A HARBOUR, A BARRIER AND HOPE by Penny Dolan

 

The Isles of Orkney and the seas around Scapa Flow make a natural harbour, and have been used by sea voyagers and travellers through the ages. The scattered islands seem to circle around each other, providing bays and beaches and inlets that have been used by viking raiders, by the Earls and their descendants, by lairds and lords and by the folk of the islands.


However, in the 1940's, a huge construction project was begun which changed the pattern of the waters and many aspects of life on Orkney.  

The Royal Navy had had reasons to worry about the wide harbour of Scapa Flow. Back in 1918, after the Surrender, the fleet of German warships was anchored there while the powers at Versailles decided their fate. 

The Fleet Commander, Admiral Ludwig Von Reuter, sent a secret message to all seventy-four German ships, giving orders for each ship to be scuttled by their crews. The date he chose was 21st June, 1919, the date then proposed for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Just after 11am on that day, all valves and sea-cocks were opened, bore-holes driven through bulkheads and portholes and doors unsealed. About an hour later, the crews on the Royal Navy guard-ships saw the captured fleet avoiding further disgrace sinking before their very eyes. Although some vessels were beached, fifty-four German ships were scuttled at Scapa Flow. This year, 2019, is the hundredth anniversary of that event.

Then, on 14th October 1939 - more than a decade later, and at the start of WWII - there was another blow to the Royal Navy's morale.  

Although Scapa Flow was considered invulnerable to submarine attack, a German U-47 submarine passed through the block-ships and torpedoed the elderly HMS Royal Oak which was anchored there. Over eight hundred sailors, including many young recruits, lost their lives.

In 1940, in response, Churchill decided that a set of concrete causeways would be built, blocking the eastern lanes into Scapa Flow and linking the islands South Ronaldsay, Burray, Glimps Holm and Lambs Holm to the orkney Mainland. 
The Churchill Barriers were completed in 1944 and opened in May 1945. While the narrow causeways did make road travel between these islands possible, the changes to the flow of the water also damaged local fishing grounds.

Of course, Churchill's bold scheme would need a quantity of labourers, so a work force of over twelve thousand Italian prisoners-of-war was brought from the sands of the North African Campaign to the wild, wind-scoured Orkneys 

Under the Geneva convention, POW's were not supposed to take part in war work, so the barriers were described as "improvements to communications."

 
 
Here, amid all the seafare and warfare, is a small piece of history that I found inspiring and hopeful. 

While the men were working there as prisoners, they also built two chapels. The chapel on Lambsholm still exists: it is cared for, used for very occasional services and open for visitors.

The chapel was simply built. It was constructed from two concrete-covered nissen huts and given a bitumen coating. Only the ornate concrete facade hints at what can be found within.

In their spare time, prisoners decorated the inside of their nissen huts so that it resembled the stone, marble and mosaic interior of  their chapels and churches back in Italy.
  

Two men were largely responsible for the creation of the chapel and organising all the careful work. Signor Guiseppe Palumbi was the person who made the iron work and screens from whatever metals he found available. This hanging sanctuary lantern, below, is made from a bully beef tin.

Signor Domenico Chiochetti was the creator and painter of much of the artwork, especially the large mural behind the altar: a copy of "Madonna and Child" by the artist Nicolo Barabino. 
 

After so much about men and their machines in this post, I am glad of the fact that Chiochetti used the image from a card that his mother had given him as he left home and which he carried in his pocket throughout the war. He got home safely and he returned several times to the little chapel he had created on Lambs Holm.

After the wrecked ships and the concrete blocks and the evidence of past wars, the love spent on this tiny chapel - and the magic of the Orkney landscape and light - were things that lifted the heart.  

Penny Dolan 

@pennydolan1

 

A Word I Don't Have by Joan Lennon

English is a rich and wonderful resource, but it has gaps that other languages have managed to fill.  Words for things we feel but haven't a term for.  Like akihi in Hawaiian, which means that thing where you listen to a string of directions, walk away, and promptly forget the lot.  Or arigata-meiwaku in Japanese, for that feeling of having to be grateful for something someone has done for you that you really didn't want them to do in the first place.  Or l'esprit de l'escalier in French, for that clever repartee that comes to you when it's too late to deliver it. 

The word I don't have is maybe a bit specialized, but if it existed it would express something that writers of historical fiction - and non-fiction - feel.  Deeply.  Viscerally, even. 

It's a word to describe that stomach-tightening, hand-dampening, shallow-breath-inducing feeling that we are overwhelmed by when a new programme comes on TV, or a new article appears on the internet, or a new tome is published, on the topic of the book we've just written.  The book where the plot is dependent on a particular understanding of historical events - where the characters have formed themselves around and out of that understanding. The book we've put time and effort and thought and care and tons of research into, and now it's too late to make any changes.

That.

I suspect that out there, in some language or other, there may very well be a term - a word that says, "please, please - I want to go on learning - just don't tell me anything that will blow my book out of the water * - please, please, please ..."   If you know the feeling, let me know.  If you know a term or phrase that English, the great word-grabber, can acquire from some other language, to express this particular discomfort, let me know that too! 

Joan Lennon's YA debut novel Silver Skin is being published by BC, Birlinn Polygon's new imprint, on 16 June 2015.  She continues to watch, listen, read and learn about the late Stone Age but, metaphorically, from behind the sofa.  

* So far, it hasn't happened.  At the end of Silver Skin, I included this Note to Readers:

So much of what we think we know about the time when the Stone Age was bleeding into the Bronze Age is based on bewildering artefacts and guesswork.  What we do know, however, is that during this time, the climate worsened.  There are many scientific, anthropological, archaeological theories about the effect climate change might have had on the civilisation of Orkney, and I have cherry-picked indiscriminately among them.  This story is just that – a story.  It is driven by the interactions of fictional characters in a setting that has sparked my own imagination for years.  I have researched and visited museums and sites and taken photographs and talked and listened, but if you are looking in the result for a historical document, you will be disappointed.
Maybe I should have put it at the front!

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

Orkney: A Historical Guide by Caroline Wickham-Jones - reviewed by Joan Lennon

This is not the first occasion I've indulged my delight in guide books and Orkney (see The Elevated Limpet) but this time I've brought things right up-to-date.

Caroline Wickham-Jones is an experienced archaeologist who has worked on and written about sites across Scotland and Scandanavia.  Her Orkney: A Historical Guide was first published in 1998 and has been updated and re-issued a number of times since then.  Wickham-Jones' clear writing, expertise and obvious enthusiasm for her subject make her brand-new 2015 Guide a must-read for anyone drawn to this approximately 70-island-strong historical treasure trove.

There is so much to see, and one of the confusing things about visiting Orkney is the way remains from so many different historical periods often sit cheek-by-jowl in the landscape.  Wickham-Jones' Guide is extremely helpful in separating the layers out, starting with a series of maps, which show:

     Neolithic sites
     Bronze Age, Iron Age and Pictish sites
     Norse and Scottish Earls sites
     18th- and 19th-century sites
     20th-century sites

The chapters of the book take the same approach, with an overview for each block of time and then a description of sites of interest - and accessibility.  She also explores the effects of geography on the Orkney Islands' history.  The power of the winds, the fertility of the soil, the lack of trees and the easily splittable sandstone rock - all have their place in the way human life here was shaped and preserved. 

I would thoroughly recommend this Historical Guide for your reading and research pleasure - and I would also thoroughly recommend using it on a visit to Orkney.  Orkney may seem a bit out-of-the-way (though you can't really see the edge of the world from there, as Pytheas of Marseille claimed in 330 BCE).  But for a large part of her 10,000 years of habitation, the sea roads made her nearer to being at the heart of things than the edge.  Granted those roads were treacherous* and, as Wickham-Jones says,

"Rather like a six-lane motorway today, you have to know what you are doing, but the northern seas could lead you directly to your destination and provide varied benefits in the form of sheltered harbours and plentiful supplies."

Reading her book, I defy you not to be convinced that those "plentiful supplies" include history preserved in abundance, to excite the imagination and furnish us with thoughts and ideas, whether as readers, writers or historians. 

* Don't worry - the roads to Orkney are much safer now. 


Caroline Wickham-Jones' Orkney: A Historical Guide
pub. Birlinn Books
pub. date 12 March 2015
ISBN: 9781780272641          


(With a YA novel inspired by Skara Brae coming out mid-June, and therefore at too late a stage to change anything, I approach all archaeological writing on my period with some uneasiness ... I'll be talking more about that another time!)

        

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

The Elevated Limpet - Joan Lennon

Three of the things that give me pleasure - old travel guides, the Orkney islands, and storms. But let us define our terms.

How old do I like my travel guides to be?  George Anderson and Peter Anderson of Inverness published their Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in 1850, and that does me fine.  (I don't own the book, sadly, but you can read it online here.)

What exactly is meant by 'the Orkney islands'?

The Orkney Islands lie off the north coast of Scotland, and are separated from the county of Caithness by the Pentland Firth, which is 51 miles broad at the narrowest part.

Ah, but what constitutes an island?

If these are considered islands that are insulated every high water, and have flowering plants growing upon them, there are seventy-three, but seventeen of these become peninsulas at low water, so that they are reduced to fifty-six at that state of the tide. Of these, twenty-nine are inhabited, and nineteen more are probably capable of supporting a single family each; but these smaller islands, or, as they are here called, holms, are at present the abodes of innumerable sea-fowl, that hatch upon them with little molestation, while on some a few sheep or cattle are pastured; however, these Peerie [Peerie is a word in common use in Orkney, and means little; and it is curious, that on the return of Captain Cook's discovery vessels from the South Seas, the officers mentioned that the same word is used in the same sense in some islands there.]* islands used to be more valuable on account of the sea-weeds that grow on their rocky shores, than for the scanty herbage that clothes their soil. 

And what is a storm?  Well, if the Anderson boys are to be believed, it is a veritable tourist attraction, for ...

If the tourist has the good fortune to be in Orkney during a storm, he will cease to regret the absence of some of the softer and more common beauties of landscape, in the contemplation of the most sublime spectacle which he ever witnessed. 

This is what you do:

By repairing at such a time to the weather shore, particularly if it be on the west side of the country, [the lucky tourist] will behold waves, of the magnitude and force of which he could not have previously formed any adequate conception, tumbling across the Atlantic like monsters of the deep, their heads erect, their manes streaming in the wind, roaring and foaming as with rage, till each discharges such a Niagara flood against the opposing precipices as makes the rocks tremble to their foundations, while the sheets of water that immediately ascend, as if from artillery, hundreds of feet above their summits, deluge the surrounding country, and fall like showers on the opposite side of the island. 

Having visited the west crags some days after a recent storm, the writer found sea insects abundant on the hills near them, though about 100 feet high; and a solitary limpet, which is proverbial for its strong attachment to its native rock, but which also seemed on this occasion to have been thrown up, was discovered adhering to the top of the cliff, seventy feet above its usual position. We apprehend it is with limpets as with ourselves, that the highest, and particularly those who are thus suddenly elevated, are not the most happy.

I feel you apprehend correctly, sirs - I really do - and it has been a pleasure!


* It IS curious!

Joan Lennon's website.

(The photos are mine.)