Dreichy Thursday

I spoke too soon when I said we were getting less customers.

The 70th Anniversary of the Royal Oak disaster has brought many visitors to Orkney this week. We ended up organising a makeshift cinema in a meeting room so that we could show our commemorative videos to relatives of those who went down with their ship in 1939. The photographic archive has also received several orders for prints of our Royal Oak pictures.

We also seem to have a lot of visitors who are interested in other topics. All of the tables in the searchroom are occupied and each has it's own precarious tower of books and documents. Every researcher seems to have a laptop nowadays so the room is filled with the gentle click-clack of typing from both researchers and staff. The subjects being investigated today include:

Children's Reading Habits in Orkney 1930s - 1970s
Orkney folk songs
War Commemorations
Sir William Honeyman, Lord Armadale
West Mainland Young Farmers' Society

Royal Oak

Tomorrow is the 70 year anniversary of the sinking of the Royal Oak (pictured c. 1927) in Scapa Flow, Orkney. The tragic loss of 833 men as well as a sturdy, seemingly indestructible battleship was a terrible shock for Britain so early on in the war.

The Royal Oak was torpedoed at 1.30am by a German submarine. U-47 was captained by Gunther Prien who went on to be awarded the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest honour.

When Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, heard the news he said 'Poor fellows, poor fellows, trapped in those black depths.'