Warning Reform will drag Britain back into 1950s as new worker rights become law

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/peter-kyle-reform-sick-pay-36961468

Trump Tells U.K. to ‘Fight for Yourself’ as Fuel Crisis Deepens

President Donald Trump has told Sir Keir Starmer that the UK will have to “fight for yourself” as…
#NewsBeep #News #Headlines #energycrisis #fuelshortages #hormuzstrait #iranwar #oilprices #royalnavy #starmer #Transatlanticrelations #Trump #UK #UnitedKingdom
https://www.newsbeep.com/464013/

#Trump says #Iran's president wants ceasefire, but #Iranian -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/us-cities.html#10a

White #House does not rule out oil prices rising to -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/etc.html#Russia

'It’s an #Indian movie' -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/etc.html#India

Teledyne secures new #RoyalNavy contract for ocean -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/infotech.html#70

Cork v #Limerick live stream of Munster U20 Hurling -
https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/p/ireland.html#IrishMirror

View all news from the UK https://kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2026/03/latest-news-from-united-kingdom.html

Nearly 2 decades of #austerity, plus selling off military training areas for housing developments...

'US jibes at Royal Navy are uncomfortable because they have substance'

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/01/us-royal-navy-jibes-are-uncomfortable-because-they-have-substance-pete-hegseth

Gen Sir Gwyn Jenkins: 'Speaking to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on Monday, he said: “According to the defence investigation that was completed last year, I will be ready for war by the end of this decade.”'

#UK #military #politics #ukpol #defence #RoyalNavy #navy

The ignominious end of HMS Caledonia: the thread about how the Navy’s longest ship ended up as scrap metal on the Forth seabed

This thread was originally written and published in August 2023.

Q. What was the largest ship in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of WW2?

A. As any respectable naval anorak knows, it was the 47,000t, 860ft long battleship HMS Hood, the “Mighty Hood“, pride of the fleet and largest warship afloat. Right? Or… was it the Bismarck?

No, the largest ship in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of WW2 was the 56,500t, 956-ft long training ship HMS Caledonia; until 1936 the Cunard-White Star liner RMS Majestic, which until 1922 had been the Hamburg-Amerika liner SS Bismarck. Until 1935, the largest ship in the world

The Bismarck was the 3rd and largest of three Hamburg-Amerika liners built immediately prior to WW1; the others were the Vaterland and Imperator. They were ordered to reclaim dominance and German national pride in the Transatlantic liner stakes from the British Cunard and White Star liners. They were to do this by being both the largest and grandest liners afloat. Bismarck was the last of the trio but before she was laid down, the Hamburg-Amerika line found out that the new Cunard liner Aquitania was to be longer than her, so they hastily rejigged the design to add an extra 6 feet on. They needn’t had bothered, they had made been misinformed and Aquitania actually ended up being 50ft shorter than Bismarck.

It was too late to change the design however and it was too late for her sister Imperator, which had been given the most embarrassingly awful nose job to lengthen her by the vainglorious addition of a massive bronze eagle figurehead which was meant to make her 1ft longer than Aquitania. Fortunately for her appearance this partially fell off during Atlantic storms within a year, and was removed.

Bismarck was launched in June 1914 by a granddaughter of the Iron Chancellor, but this ceremony was jinxed when she fluffed the swinging of the champagne bottle and it only broke on the second attempt: none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II stepped in to give it his best swing. The outbreak of war found her without a purpose, and construction ground to a halt beyond maintenance work. During the war she was stripped of valuable components, wiring and piping and all her brass and copper. The incomplete hulk was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Versailles as reparations for the loss of the White Star liner Britannic (sister of Titanic), which had struck a German mine and sunk in 1916 while serving as a hospital ship. This was the largest ship lost in the war, but although she sank in just 55 minutes, all but 30 souls on board were saved. Her sister Imperator went to Cunard as a replacement for the Lusitania, the ill-fated liner whose sinking had outraged America and helped drag that nation into the war against Germany.

White Star sent representatives and shipyard engineers from Harland & Wolff in Belfast to Hamburg to supervise completion of their new possession. The whole ship needed re-wiring, and a mysterious fire that damaged her during completion and which the British put down to sabotage by the German workers was probably an electrical fault: this would be a recurrent theme. She completed in March 1922 and White Star officers were sent to supervise her trials by officers and men of Hamburg-Amerika line. This was marred by briefly running aground, but after a week she was accepted and handed over. Her German name was painted out and replaced with Majestic.

A White Star crew arrived and sailed her to Southampton, during which time they repainted her funnels into company colours. She arrived exactly 10 years to the day that the Titanic had departed on her ill-fated maiden voyage. Not only the largest in the world, she was arguably the most opulent, designed by the French architect Charles Mewès. Her German builders had trunked the boiler uptakes around the ships sides (rather than through the centre), to allow for huge, uninterrupted interior spaces, and spared no expense on the specification

Despite being a foreigner in a time when ocean liners were a symbol of national prestige, she was made White Star flagship and was the pride of the fleet. Her first official duties were to be inspected by King George V and Queen Mary, before heading for New York. She settled down to a glamorous 1920s career on the Atlantic, but one that was always marred by the occasional spontaneous fire in her electrical system, and growing cracks in her decks (which grew to 100ft long) as a result of the lengthening job.

The Depression hit the Transatlantic liners hard, already struggling from a downturn in migrating passengers, and in White Star’s case, poor corporate management. The Majestic frequently found herself on “booze cruises” from a very dry and thirsty Prohibition-era USA to help pay her huge running costs. But the cracks grew bigger, the electrical fires got more frequent and the finances grew ever worse. Cunard and White Star line merged in 1934 in a government-sponsored deal. The new company had too many liners and the older ones began to be disposed of; Majestic survived the initial chop, but her card was marked.

With the new company flagship Queen Mary under construction, Cunard-White Star made to dispose of the sister ship Berengaria, which was older and more prone to fires, but the larger Majestic had higher running costs so in 1936 was taken out of service instead.

She quietly sailed her last voyage in February that year and disappeared from the schedules without any announcement on her future. In May she was bought by Thomas Ward of Inverkeithing for £115k (c. £6.6m in 2023), the scrapyard where many a liner and battleship ended its days.

Majestic was taken into dock at Southampton to have her funnels and masts lowered to allow her to sneak beneath the Forth Bridge, but there was a snag – the minor matter of fine legal print of the Treaty of Versailles. Bismarck had been handed over as a prize of war as compensation to White Star, but the terms did not allow the new owner to sell her. Instead, the Royal Navy stepped in and took possession, and “gave” Wards 24 old destroyers of equivalent scrap value in return. Everyone was happy. The lawyers were happy. Cunard-White Star got paid by Wards, Wards got the scrap they had paid for and the Royal Navy got what had been – until 6 months previous – the largest ship in the world, for the price of only a few old rusty relics.

The great liner was now taken in for conversion to an enormous training ship, with capacity for 1500 trainee boys and 500 officer apprentices. Her luxurious fittings – apart from the swimming pool – were stripped out, and the vast interior converted to spartan classrooms. Where once her passengers slept in the most luxurious cabins afloat, the new occupants would sling hammocks from the roof beams in time-honoured Royal Navy tradition. In April 1937 she made her last sea voyage, to Rosyth on the Firth of Forth.

On arrival, she commissioned as HMS Caledonia, named after the Victorian training ship that had once served on the Forth under that name. Her job was to train the boys and young men who would fill the ranks of the expanding Royal Navy in the run up to the inevitable war. By the end of the year there were 1,000 trainees aboard.

The new Caledonia only had an expected lifespan of 4 years, she was to plug the gaps until permanent shore facilities could take over; but she didn’t even make this. On the outbreak of war there was a panic that the Luftwaffe would target her for a revenge sinking. This was not without reason and the first air raids over the United Kingdom during the war soon followed over the Forth with the Royal Navy and Rosyth being the target. And so the trainee boys onboard were packed off to safety in the Isle of Man, the officer apprentices were sent ashore at Rosyth, and the great ship was floated out into the Forth and pumped full of water so she would settle on the sea bed at low tide (therefore couldn’t be “sunk”), to await her fate, or another use.

However the proud old ship had other ideas. Just 26 days after war was declared and a full 17 days before the Luftwaffe arrived over the Forth, she set herself on fire and burnt out, settling on to the bed of the Firth. Her shonky electrical system had the last laugh. With the country now at war with Germany, the niceties of previous treaties could be overlooked, and she was sold to Wards of Inverkeithing – again, for mining as a strategic reserve of scrap iron. She was demolished in situ from 1940-43.

In July 1943, what remained of the hull was patched up and floated around the corner to Inverkeithing, for beaching and final break-up by Wards. This was completed in 1944, her name transferred to a shore station at Oban.

After the war, the name was relocated back to Rosyth, where it was a shore training establishment until 1985. It was rehabilitated again at Rosyth in 1996, where it remains to this day, the Navy’s HQ in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The HMS Caledonia which was once the liner RMS Majestic remains the longest ship to have ever commissioned into the Royal Navy, a full 24ft longer than the modern Queen Elizabeth aircraft carriers. With her loss in 1939, the battleship HMS Hood would regain her crown as the largest ship in the Navy. In a sardonic twist of fate, Hood would be sunk in May 1941 by a German ship named Bismarck – with great loss of life.

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Tenuously Jacobite: the thread about the Naval Reserves in Leith and Granton

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

Here is a photo of HMS Killiecrankie alongside at Leith docks in 1963. She was the training tender for the Leith & Edinburgh Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) station at HMS Claverhouse on Granton Square.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/126268375@N08/14803466805/

The Killiecrankie was built in 1952 as the Ton-class minesweeper Bickington, over 100 such ships were built in the 1950s in response to Cold War paranoia that the Soviets would mine inshore waters. They were all given names ending in –ton, but in the event far too many were produced and so there was a surplus. These were given different roles and were renamed. Bickington for instance was commissioned as HMS Curzon as the tender to the Suffolk RNR. When she moved to the Firth of Forth again she took up a new name. She served this station from 1962 – 1676, before renaming to her originally intended HMS Bickington and being transferred to the Fishery Protection Squadron

HMS Claverhouse was a shore base and it is Royal Navy practice to name shore bases as if they were ships. But how did this particular name with its strong connotations in Scottish history become associated with Edinburgh and Leith, which it otherwise has a brief connection with? (And if you don’t know the connotations, all will become apparent in a few paragraphs).

The first Claverhouse was a war-surplus coastal monitor; a sort of small, slow, relatively unseaworthy ship for carrying around a few big guns to shoot at things ashore with. She was originally called the M23 and in 1922 had been sent to Dundee as RNVR (Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve) drill ship and renamed Claverhouse . I suppose someone had a sense of humour to name her after John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee. This man was variously Bonnie Dundee to his supporters or Bluidy Clavers to his opponents, given the divisive (and ultimately fatal for himself) part he played in leading the Jacobite uprising of 1689.

The RNVR was distinct from the RNR; the latter organisation was a reserve force of professional civilian seamen, the former were civilian volunteers from non-seafaring occupations.

The Claverhouse took her ships crest and motto directly from the Viscount Dundee, a phoenix rising out of the flames and “Gang Forrit” (which either is literally to “go for it”, or a euphemism for to take communion).

With war clouds on the horizon in the 1930s and a need to rapidly train up volunteers and reserves to man a wartime navy, HMS Claverhouse was shifted to a permanent shore base on Granton Square, in the requisitioned Granton Hotel. The new HMS Claverhouse took on the crest and motto of the ship from Dundee, which it also inherited as a drill vessel. At Granton merchant seamen were given training in defensive techniques (i.e. how to fire guns!) and the station was also used as an HQ for the local coastal defence forces. When war ended, Claverhouse was not returned to civilian life but was kept on as the HQ for the newly formed Forth Division of the RNVR. Again, the motto and the crest was that inherited from Viscount Dundee. Tay Division of the RNVR was based on the old wooden frigate HMS Unicorn in Dundee, so it took as a crest a white unicorn.

The old monitor was still going and stayed on at Granton as the Claverhouse drill ship until 1958 when she was sent for scrap. But given the post-war naval reserves had a primary focus with inshore minesweeping, she was joined in 1948 by a small war-surplus motor minesweeper called MMS.1089.

MMS.1089 took the name HMS Forth, but was soon renamed Killecrankie. Again someone had a sense of humour as, if you don’t already know, it was at the Battle of Killecrankie in 1689 where Viscount Dundee met a very pyrrhic end when a musket ball went through him in the moment of victory; finishing both him and ultimately the Jacobite rising.

The little Killiecrankie was too small and obsolete for the realities of the Cold War so she was sold in 1957 and replaced with the newer and bigger HMS Bickington/ Curzon, which inherited her name. This ship carried a generic ship’s crest that had been assigned to all of her type. In 1976 Killiecrankie was returned to being plain old Bickington and was replaced by her sister Kedleston, but the latter kept her own name.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/153873640@N02/41105299245/

In 1986, Kedleston was in turn replaced by a new River-class minesweeper as the Forth RNR training ship, somewhat confusingly their new vessel was called HMS Spey. She lasted at Leith until 1993 when a defence review withdrew the entire RNR fleet and moved it to other purposes. Spey spent here next 4 years in Northern Ireland before being sold to Brazil.

As part of the 1993 economy measures, in 1994 the Forth Division of HMS Claverhouse and the Tay Division of HMS Camperdown were merged as HMS Scotia and relocated to Rosyth. Another volunteer unit at Granton, the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service (RNXS), was also disbanded at this time. The RNXS was a uniformed, non-combatant volunteer service whose role was to assist in the operations of ports and anchorages in times of conflict.

Rosyth as it turned out wasn’t that smart an economy measure; although it looked good on paper, shifting your volunteer base away from the centre of population it draws from doesn’t help with recruitment. The RNR therefore re-established separate Forth and Tay divisions in 2000. The new Forth Division only lasted until 2004 before being wound down as yet another economy measure. The old HMS Claverhouse on Granton Square is now the Claverhouse Training Centre for various cadets and other reserves units.

So anyway, that’s the long version of how some rather geographically and historically unusual (you might even say inappropriate) names came to be used for naval establishments in Edinburgh and Leith.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

1813 in Canada
#CanadianHistory
#history
#WarOf1812
#MilitaryHistory

HMS Shannon defeats the USS Chesapeake, whose captain dies; with a cannon salute, six Royal Navy captains act as pallbearers to his grave

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=YFjsv_pBGBYC&dat=18130708&printsec=frontpage
Pg. 3 of 3 (lefthand page, 4th column)

See also: The Shannon captain's description of the fight
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=YFjsv_pBGBYC&dat=18131007&printsec=frontpage Pg. 2 of 2 (lefthand page, 3rd column)
A Chesapeake officer's description of the fight
https://archives.novascotia.ca/newspapers/archives/?ID=778&Page=201113103 (3rd column)

#RoyalNavy #USNavy #frigate

See also: USS Chesapeake
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/uss-chesapeake