be able to pay my respects to those who perished in an action that was, with hindsight, utterly pointless – for the Treaty of Westminster, by which Charles II’s kingdoms withdrew from the war, was signed on 19 February 1674, just days, perhaps even hours, after the battle in Ronas Voe.

Orkney and Shetland Road Trip, Part 4

by

Shetland has less naval heritage than Orkney, but it still has a substantial amount. During the 17th century, the islands were of vital economic importance – but to the Dutch, not the British. Vast Dutch herring fleets regularly sheltered at Bressay Sound, trading with the local people and contributing to the rise of Lerwick at the expense of the old capital, Scalloway. This caused some tension; in 1625 the authorities attempted to stamp out ‘the manifold adultrie and furnicatioun with women venteris of beir and utheris women evill inclined’. In 1703 the French attacked the Dutch herring fleet, destroying the escorting warship Wolfswinkel and pursuing the herring busses into Bressay Sound, where over 150 of them were burned. The islands were also a port of call for Dutch ships outward bound for, or returning from, the East Indies, especially at times of tension or war with Spain, France or England, when the Channel route became problematic. In 1640 three returning East Indiamen and an escorting warship were attacked in Bressay Sound by ten Spanish warships. Another such ship, the Kennemerland, was wrecked on the Skerries in 1664, and a number of artefacts from her are displayed at Lerwick Museum.???????????????????????????????

In the summer of 1652, General-at-Sea Robert Blake was ordered to Shetland with a fleet of over eighty ships to intercept the Dutch East India fleet, bound for home ‘north about’ (achteroom) around Scotland. Admiral Tromp went after him, but both fleets were caught in a storm on 25–27 July. Blake and his fleet managed to shelter in Bressay Sound, but the Dutch were battered on a hostile lee shore. After three days of continuous gales Tromp he had only thirty-four ships in company out of a fleet of over 100. Most of the others found some sort of shelter away from the main settlements but six foundered at sea and ten were wrecked. Even so, seven of the nine East Indiamen successfully made it home. To deny Bressay to the Dutch, a fort was ordered to be built at Lerwick during the first Dutch War (1652-4), but it is not known if this was ever completed. In 1665 work began on a more permanent fortification, built by Charles II’s master builder Robert Mylne. Finished in 1667, this was destroyed by the Dutch in 1673. The depredations of French and American privateers led to its rebuilding in 1781, when it was renamed Fort Charlotte, and it is in this form that it still survives, albeit now hemmed on almost all sides by the buildings of the town. It was used as a Royal Naval Reserve headquarters from 1861 to 1910.???????????????????????????????

Other relics of naval heritage can be found throughout Shetland, although we didn’t have time to investigate any of these in person. During World War I, the navy used the Swarbacks Minn anchorage on the Isle of Vementry as a base for patrols by the 10th Cruiser Squadron; the 6-inch guns of the coastal defence battery erected to protect it are still in situ. Bressay Sound was an important convoy anchorage, and guns were placed at both ends of it. A Royal Naval Air Station was established at Catfirth, operating seaplanes which hunted U-boats in the Atlantic. During World War II, a RN radar station was built on Sumburgh Head to detect U-boats passing between the Atlantic and North Sea via the Fair Isle channel; in 1940, the station provided early warning of a Luftwaffe attempt to bomb the British fleet in Scapa Flow on Orkney. To defend Lerwick, a large new gun battery was erected at Ness of Sound.

???????????????????????????????We did go to Lerwick Museum, which contains very little of naval relevance (other than a propellor blade from HMS Oceanic, the liner turned auxiliary cruiser wrecked on Foula on 8 September 1914), but that certainly isn’t true of the brand new museum at Scalloway, opened only last summer (it doesn’t usually open in winter, but did so for the holiday following Up Helly Aa in Lerwick). Standing in the shadow of brooding Scalloway Castle, another testament to the ambition and extravagance of Patrick, Earl of Orkney – see previous posts in this series – the museum has an interesting display about the sinking of Oceanic. Above all, though, it devotes a substantial amount of its space to the story of the ‘Shetland bus’, the extraordinary covert operation of World War II which saw fishing craft and, later, submarine chasers of the Royal Norwegian Navy smuggling men, equipment and information into or out of their occupied country. It’s an interesting sign of Shetland’s abiding and powerful connection to Norway, which ruled the islands until 1469, that Lerwick Museum was opened by the Queen of Norway and Scalloway’s by its Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg; indeed, the latter apparently generated some controversy in his homeland by choosing to spend its national day last year in Scalloway rather than Norway, but by doing so, he emphasised the debt his country owes to the heroes who operated the ‘Shetland Bus’.???????????????????????????????

Orkney and Shetland Road Trip, Part 3

by

Transcript of a meeting held at the offices of Blandshire County Council. 

Present: Councillor Gordon Scrote, chairman of Health and Safety committee; Inspector Robert Brent, Blandshire Police public order representative; and a large bearded Viking wearing furs, armour and a winged helmet, wielding a battleaxe, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Brian Blessed in ‘Flash Gordon’. 

???????????????????????????????Councillor Scrote – Good morning, Mister…umm…

Viking (booming) – I AM THE GUIZER JARL!

Councillor Scrote – Ah, yes, Mister Yarl. Now, we’re here to discuss your application for a public entertainment licence, but there are just one or two minor matters that we’d like to clarify. First of all, you seem to suggest holding what will be a relatively large outdoor event in January. With respect, Mister Yarl, that’s hardly a tourism-friendly time of year.

Jarl – JANUARY! To salute the coming end of winter and honour the ancient Norse gods!

(He waves his battleaxe menacingly. Councillor Scrote surreptitiously ticks the box marked ‘religious diversity’ on the form in front of him.)

Councillor G Scrote – So this festival has ancient origins, then, and reflects genuine Norse cultural heritage????????????????????????????????

Jarl – Of course.

Inspector Brent – So you can assure me that it wasn’t devised by a bunch of Victorians looking for an excuse for an all-night party and won’t include groups of men dressed as ballerinas and giraffes?

Jarl (flustered) – Umm…look, Gordon’s alive!

Councillor Gordon Scrote – Of course I am. (Councillor Scrote begins to cross through large sections of the form in front of him.) Now, Mister Yarl, the crux of the matter seems to be an unfortunate typographical error in your application. When you say ‘Fire Festival’, I presume you’ve omitted ‘works’ from the word ‘fireworks’, and that you really mean a carefully controlled fireworks display, with the public kept several hundred yards away behind barriers to fulfil Health and Safety requirements?

Jarl (booming even more loudly) – NO! FIRE! Nearly a thousand men marching through the town bearing blazing torches! So close to the spectators that their cheeks will be warmed by the flames, and their expensive North Face kagools singed by cinders! AND FINALLY, ALL THE TORCHES SHALL BE THROWN ONTO A VIKING LONGSHIP, WHICH WILL BE CONSUMED BY THE CLEANSING FIRE!

(Councillor Scrote turns bright blue and drops dead.)

Inspector Brent – I’m sorry, could you just run all of that past us again?

***

???????????????????????????????No, the Up Helly Aa parade in Lerwick, Shetland – Europe’s largest fire festival – would never, ever get off the ground if someone tried to start it today. Forget the fact that, like so many of Britain’s so-called historical traditions, it’s really an invention of the Victorian era which gradually acquired more and more accretions (the longship, the chief ‘guizer’ or performer known as the Jarl, etc), all of which are now set in stone. Something similar happened in my home village, which stages a spectacular Mayday festival – and despite the fact that May festivities have pagan origins, and that such celebrations in the village were recorded in 1563, the supposedly ‘traditional’ form of the annual event dates from only the 1880s. There’s another glorious example of this invention of ‘cod history’ on Shetland. The archipelago’s finest archaeological site is Jarlshof, which we visited before going to Up Helly Aa, but no inhabitant of any of the different settlements from different eras on the site would ever have known it by that name – which was a complete invention by Sir Walter Scott, who rechristened the real Sumburgh for dramatic effect in his novel The Pirate. 

Anyway, to return to Up Helly Aa (and I’d never realised that the Lerwick event is just the biggest of several that take place in communities around Shetland between January and March). Despite the very high winds – 84 MPH that night in Lerwick – and lashing rain, it proved to be one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever experienced. With the lights of the town extinguished, the procession resembles nothing less than a river of flame, and it’s easy to see why the primal power of fire has been regarded with such awe down the millennia. The camaraderie of the marchers and spectators was particularly marked; there were very few tourists present, hardly surprising given the difficulty of getting to and from Shetland in January and the prevailing weather conditions there at this time of year, and there was no sign of any anti-social behaviour. Whether that was still the case this morning in the dozen or so halls around Lerwick where drinking and dancing were meant to continue until 7 AM is another matter; we were in Lerwick at lunchtime and the place was remarkably quiet (unsurprisingly, the day after Up Helly Aa is a local bank holiday). The climax of the event, the tossing of the blazing torches onto the longship, was a thrilling and unforgettable sight. But no words of mine are really adequate to describe it, so I’ll let the pictures (both mine and the BBC’s) speak for themselves!

(Tomorrow, I’ll blog about some aspects of the naval heritage of Shetland before finishing this series with a final blog about other aspects of Orkney’s naval history, although that might have to wait until after we’re back!)

???????????????????????????????

Looking at Things The Right Way Up

by

Cards on the table: sat nav is the spawn of Satan. So, too, are such iniquities as reality TV shows, Welsh rugby teams that aren’t the Scarlets, and, of course, caravans, but today I’m concerned with geography. I refuse to use sat nav, partly because I prefer to rely on maps and that trusty piece of equipment, the Mark One Eyeball, partly because I’m of the opinion that it drains drivers’ ability to think for themselves and to deploy that increasingly underused commodity, common sense. Witness the recent story about the Belgian woman who set out to drive to Brussels, 90 miles away, and ended up in Zagreb, 900 miles away, because she was relying on her sat nav and ‘got distracted’ (with respect, madame, that’s one heck of a lot of distraction). Ok, I’ll admit that my aversion to sat nav sometimes leads me to take unexpected alternative routes – anyone thinking ‘huh, that’s a euphemism for getting lost’ is toast – but I always take the view that this might lead me to discover interesting places that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. I can invariably get back on track pretty quickly due to a very well-developed sense of direction and good map reading skills, plus always factoring in lots of time for journeys. From quite an early age, my dad let me do the navigating whenever we went for long drives (which was often), so I quickly became a skilled map reader. This later led on to my becoming pretty good at Geography – indeed, it was notionally my second teaching subject, which I’ve actually taught to 15-16 year olds – and, when I started sailing, to taking to navigation like a duck to water.

All this is by way of preamble to the fact that later this week, I’ll be driving all the way to the very northern end of Scotland and then taking the ferry to Orkney, where we’ll be spending a week; apart, that is, from a day and a bit in Shetland, where we’ll be going to see the Up Helly Aa festival, something that I’ve always wanted to see. The wisdom of making the journey by road given the current weather conditions in Britain, or of making it in January at all, remains to be seen, but I’m taking three days to get up there, doing some research en route, with Wendy flying up at the weekend after she finishes work. When we first started planning the trip, my thinking was pretty conventional, along the lines of ‘it’s a very long way, and the islands are pretty remote’. But the more I thought about it and placed it in a historical context, the more I realised that this way of thinking is just lazy.  To start with, what we Brits consider ‘a long way’ would be regarded very differently by my friends in Australia and the mid-west of the United States, to give just two examples, while the islands are only ‘remote’ if one falls into the trap of donning certain historical and geographical straitjackets. As a Welshman, I’ve spent a lot of my career as a historian battling against the Anglocentric, and frequently Londoncentric, biases that dominate a lot of allegedly ‘British’ history, and obviously, those mentalities would see Orkney and Shetland (along with my own place of origin in south-west Wales) as ‘remote’ and peripheral. But it’s interesting that the same problem even seems to affect Orkney and Shetland within Scotland; as in Britain as a whole, the capital is situated in the extreme south-eastern corner of the country, leading to a perception of a warped perspective from Edinburgh-based politicians and media and to a sense in the northern islands that they’re perceived as just as remote from the Scottish capital as they are from London. It’s even been suggested that this could play a part in the islands’ reaction to the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum, with the possibility that they might prefer to stay with the remainder of the UK than go with an independent, Edinburgh-dominated Scotland. It’ll be interesting to see if we pick up any vibes about this while we’re up there.

Note the subconscious geographical bias in that last sentence – ‘up there’. This, of course, is one of the great dangers of my grumpy old man’s adherence to maps in preference to sat nav. There have been a number of controversies about, and a great deal of literature produced about, the alleged political biases of mapping, which has always been used as a propaganda weapon by governments or else has been accused of perpetuating ethnic or racial superiority (for example, the Mercator projection was attacked for its portrayal of a big Europe and north America as against a small Africa and India). From a British perspective, entire generations grew up with attitudes to the world and to their place in it that were shaped by maps which showed the British Isles pretty much at the centre of the world, whole swathes of which were coloured red (and having the prime meridian going through Greenwich, the outcome of a cartographic war with the French, only enhanced the mindset of geographical superiority). Witness, too, the vast raft of preconceptions, assumptions and biases implicit in using ‘Down Under’ to describe Australia. Then there was the uproar when the BBC changed its weather map to one which stretched the south of England, squashed Scotland and moved Shetland a long way further south, a common mapping ploy which gives a warped picture of where the islands really are; in reality, Shetland is nearer to Bergen, in Norway, than to Edinburgh. It’s interesting that these distorted perceptions only seem to have developed since it became possible to establish longitude, and maps took on their standard form with the north ‘at the top’. Seventeenth century people would have had a much more flexible mentality: maps of the time have south, west or east at the top just as often as north, or else give an entirely different perspective. This affects the history of Orkney and Shetland, which were arguably much more central to both politics and naval strategy in the early modern period than they are now – a subject to which I’ll return next week.

My current intention for next week is not to do the usual big single blog on a Monday but to do some ‘mini-blogs’ about Orkney and Shetland, focusing primarily on the naval and 15th-18th century history and heritage as well as general impressions of the islands. But much will depend on what we decide to do during the evenings, on the time available generally, and of course on internet access…oh yes, and on whether we actually get there in the first place… So watch this space for news of the Gentlemen and Tarpaulins road trip!