Diary of a Shopkeeper, 30th July

The great metropolis of Lyness: a photo of a museum photo.

This year your shopkeeper is once more back on Hoy for his summer holidays. Not Rackwick this year, but a friend’s house overlooking Scapa Flow. Fuchsias and raspberries crowd around the door.

It’s a short walk from here to the new museum at Lyness, so I took a dander over, passing in a few steps from idyllic shore and garden into the remains of the steel and concrete metropolis that once covered this land. I was always a fan of the old version of the museum, having visited many times since childhood, and wondered if I’d feel sad to find it gone.

I needn’t have worried. Another childhood memory came to mind: Dr Who regenerating into a new physical body. The outward appearance of the building may have changed, but the spirit of the much-loved original remains intact. It’s still the same museum, telling the same story, despite looking and feeling very different. And it relates Scapa Flow’s wartime history vividly.

The focus on battleships and the patrols and missions they carried out, in both the first and second world wars, is understandable. But there’s generous coverage of areas that I find even more fascinating: the sheer enormity of sustaining thousands of service people around the shores of the Flow. During the first world war, up to 150,000 naval and support personnel were stationed here. A quite astonishing number: six times the total peacetime population of the county. It certainly puts a new perspective on busy liner days in town, when we might get a thirtieth of that number disembarking for a few hours.

This sudden city – equivalent to current day Dundee in population – had to receive medical treatment, entertainment, and food. My goodness, the food! 320 tons of meat per month, 800 tons of tatties, 180,000 pounds of sugar and 840,000 of flour! The enormity and complexity of importing, storing, and distributing such quantities is almost unimaginable. In our wee shop, receiving and storing a couple pallets of wine seems like a big job.

Did Kirkness & Gorie – or James Kirkness, as it was until 1919 – play any part in this supply? Very little, as far as we can make out. Old receipt books show our shop had a healthy trade with several recurring naval visitors – HMS Mermaid, HMS Leopard, HMS Commonwealth – but all those sales seem to have been before the war. On the 22nd of June 1909, for instance, we supplied HMS Skirmisher with 64 pounds of butter, one and a half stone of onions and two boxes of bloaters. (That’s a lost delicacy: when was the last time you tried a herring smoked with its guts in?) But for wartime there are no records I can find. Of course, they may have been lost, or destroyed, or kept secret.

From the K&G archive, courtesy of Bruce Gorie.

An interesting snippet of naval history is provided by a letter from an officer called Gillard, canteen manager on HMS Bulwark:

Dear Mr Kirkness,

I am writing to ask you to do me a small favour. I left two suits of clothes with the Agent of Thompson’s Dye Works who is not very far from you. I do not know his name but it is an Outfitters shop on the left hand side of the street going from your shop towards Scapa. Would you kindly […] ask him to forward them to me c/o GPO London, as I am badly in need of them.

Hope you are doing alright in business but I suppose you are a lot quieter than you were when we were with you. Kind regards to all old friends.

The letter is undated, but must come from the earliest days of the war, if not before. HMS Bulwark blew up on 28th November 1914 while stationed at Sheerness in Kent. This was due not to enemy action, but an accident while restowing ammunition. 741 lives were lost, making this the second worst loss of life due to accidental explosion in British naval history. The worst, with 843 lives lost, was HMS Vanguard in Scapa Flow in July 1917, a tragic event movingly commemorated in this exemplary museum.

There are many sites with further info about the museum. A good place to start, as with so many things, is orkney.com.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 2nd August 2023. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.